 Richard Pryor, who saw a screening of "Cane River" before Jenkins's death, had offered to place the film with the studio Warner Bros., with whom he had an agreement to distribute films made by African-Americans, but its producers declined the offer.The film was not publicly available until 2013, when the film preservation organization IndieCollect uncovered a negative copy from the vaults of DuArt Film and Video.The Academy Film Archive accepted "Cane River" sight unseen.