Commerce & Ethos in Indie Film

The past 15 years have been a boon for American independent film. Filmmakers such as Cassavettes, Sayles and Jarmusch—even the earlier New Hollywood (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, et al) who helped significantly weaken studios’ creative stranglehold—laid the groundwork for a new trajectory that began (roughly) with Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). The stage was set for the ascendancy of Sundance and Miramax and such touchstone films as Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Slacker, El Mariachi, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Blair Witch Project. This is the world of Paste film.

What is Indie?
Also under that banner of independent film lie Rushmore (from Disney’s Touchtone Pictures), Kids (from Miramax, owned by Disney at that point), Lost in Translation (from Universal’s Focus Features), and In America (distributed in America by Fox Searchlight). Which raises the question: What exactly is independent film?

“I don’t know if there is a good single definition,” Ray Price responds as we sit in his Beverly Hills offfce. Nonetheless, as the vice-president of marketing for Landmark Theaters, the nation’s largest chain of art-houses, he needs an answer as a matter of course. “My preferred definition is that independent films have authorship, where there’s actually a storyteller trying to talk to the audience.”

Chris Gore—the founder of FilmThreat.com, filmmaker, indie film talking head on numerous networks (IFC, FX, Starz), and author of several books on independent film—echoes these sentiments over calzones at a West Hollywood eatery. True indie films are where “the voice of filmmaker isn’t filtered through a corporate entity and checked for marketing concerns or videogame opportunities.” But he adds, “The problem is that it’s been co-opted now. Where 15 years ago, independent film was not a common term used in the American lexicon, now independent film is a brand and a section of the video store, and it’s a marketing vehicle for small labels within studios.”

As used in the film world, the term denotes aspects of quality and creative control—not finances or ownership. “A film can do $100 million and still be an independent film,” Price states. “It really doesn’t matter who distributes it. That’s just somebody who said, ‘I’ll give you $2 to let me distribute it,’ but it has nothing to do with the content. And there are very low budget films that are just genre films that don’t have any kind of really special storytelling qualities to them.”

The Indie Market
Despite the high profile successes of the last decade, indie film remains a gamble. Price points out that while the financial success of the industry has attracted capital, it has attracted even more filmmakers. For its theaters, Landmark culls approximately 250 films from a pool of 5,000. “It’s only the 95th percentile that’s actually making it to theaters,” he states. “Which is probably how it’s always going to be.”

Gore states that 180,000 independent features are made each year; only 10% of those make the festival circuit. Even among those, only a small fraction get distribution deals.

While the chances of success are slim, the costs have also decreased significantly with the maturation of digital video. Decreasing costs and higher payoffs (if you win) have resulted in a flood of new films over the last decade.

But what has this done to the quality of the ½lms?

Both Price and Gore point to the ease of attracting quality, recognizable actors for these films. “The actors see it as an opportunity to stretch,” Price says. “They get to have fun in some ways that they can’t in a film for $100 million budget where you’re not allowed to screw around very much. With actors like Sam Jackson, who’ll donate their time to be in an independent film, and the budget of this film is less than Samuel gets paid in a studio movie—that he’s willing to do that makes the investors’ stake valuable. You’ve got a $10 million actor in a $2 million movie.”

With the new commercial realities, consumers are offered a greater breadth of films and styles from which to choose. Gore states, “The choices now for consumers are mind-boggling compared to 10 years ago.”

On the flip side, Price points to the democratization of the filmmaking process. “The opportunity is there for almost anybody, which is an astounding and exciting thing,” he says. “And I think that’s what keeps it a storytelling medium. Somebody said film will never be democratic until it’s as cheap as a theater ticket. It’s not quite that cheap yet, but it’s approaching that—where everybody that has a story to tell can tell it.” It’s the punk music ethos coming to film.

Whither the remnants?
Of the 170,000 or so titles that fail to land a distribution deal, what happens to the rest? More importantly, why should anyone care? Similar to the conversations in the early days of punk, you’ll catch comments by prominent filmmakers at festival panels indicating that it’s too easy to make films these days. The market is crowded with crap.

True, no doubt. But when punk becomes a mainstream marketing tool, it’s usually the true punk that’s left to wither. “If Kevin Smith’s first film Clerks was shown at a film festival today,” Gore says, “it would not have been sold to Miramax. Think about it. Clerks is a 16mm movie, shot in black and white, with no stars. You describe that film to anybody who works in acquisitions—they won’t even go see it, much less have a conversation with you about it.

“If the Kevin Smiths of today—those filmmakers making movies for less than $100,000, which includes films like Richard Linklater’s Slackers, Robert Rodriguize’s El Mariachi, Darren Aronofsky’s first film Pi—you begin to examine the first films of these filmmakers, and they were made for paltry sums. These films aren’t getting nearly the kind of attention because there’s so much of a focus on the larger-budgeted independent features.”

So what options do these potentially worthy works have for being seen?

One viable option is provided by the simple DVD. A number of independent labels have sprung up to distribute these films directly on this medium. While direct-to-video is nothing new, the stigma of such a fate is wearing off, and the Internet—from online retail sales to streaming content to rental services such as Netflix and cafedvd.com—has exponentially enhanced consumers’ ability to access these titles.

One such label is Gore’s recently launched Film Threat DVD. “[It] effectively is a lot like the independent records model. It’s a coalition of filmmakers who come together, we provide marketing and access to retail, and the filmmakers own the movies. We acquire no rights to their films. All we get is the opportunity to sell their movies at a preferred wholesale price. The filmmakers who’ve done it are really happy about it. I love writing checks to filmmakers and whatnot. I love giving opportunities to films that might otherwise not be released. Video stores will buy titles that they’ve never heard of, because our brand is high. If that’s what it takes to get a film out there, good.”

Another intriguing option for filmmakers and consumers is through Film Movement. Launched in January 2003, the company releases films simultaneously to theaters and on DVD to subscribers. At the SXSW film festival, founder Larry Meistrich (producer of such films as Sling Blade) described his mission: “Basically what we’re doing is we’re combining the theatrical release—the glamour of it, the reviews, the ability to generate press, the needs of filmmakers—with the accessibility of the DVD subscription service.”

The idea came to Meistrich via Harry Potter. As a member of the Academy, he received a screener of the first film while it was still in theaters. After his daughter told her schoolmates, he was flooded with phone calls and party requests. And he thought, “What if you can combine those two experiences [theatrical and DVD], just collapse the window?”

Thus Film Movement was born. Each year, they attend the larger and more important film festivals—Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, SXSW—and pick award winners. The films are chosen by Meistrich and a panel of curators that includes Richard Peña from Lincoln Center, Christian Gaines from American Film Institute, Matt Dentler from SXSW, Nate Kohn from Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, among others.

Meistrich was also motivated by his needs as a suburban father. “I think there’s a lot of consumers like me—who are suburban, busy, have lifestyle issues that kind of get in the way of being able to drive to a big urban center to an art-house to see these films.”

Price also highlights the importance of suburban consumers. “One of the really great expansions hasn’t been so much existing markets growing as new markets coming online or what has been small markets maturing into big markets,” he says. “It used to be New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles—the coasts and not a whole lot in between. That’s how it was 25 years ago. In the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been almost no growth [there] but huge growth in markets in between …. You’ve seen a lot of people moving out of the cities to get a bigger house or whatever, but they haven’t lost their cultural interest.”

Gore points to film festivals as the best option for rural film lovers. “That’s how independent film is brought to small communities,” he says. “Festivals, directors, programmers and volunteers from all over the country starting a small film festival in their little town, bringing independent filmmakers out there to screen their work. I wrote the 2nd edition of my book [The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide] 3 years ago. Now there are approximately 400 new ½lm festivals in the United States, most of them in rural areas. What I love about that is it’s a way for those communities to view another kind of movie and to really feel like a part of the process, and those ½lmmakers can actually have direct contact with their audiences. So in a way it’s a lot like a musical tour, going on a festival tour.”

Will independent film ever develop to the point of independent music, where artists no longer need major labels and distributors in order to make a living? “I certainly want to get there,” Gore responds. “I think the music business is far ahead of independent ½lm in that regard. Certainly that would be the goal, to be where an artist like Aimee Mann is. She started up United Musicians; I buy all her CDs directly from her. And I love that. I love the idea of supporting the artist. There are too many middle men involved in getting products out on a large scale.”

¡Viva la revolucion!