Milestone Films is a mom-and-pop operation — literally.
The two-person distribution company was co-founded 35 years ago by the newly married Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, working out of their Manhattan apartment. Later, drowning in VHS tapes, they moved themselves, and their company, to a house in Harrington Park.
And as their family grew — they have a daughter, now an engineer — so did their ambitions.
As eclectic and independent as its owners. Milestone now distributes well over 200 films, ranging from restored silents (1922’s “Beyond the Rocks,” with Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson) to rediscovered indies (1993’s “Household Saints,” with Lili Taylor and Michael Imperioli.)
Over the years, the company has almost single-handedly revived the reputation of the dazzling, 1964 cinematic anthology “I Am Cuba” and of director Charles Burnett (1978’s “Killer of Sheep,” 1983’s “My Brother’s Wedding”). It has faithfully promoted documentaries about progressive causes, and works outside the usual cinematic canon, promoting movies by women, people of color, and filmmakers from emerging nations.
It is a company unafraid to break the rules, but one stubborn fact remains.
“We’re not immortal,” says Doros.
So a while ago, the couple, being practical, started thinking about how to step away from Milestone while still keeping it a going concern. Facing the same situation, some businesspeople would look for a suitable family heir, a la “Succession.” (OK, bad example.) Others would look for a deep-pocketed buyer: a big company hungry to grow a little bit bigger.
But Doros and Heller aren’t typical businesspeople. They decided to give their company away.
“God bless the child who’s got her own,” Heller explains. “And our daughter’s got her own. She’s an engineer. She has her own thing. She doesn’t want to run a film company. And now she won’t have to.”
If asking a family member to take over the business seemed like an imposition, selling it to a corporate outsider felt unthinkable.
“Every time a distributor has been sold, they’ve just been devoured by larger companies,” Doros says. “They’re stripped for parts, and most of their films disappear.”
“This was never about money,” Heller emphasizes. “This is something we believe in and want to see continue. The most important thing for us was preserving the company.”
Their search led them to Maya Cade.
A writer and historian, Cade founded the Black Film Archive in 2020 to preserve and protect all of Black cinema. Her site collects and presents streaming options for a wide range of titles, from Blaxploitation entertainments (Pam Grier action pictures, “Blacula”) to documentaries (“Say Amen, Somebody,” Marlon Riggs’ “Tongues Untied”) while placing them in a historical and cultural context.
It seemed like the perfect match. The entire handover is expected to take about a year, after which Heller and Doros will stay on as advisors.
Will the new company pivot more to streaming? Increase its emphasis on Black films?
“It will be her company, and she’ll take it in the directions she wants to,” Heller says. “But she loves the Milestone catalog — she loves all kinds of cinema. And she’s incredibly smart, and incredibly hardworking, and just seems like someone who has all the right feelings, and tools, to keep this company going, and growing in new and interesting directions. Will it be the same company? Not quite. But change is kind of inevitable.”
One definite big change: Milestone itself, as a business, will now be headquartered in Los Angeles, where Cade lives.
But Heller and Doros aren’t going anywhere, and neither is their love of film. Or their appreciation of local film history. This month they will release the two-disc Blu-ray set “Made in New Jersey,” a compilation with notes by local scholar and historian Richard Koszarski. Devoted to movies made at America’s first cinema capital — Fort Lee — the contents include beautifully restored 1909 works by D.W. Griffith, a 1912 version of “Robin Hood,” and a 1939 Ukrainian-language epic, “Cossacks in Exile” (with rural Bergen County doubling for the wintry Eastern European steppes).
The couple is also currently working with Native American author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie on a DVD release of his 2002 feature “The Business of Fancydancing” and on a newly scored, re-imagined version of the troubled Erich von Stroheim production, “Queen Kelly.” Real, just taking-it-easy retirement? Not yet, thanks.
“We’re sitting here now with stacks of books on von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson and Joseph P. Kennedy piled up everywhere,” Heller says with a laugh.
But the couple is too smart to make firm plans for themselves, or predictions for cinema.
“Physical media has been declared dead 20 times over the last 20 years and yet it still stubbornly stays alive,” Doros says. “It’s even had a bit of a resurgence. Ultra-high-def discs are very popular now; the quality is often much better than what you get with streaming. Besides, most of the major streaming services are owned by large corporations, who don’t care about film history, or keeping their libraries available.”
“Predicting the future is kind of a fool’s errand,” Heller says. “But I think there will always be a need for physical media.”
A need that Milestone Films, it seems, will continue to fill.
For more on Milestone Films, visit milestonefilms.com.
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