Nothing Lasts Forever (film)

Plot

The story begins with Adam Beckett, a pianist who is not thrilled to be performing Chopin at Carnegie Hall. When the audience demands an encore, he admits he has been faking it with a player piano. The furious crowd rushes the stage and wraps him up in piano rolls. Adam then wakes up on a train in Europe, realizing it was all a nightmare.

A Swedish architect approaches him, and Adam confesses his frustrated ambitions to become an artist. Encouraged by the architect, he decides to go back to America and chase his dream. But when he returns, he finds the Port Authority has seized control of New York and is blocking people from entering. Adam fails a drawing test, so he is assigned a dull job under a boss who is quick to pull a trigger.

His task is to monitor traffic heading into the Holland Tunnel, stopping cars with broken parts like a burnt-out headlight. Feeling stifled at his aunt and uncle’s house, Adam moves into a hotel. The room he gets belonged to someone who vanished without a trace, leaving behind a collection of paintings. At work, he meets Mara, another aspiring artist.

He follows her to SoHo, where she tries to introduce them to various art forms to see what clicks. When Adam shows kindness to a tramp, he is led into a secret underground network. There, he is purified by fire and learns that the city’s homeless people control the fate of every city worldwide. They send him on a mission to the Moon.

Back above ground, Adam goes straight to Mara, but she acts cold and distant. Upset, he rushes to catch a city bus headed for the Moon. On the bus, there are separate levels for dancing and dining. An elderly woman tells him everyone has a chip in their neck that makes them say “Miami” instead of “Moon.”

When the bus arrives, Moon Maidens and a woman named Eloy greet them. Eloy is supposed to be Adam’s true love, but she warns him it is not safe to talk. Adam jumps off the shuttle that is going to Moon-o-Rama, and Eloy picks him up in a buggy to get him out of Consumerzone. He then wakes up in an alley, where someone tells him he must get to his concert at Carnegie Hall.

He plays Chopin’s polonaise no. 53 and gets a standing ovation. Looking up, he spots Eloy waving at him from a box seat.

Release

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer pulled the plug on Nothing Lasts Forever just before it was supposed to come out, and the studio never gave it a wide release. The only time it played in a theater was at a cinema in Phoenix, Arizona, in September 1984. No home video version has ever been made available in the United States. Director Schiller said in a 2019 interview that MGM executives thought they were getting another Animal House or Caddyshack, but after seeing the finished film, they called it an art film.

A test screening went so badly that the studio worried it wouldn't make money, and Schiller had also used a lot of clips from older movies, which raised copyright issues. Despite that, the movie has turned up on television in several countries: the BBC in the UK aired it in 1994, it appeared in Italy and Germany, and Dutch TV showed it in November 1993. Warner Bros., which now controls the pre-1986 MGM library, said in 2003 and again in 2006 that it wanted to put the film on DVD but couldn't because of legal problems.

Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd have both agreed to contribute to DVD extras if a release ever happens. Someone leaked the film onto YouTube in 2011, and it finally made its American TV debut on Turner Classic Movies in January 2015 as part of their late-night underground programming.

Screenings

The film's first known public showing was on April 13, 2004, at Brooklyn's BAM Cinematek, with Murray and Schiller present. Over a year later, on September 6, 2005, Murray, Schiller, and Zach Galligan appeared at a Lincoln Center screening at the Walter Reade Theater, which included a Q&A and a book signing for Nothing Lost Forever: The Films of Tom Schiller. The St. Louis International Film Festival picked it up on November 12, 2005. Schiller himself introduced a January 28, 2006 screening at the Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York.

He returned for an August 22, 2007 showing at the Cinema Arts Center of Huntington, New York. The film opened the Olympia Film Festival on November 6, 2009, at the Capitol Theater in Olympia. On April 1, 2010, it played at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood as part of the American Cinematheque's series on "criminally unknown" films, with Schiller on hand for questions. Finally, on September 27, 2014, Schiller attended a screening and Q&A at Sunray Cinema in Jacksonville, Florida.