As a direct result of becoming “sexy,” there is tremendous pressure from the bottom from new filmmakers coming up. As John Sayles puts it, “As the last ten years have progressed, many, many, many more independent features are being made, and so a much higher percentage of them never get a theatrical release. And a not much higher percentage of them even go straight to video.” Adds Ethan Coen, “The big difference between then and now from our perspective is that then, if you had a finished movie in 35mm, you could get everybody to see it. Now, partly because it’s easier to make a movie, it’s more difficult to get people to even look at it. Because there are so many.”
The ferocious competition, alongside the twin obsessions with the young and the new, means there is little opportunity to fail, and from failing to learn. There is no apprentice system. “Most of the ’70s guys just shoveled shit for Roger Corman, learned their craft long before they found their voices,” says James Schamus. “Spielberg did so much TV, people have no clue. Whereas these days, you say to some guy at NYU, ‘Why don’t you go make some TV,’ it’s like, ‘Please. Out of my sight.’ ”
Sundance was supposed to fill this hole, but there’s a big difference between working for Corman and a Sundance lab that lasts three weeks at most. There are few first novels in filmmaking, efforts that go into the drawer or up in flames, because there are no—or very few—second chances. Or, to put it another way, indie film is almost exclusively a cinema of first films. “The psychology of the American independent has supplanted the auteur psychology,” Schamus continues. “There’s no question to me that Sundance, as a culture, has dangerously infantilized auteurism, because the reigning assumption is that by the time you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, you’re pretty much an auteur if you’re going to be an auteur, and if you’re not, you’re not. If you’d put that on someone like Coppola, I don’t think he’d ever have been Coppola. What could that guy have said at the age of twenty? Your first independent film has gotta be your film, your voice. So now the pressure is really on from the time you’re out of diapers to be an artist. It’s become a grim kind of joke.”
If the first film is successful, the director is overwhelmed with praise and offers he (or much less often, she) cannot refuse. Then, adds Kevin Smith, “An independent filmmaker has to produce something that lives up to the hype based on what he did last, that he himself has encouraged. There’s a lot of fuckin’ pressure, and life is too short to deal with it.” If, on the other hand, the first film fails, raising cash for the next one becomes an unrelenting grind of begging and scraping. There are so many filmmakers chasing so little money that getting film number two or three made can be harder than number one. Either way, the filmmaker stops living life—as most people know it. While the first film was about “My life up to now,” the subsequent films aren’t about anything at all or, if you’re Charlie Kaufman, they’re totally reflexive, about screenwriting itself.
The indie landscape is littered with first (or occasionally second) films of promise—promise that has rarely been realized, not necessarily because the filmmakers have no talent, but because of the cultural and economic ecology of the environment in which they are working. Examples: Anders’s Gas Food Lodging vs. all her subsequent work; Gregg Araki’s The Living End vs. his; Aronofsky’s Pi vs. his; Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan vs. his; Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men vs. his; Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade vs. his; Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity vs. his; Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup vs. his; Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects vs. his; Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art vs. hers; Scott Hicks’s Shine vs. his; Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth vs. his; Rose Troche’s Go Fish vs. hers; Larry Clark’s Kids vs.his; and Boaz Yakin’s Fresh vs. his. Says Linklater, “Once you proved you aren’t the next George Lucas, then your stock goes down. It’s, ‘Oh shit.’ It doesn’t get easier, it gets harder, ’cause with each film you define yourself more, what your limitations are. If you haven’t had big financial success, you get smaller and smaller. I remember seeing Altman talk in Houston in the late ’80s, and he said, ‘Any of you in this audience has a better chance of getting financing than I do.’ I was like, ‘That’s insane, he’s Robert Altman!’ Then you go, ‘Now I know, he was right.’ ”
Just a glance at the Sundance Film Festival program each year reveals that for every familiar name there are ten unfamiliar ones, filmmakers who were wounded and left for dead, and that’s just Sundance, which accepts a tiny fraction of the films submitted. A where-are-they-now list nearly as big as the Salt Lake City phone book could be compiled of filmmakers who never made it. What happened to Leslie Harris, whose Just Another Girl on the IRT made a splash at Sundance in 1992, or Karyn Kusama, whose Girl-fight was acclaimed in 2000, or Susan Streitfeld (Female Perversions), or Mark Illsley (Happy, Texas), for that matter. Judged by one of its original, loftier goals, an institute to help outsiders, Sundance has failed. Women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the poor still don’t have equal access to the camera. And so far as creating a nurturing environment sheltered from the commercial demands of Hollywood where filmmakers could grow, learn, make mistakes, and grow some more—the labs do a good job, but a lot of that good work is undone by the frenzy of the festival. Skeptics once feared that Sundance would be no more than a farm team for the majors, and it has become just that. “If you’re an independent who wants to get your feature looked at by Miramax or Focus, then SD is a great mechanism,” says Sterling Van Wagenen. “But what if you’re a real independent who wants to go someplace that’s really out on the edge, I suspect it is not the answer. If you’d said to me twenty years ago that this is where Sundance was going to be, I would have been surprised.” The indies who were in on the beginning of Sundance—Victor Nunez, Annick Smith, et al.—are not much better off than they were two decades ago.
Still, if Harvey Weinstein is like the Terminator, coming back from defeat after defeat stronger than ever, Sundance is like the headless horseman, picking itself up, brushing off the dust, and plunging ahead. Schizoid, the festival has always tugged the institute in the direction of Hollywood, but the labs—under the radar—have nurtured the original vision. As the labs have evolved, they have changed in scope, not concept, supplementing the original June directors program with labs for writers and composers, as well as an annual producers’ conference. If Sundance managed to sink its production arm, it still, according to Michelle Satter, the unsung hero of the institute, provides “ongoing support for projects through their entire life—including help with financing, casting, production services, etc.—aimed at leveraging films into production.” And if the Sundance cinemas went bottom up, the Sundance Channel, in conjunction with the Loews theater chain, opened four corporately sponsored indie films in 2003, while at the same time arranging DVD distribution for films that premiere on the channel.
THE WEINSTEINS hopped aboard the Miramax balloon and vanished skyward to the huzzahs of its fans and catcalls of its enemies, ascending as fast and as far as hot air would take them. But in truth, the Weinsteins escaped the gravitational pull of the indie world many years ago, in 1998, after Shakespeare in Love, or even earlier, in 1994, after Pulp Fiction. And despite the many ways in which the brothers Miramaxed and Disneyized everything in sight, it would be a mistake to exaggerate their influence. The broad shadows the brothers cast should not obscure the fact that in many respects, Miramax is sui generis. True, they recast the indie landscape, but when the Weinstein spores landed at almost every single indie distributor in the business and tried to pod and body-snatch their new hosts into Miramax clones, most often they failed. Scott Greenstein surely tried with October, but he never did succeed in cutting its cloth to suit the fashion of his old home. Even though every studio wanted its infant indie division to become the “new Miramax”—the chorus has always been the same, “October, the new Miramax,” “Artisan, the new Miramax,” “USA, the new Miramax,” and even now, “Focus, the new Miramax”—it never happened, because it takes a certain
kind of personality to fashion a Miramax, a ruthlessness, a willingness to take scissors to films, to shelve them, “bury” them, as Harvey so often put it. The Weinsteins’ methods ran counter to the way indie companies had historically conducted themselves, and most former Miramaxers didn’t have the stomach for it. They discarded their ghostfaces and fashioned kinder, gentler companies. The start-ups have generally defined themselves against Miramax.
Life after Miramax, then, without the Weinsteins to kick around anymore (or, more accurately, without the Weinsteins to be kicked around by anymore), may be less dramatic, but it will certainly be more civil, with the business recapturing some of the collegial sensibility it enjoyed in its infancy, especially with the reemergence of indie stalwarts like Bingham Ray, and the empowerment of sane players like James Schamus and David Linde, and Mark Gill at the new Warners Independent Pictures. “Now that Miramax has stepped out of it, other distributors don’t have to pay as much for films they like,” says Cassian Elwes. “Filmmakers and agents won’t make as much money because Miramax is not overpaying, but at the end of the day the films are still going to get distributed. It’s healthy for the business.” With the frenzied competition that created the acquisitions bubble ended, at least for the foreseeable future, and absent the Disney dollars Harvey dumped onto the Sundance game board, real filmmakers, rather than heat-seeking wannabes, may even reclaim the movement. Maybe.
Indeed, more relevant to the future of the indie movement than the presence or absence of Miramax, perhaps, is the state of the studios. At the beginning of the decade, the indie world was largely reactive; how it looked and felt, its focus and attitudes were determined by what the studios did or didn’t do. As the decade wore on, the two worlds reached out to each other—the studios starting their indie divisions and the indies responding with their Indiewood films—but it was a dangerous dance, at least for the indies. Despite the spate of “indie spirit” films released in 1999, or again in 2002 and 2003, it’s a mistake for indies to look to the studios for more than the occasional handout. For one thing, studios are fickle creatures and don’t have much in the way of long-term, coherent strategies. One year it’s American Beauty, the next it’s Gladiator. Indie films and studio movies converge only to diverge again. Studios are no more suited to marketing indie films than they ever were. And when the studios do acquire or create their own specialty divisions, they’re often treated like orphans, starved and neglected. Nor is the bureaucratic studio culture suited to the risk-taking indie sensibility that has served the Weinsteins so well. The executives with the most longevity are the most conservative, like Paramount’s Sherry Lansing. On the other hand, Bill Mechanic, who pushed the envelope at Fox, launching The English Patient and Traffic, along with Bul-worth and Fight Club, was swept away by Rupert Murdoch’s broom in a “regime change.” Pulp Fiction aside, Three Kings was the most important film of the last decade, because it showed that an indie director could ram a major film with leftist politics and a daring aesthetic through a studio, Warners, one of the most conservative. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the executive who fought for it, got the sack after tangling with Warner’s COO Alan Horn, who had criticized him for making films, such as Training Day, that are “too dark.” Ultimately, it may be easier, and certainly more profitable, for the studios to revert to form, focusing exclusively on the kinds of pictures they’re good at: comic book pictures, sequels, broad comedies, and steroidal versions of golden oldie TV series. What with the economic squeeze, they’re thinking about the bottom line, not about Oscars, modest profits, and luring new talent into the fold. They may lose interest in their classics divisions.
The danger, as always, is that if they do continue to make the occasional Indiewood film, the likes of Payne, David Russell, and the Andersons will be cannibalized by the studios. As New Line’s Bob Shaye admitted, in case anyone was wondering, when he defended himself against the charge of re-cutting About Schmidt, “We are not a cultural temple.”19 Adds Ted Hope, “When I started working, the Jim Jarmuschs, the Hal Hartleys, the early Todd Haynes were aiming for a different level of art, and audiences seemed to be responding, but it became harder and harder to get money to make those movies, whereas the films that actually could step forward and compete at the Oscar level, you could raise money for. But then specialized film has become simply this Academy-qualifying low-budget cinema of quality.”
Besides, there’s a quota system for indie films at the studios, as Russell discovered. Before di Bonaventura left Warner’s, Russell set up his new film there, I Heart Huckabee’s. Miramax still had an option on him, but neither he nor Warner’s wanted to partner with Harvey. However, says Russell, “He’ll litigate. We squirmed every which way, and we decided to make a deal instead. We made Warner’s the production partner so we wouldn’t have to deal with Miramax. Since Warner’s doesn’t know how to distribute an interesting film, Miramax was going to distribute domestically. It was the best of both worlds.” That is, until di Bonaventura exited, and Russell found that neither Warner’s nor Miramax would step up for his project, modestly budgeted at around $22 million with a cast that includes Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and Isabelle Huppert. “This is where the whole movie star fucking thing comes in,” says Russell. “I said, ‘How come you made fucking Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—which I had been offered to direct a couple of years ago and concluded that it was just not about anything but a guy who liked to fuck girls and say that he shot people in the head—just so you could get to get in bed with Clooney? Of course they’ll make a movie with a movie star in a heartbeat, as Fox did with Solaris.”
Russell shopped his project. “New Regency spent $45 million on an Angelina Jolie/Ed Burns romantic comedy, Life or Something Like It,” he continues. “So now the company was in austerity mode, and I came with my picture, and asked for $12.5 million, and it’s ‘no.’ I have to pay for your stupid mistakes? Same thing happened at Universal. They spent a lot of money on his Jonathan Demme remake of Charade. Much as I respect him, Demme burned through the independent capital there. Wasted it. Same with Payne at Sony. Sony had just spent over $50 million on What Planet Are You From?, and then Alexander couldn’t get the time of day for About Schmidt, and they put it in turnaround. The climate for independent type pictures is not good unless they’re made for under $10 million.”
Finally he ended up at Fox Searchlight, which is doing Payne’s new picture as well, and scored in 2003 with films like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days, Catherine Hardwicke’s 13, and Gurinda Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. “For sure, Miramax is not interested in making certain kinds of risky movies and movies that have to be sold with tender loving care,” Russell continues. “No, Harvey has to get the movie star juice, he has to do a deal directly with the movie star, like with Clooney. He’s just bored. Now Fox Searchlight is doing that business.”
But the good news is that by the end of the decade, the indies had formed their own infrastructure, their distributors—both the studio-affiliated divisions with deep pockets and the unaffiliated companies looking for the old-style, star-challenged indies—their lobbying arm, the IFP, their own media (indieWire, Filmmaker, and the like), and last but hardly least, their base in the agencies, witness William Morris Independent, run by Elwes. This institutional foundation for the first time gives them leverage with the studios, hopefully making, for example, the first-film syndrome a thing of the past. As attorney Linda Lichter puts it, agents like Elwes, Robert Newman, and John Lesher “have found money for them so that they’re not scrounging for bucks for their next movie, but can really have a career.”
The contradiction that has always bedeviled Sundance reflects the contradiction at the heart of the indie phenomenon: Is the indie world a place where the studios develop talent, a farm system for the majors? Or is it an autonomous world of its own, with its own values and aesthetic existing outside and even thrusting against the gravitational pull of the system? The remarkable success of indies in the 1990s, for whic
h Sundance, Miramax, Sony Classics, October et al. are largely responsible, is that it was both, and the one fed the other. “The purpose of doing a film outside the system is so that they don’t fuck with you,” Lichter continues. “And the movie you get is the movie that has your voice. Then, when the big people come calling, they do so because of who you are, what you can bring to them, not because they can control you. Rather than doing one for them and one for you, you can do one for you that both they and you want to make. The impact of the independents on the studio world is that all of a sudden, they want what we got. Of course, you have to see if you can do it on your own terms and not be eaten alive by the system. David O. Russell really did that with Three Kings. Whether anybody can do it again I don’t know.”
Nothing could have made the new clout of the indies clearer than the reality check administered by the studios to the indies on September 30, 2003, when Jack Valenti, ostensibly backed by the seven majors, plus DreamWorks and New Line, announced the decision to cease sending out screeners to Academy members, critics’ societies, and the guilds. The decision came out of the blue on the runup to the 2003 Oscar race, already fore-shortened by the removal of the ceremony itself from the end of March to the end of February 2004. The new policy, reportedly spearheaded by Warner’s CEO Barry Meyer, who stayed in the shadows, and announced by veteran MPAA lobbyist Jack Valenti, 82 years old and on the edge of retirement, was aimed at stemming the kind of rampant piracy that has laid low the recording industry. But the effect of the ruling would have been, and still may be, devastating for indies, especially those owned by the seven majors, which depend on screeners to level the playing field. Some indies went so far as to charge the studios with a conspiracy to reclaim the Oscars for themselves by frustrating their ability to compete. Says UA’s Bingham Ray. “It was fuckin’ railroaded by Barry Meyer, pure and simple. It’s all about, What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I think it’s fractionally about piracy. But what we all know, and will never be able to prove, is that it is about the studios reclaiming the Academy process.” Added Christine Vachon, “This is such a smokescreen. It’s clear people are getting pissed that every year the independents are getting the lion’s share of the recognition. There’s not a doubt in my mind that the bigger issue here is to refocus attention on big studio movies.” Outraged distributors also questioned the timing of the decision and the lack of consultation with those most affected, i.e., the indie divisions themselves. (Ironically, “real” indie companies without studio affiliations, like IFC Films, Lions Gate, Newmarket, Strand, and Artisan, would have presumably been free to continue to send out screeners.)
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