By the mid-1980s, indie films were starting to build an identity and an audience. Grosses spiraled upward. In 1985, Kiss of the Spider Woman racked up a very sweet $17 million for Island, and The Trip to Bountiful grossed $7.5 million. The following year Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s A Room with a View broke out and grossed $23 million for Cinecom, while a trio of British films—Sid and Nancy, My Beautiful Laundrette, and Mona Lisa—also enjoyed strong box office. The field was getting so crowded that there was bound to be a correction, and it happend in October 1987, when the stock market crashed. That, combined with the overexpansion of the most successful distributors, led to a shakeout. At the end of the decade, the heavens parted to let loose a black rain of dying companies, including some, like Cinecom and Vestron, that had seemed most healthy but had made the mistake of turning away from acquisitions to make their own films.
GENUINE CHILDREN of the New Hollywood, the indies absorbed, at least in the beginning, their anti-Hollywood aesthetic. What defines an indie film has been argued ad nauseam, but in those days, despite quibbles about this or that film, there existed something of a consensus. The purists reigned. As director/producer Sydney Pollack puts it, “Independent usually meant anything that was an alternative to recipe films or mainstream films made by studios.” They were anything Hollywood was not. If Hollywood made “movies,” indies made “films.” If Hollywood sold fantasy and escapism, indies thrived on realism and engagement. If Hollywood avoided controversial subjects, indies embraced them. If Hollywood movies were expensive, indie films were cheap. If Hollywood used stars, indies preferred unknowns, even nonactors. If Hollywood retained final cut, indies demanded it for themelves. If Hollywood strip-mined genres and dropped movies out of cookie cutters, indie films expressed personal visions and were therefore unique and sequel-proof. If Hollywood made movies by committee, indies were made by individual sensibilities who wrote as well as directed, and sometimes shot and edited as well. While Hollywood employed directors, hired to do a job, indies were filmmakers who worshipped at the altar of art. While directors accumulated BMWs and homes in Malibu, filmmakers made unimaginable sacrifices and lived in New York, preferably on the Lower East Side. They scammed and hustled, lied and cheated, even sold drugs or their own blood, to finance their films.
Hollywood favored spectacle, action, and special effects, while indies worked on a more intimate scale, privileging script and emphasizing character and mise-en-scène. Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) put it nicely when she described her own aesthetic: The story, she said, is like “a clothesline. I’m interested in what’s on the clothesline, not the clothesline itself. For the most part, Hollywood is all about the clothesline.” If Hollywood both reflected and pandered to popular taste, indies worked without an audience in mind, and if they found one, it was serendipitous and likely to be a niche, not a mass audience. Likewise, if Hollywood movies were embedded in an economic system that cushioned risk with ancillary markets,1 indies marched ahead—often foolishly—without a thought to distribution. They worked without a net.
Indie films existed in the space between the shots of Hollywood movies, which is to say, they concerned themselves with what Hollywood left out. The converse was true as well: they left out what Hollywood included, not only because they weren’t interested, but because they couldn’t afford it. Poverty inspired its own aesthetic. Hollywood reproduced conventional wisdom and mainstream ideology, whereas indies challeged both—sometimes. Like Young, Pearce, Sayles, and Lee, the first group of indie filmmakers which came up in the 1980s was forged in the crucible of the civil rights and anti-war movements, which had enough staying power to survive into the 1970s, and animate its values. Sayles in particular had absorbed the politics of the 1960s, while Lee’s work is influenced by the Black Power movement. Both filmmakers carried political chips on their shoulders, and others breached sexual taboos, like Gus Van Sant in Mala Nocha, or explored unconventional aesthetic territory like Jarmusch, or just displayed an ironic, smart-ass sensibility, like the Coen brothers. Indie films were never programatically left wing, or even “political” except in the most attenuated fashion, but many were infused with an Us/Them attitude toward the studios and other American institutions similar to that held by the movie brats of the 1970s. The preoccupations of the 1960s and 1970s—class, work, race, American imperialism, and gender—were eventually, with a few exceptions, more or less forgotten, but by virtue of the democratizing thrust of the movement, as a succession of disenfranchised groups—gays, women, people of color—gained some access to the camera, in addition to the circumstances of their production (passing the hat), they were almost by definition outsider films, and therefore—however tenuously—oppositional in nature.
Many of the successful indie films of the 1980s told the story of literal outsiders, the halt and the lame (Waterdance), angry blacks (Do the Right Thing), undocumented workers (El Norte), AIDS-infected gays (Parting Glances), pushers and petty hoods (Drugstore Cowboy), and even the obese (Heavy). On a sexual or gender level, a good number of them were mildly kinky—transgressive, to use a buzzword—giving viewers a glimpse of subject matter rarely treated in mainstream movies, say, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls versus Disney’s Pretty Woman. Since the pioneers held mainstream films in contempt, the worst sin was to “sell out.” Jarmusch always worked outside the system, while Sayles, Lee, and the Coens made forays into the studios, most of which ended badly. The studios, prosperous once again, were not about to bend over a second time for maverick filmmakers with their own ideas about how things should be done.
This having been said, with certain exceptions, like Jarmusch’s work, these films were untouched by the kind of aesthetic antics that informed the anti-narrative underground directors of the 1950s and 1960s, like Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and even the New Hollywood. “The original sin of the American independent cinema, when it shifted away from the avant-garde, was the introduction of narrative,” says writer/ producer James Schamus, now co-president of Focus Features. “Once you do that, you’re inserting yourself into a commodity system. At that point, whether or not you have seized the means of production, à la Karl Marx, doesn’t matter, because what you haven’t done is seize the means of exhibition, marketing, and distribution, and so you end up having to play by the rules of the big boys.”
Looking backward, it’s obvious that the 1980s was the great primordial swamp out of which the indies crawled, flopped onto land, and slithered off into the jungle. As Sayles puts it, “It’s like looking at a fossil record of all these animals that once existed.” The Darwinian drama of unbridled eat-or-be-eaten corporate competition that destroyed promising companies like Cinecom and Vestron as soon as they got into production, made breathing room for vigorous, younger outfits that were just emerging, which in turn allowed the next wave of indies to rise up on their two hind legs and splash mud in the faces of the studio dinosaurs.
By the 1990s, Hollywood had become even more focused on comic book, event pictures than it had been in the previous decade, creating a space, not to say an entire continent, for filmmakers who wanted to tell stories with a human scale. Although it might be argued that the 1990s—a decade in which indies reached a détente with their historical enemy, Hollywood—marked the end of the movement, this is too harsh. For our purposes it was a time when the seeds planted in the previous decade grew and blossomed. The pioneers—Sayles, Lee, Lynch, Demme, Van Sant, Wang, Waters, and the Coen brothers—continued to evolve, but within a few short years they were joined by a veritable swarm of films and filmmakers, including Anders with Gas Food Lodging; Steven Soderbergh with sex, lies, and videotape; Hal Hartley with The Unbelievable Truth; Rick Linklater with Slacker; Todd Haynes with Poison; Gregg Araki with The Living End; Quentin Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs; David O. Russell with Spanking the Monkey; Ang Lee with Eat Drink Man Woman; Kevin Smith with Clerks; Neil LaBute with In the Company of Men; Robert Rodriguez with El Mariachi; James Gray with
Little Odessa; James Mangold with Cop Land; Tom DiCillo with Living in Oblivion; Carl Franklin with One False Move; Nick Gomez with Laws of Gravity; Todd Solondz with Welcome to the Dollhouse; Larry Clark with Kids; Nicole Holofcener with Walking and Talking; Alexander Payne with Citizen Ruth; the Andersons, Wes and P. T. with Bottle Rocket and Boogie Nights; Lisa Cholodenko with High Art; Kim Peirce with Boys Don’t Cry; and Darren Aronofsky with Pi. Not to mention the British, Irish, and Australian filmmakers who enjoyed wide U.S. distribution, like Michael Caton-Jones with Scandal; Jim Sheridan with My Left Foot; Jane Campion with The Piano; Neil Jordan with The Crying Game; and later Danny Boyle with Trainspotting.
Like the New Hollywood, with its Jack Nicholsons, Robert De Niros, Harvey Keitels, Al Pacinos, and Dustin Hoffmans, the indies introduced a whole new generation of character actors like Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Tim Roth, Joaquin Phoenix, Tim Blake Nelson, Billy Bob Thornton, James Spader, and John C. Reilly, as well as actresses like Lily Taylor, Parker Posey, Catherine Keener, Janeane Garofalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anabella Sciorra, and Uma Thurman. It’s a testimony to the differences between the two decades that for the most part, unlike their predecessors, these actors—particularly the ethnic ones—were unable to cross over and become stars. In fact, the movement was in the other direction, with Hollywood stars stooping to conquer by playing character roles in indie films.
Like the 1970s, the 1990s was pregnant with change. “I remember the New York Film Festival where Blood Simple and Stranger Than Paradise premiered,” said producer Ted Hope. “All of a sudden the Coen brothers get up on stage, and I recognized them from my local supermarket. . . . I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s those stoners from the neighborhood!’ And like two days later, after seeing Stranger Than Paradise, there was Jim Jarmusch on the subway. Somehow it just felt really possible.” “I was just getting out of college in 1991,” recalls Edward Norton. “I was twenty-two. There was a sense that anything was possible. I was kicking around New York, doing theater, and I had this friend, Connie Britton, who lived across the street from me. I ran into her, asked, ‘What are you up to?’
“ ‘I’m supposed to be going to this audition for some little independent this kid is making. It’s out in Brooklyn, and I really don’t want to go.’
“ ‘Read the script?’
“ ‘Yeah.’
“ ‘Like it?’
“ ‘Yeah, I did, actually.’
“ ‘What the hell are you moaning about? You gotta hunk out to those kinda things.’ Later, she told me, ‘This guy wants me to do it, it’s nine or ten weekends, at his parents’ house, he’s got $25,000.’
“ ‘Connie, you’ve never been in a movie. Just do it for the experience.’ She did it, and five months later she told me, ‘I saw this movie I did, it’s pretty good, and we just heard that it got into the Sundance Film Festival.’ It was The Brothers McMullen! That’s the way it felt, that there was this new vortex that you could head toward that had nothing to do with Hollywood, the sense that, holy shit, some kid with $25,000 from his parents could end up at Sundance Film Festival, and then the doors opened to that new spring.”
The indies of the 1990s were a diverse lot, ranging from Haynes, with his astringent exercises in theoretically inflected gay cinema on the one hand to Smith, with his twenty-something gross-out comedies on the other, and with every conceivable variety of film in between. They lacked the cohesiveness of the movie brat generation of the 1970s, and a lot of the latter-day indies missed the feeling of community they imagined the movie brats shared, the sense that they were destiny’s children. Says Anders, “It’s so exciting when you’re starting to make films and you first learn about Scorsese and his peers, when they all started making films together, the stories about Brian De Palma coming in and cutting one of his scenes for Mean Streets, it’s like, those guys were all part of a historical moment.” In fact, the New Hollywood inhabits the indies of the 1980s and 1990s like a haunting. “I’ve been pretending that we’re in the late ’60s and early ’70s for my whole career, actually,” said Soderbergh. “I’ve tried to adopt the idea of infusing American material with a European film aesthetic. I mean, that was their great contribution.” In the 1980s, there still existed a network of revival houses that gave the larval indies access to New Hollywood movies, as well as foreign classics and the greats of the Hollywood past. “I remember seeing Taxi Driver at one of those Landmark theaters,” recalls Linklater, who grew up in Texas. “It was right after the assassination attempt on Reagan. I walked out of the theater, and I was in a daze for the next two days. I’ll never forget those years. I was just in love with cinema, and there was something every night—Badlands, Days of Heaven, revivals like Amber-sons, Grand Illusion, Los Olvidados. There was really something magical about sitting in a theater and watching these beautiful 35mm prints. That’s all gone now.”
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the generation of the 1990s was a movement, however ill-defined and unlike the New Hollywood. But their films, with the exception of Quentin Tarantino’s, aren’t so flamboyant as those of their predecessors; they don’t have “Look at me” written all over them, and some of the most prominent filmmakers have even rejected the auteur label. “I certainly didn’t feel like I was going to grow up to be Steven Spielberg, but nor did I think I was going to grow up to become Martin Scorsese,” says Soderbergh. “I’m not one of those visionary types. I’m sort of in the middle. I want John Huston’s career. I want to work for a long time and make all kinds of films.” Consequently, their achievement is deceptively understated. Again Schamus: “Most of the filmmakers are aesthetically audacious, but austere and rigorous at the same time. They get up in the morning, and they go to work. They have unique voices, but they’re not necessarily staking their claim to their potential greatness on them. The aesthetic work is focused, targeted, and modest.”
WHILE THE INDIE ROCKET lifted a whole new generation of gifted filmmakers into orbit, it never would have gotten off the launching pad were it not for the scrappy, talented entrepreneurs who took chances on pictures that no one thought would sell. As Project Green Light has taught us, when budgets are low and shooting schedules short, the drama behind the camera is as compelling as the drama in front of the camera. That drama is often about deals, getting the picture financed before it is shot and into the theaters afterward. As veteran distributor Ray Price puts it, “A good deal is smarter than a good film. You can have the world’s best film, and nobody cares. But a good deal never betrays you.” “To make a film, all you need is a girl and a gun,” Jean-Luc Godard once famously said. He might have added, “If you want someone to see it, you need a distributor.” Says Kevin Smith, “Independent films punched through based on the sales-manship of the distributors that were repping them and the personalities of the people who made the films, and not even so much the personalities as their backstory. Robert Rodriguez is a fantastic example of that. El Mariachi. So is Billy Bob Thornton. The ’90s seemed to be all about the backstory.”
The people who gave us that backstory were the distributors, the marketers, and if the 1970s was a directors’ decade, the 1990s was their decade. Historically, marketing has always been at the heart of the indie business. If “specialized product” wasn’t going to make money, it wasn’t going to exist, and most of the distribution companies were run by marketing people, like Deutchman at Cinecom and later Fine Line; Barker and Bernard at UA, Orion, and finally Sony Classics; and Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky at October. Of course, starting as early as the late 1970s, when marketers muscled production at the studios, gaining the last word over what could or could not be green-lit, it was cause for the wringing of hands and the gnashing of teeth. The bean counters took charge, snuffing the flames of originality that still flickered among the proponents of the easily digested, “high concept” pictures that were being packaged with recognizable faces for pre-existing audiences and tested to death in previews administered by the increasingly influential National Rese
arch Group.
But indie marketing was as distinct from studio marketing as indie films were from studio movies. Where studios spent freely on advertising, indies relied on publicity, which was free. Whereas studios practiced saturation booking and launched expensive campaigns that included massive TV buys, newspaper ads, radio, billboards, and so on, aimed at attracting as many people to as many theaters as possible in the shortest amount of time—usually the first weekend—indie distributors did the opposite. Instead of taking the money and running, they understood that the first week was going to be weakest, so they depended on good reviews and word of mouth gradually to build an audience for films booked into lengthy engagements at few theatrers. (At its maximum exposure, A Room with a View went out on no more than 150 screens, while Cinecom cautiously marked the one-year anniversary of its run at the Paris theater in New York by taking out its first full-page ad in The New York Times.) Whereas the studios adhered to the law of large numbers, releasing a lengthy slate of pictures each year, gambling that a handful would break out while dumping the rest, indie distributors released few pictures, could ill-afford even a single flop, much less two or three, and consequently lavished tender loving care on each one.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 4
