Contemporary American Independent Film

From the Margins to the Mainstream

Christine Holmlund, Justin Wyatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134576203
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

From Easy Rider to The Blair Witch Project, this book is a comprehensive examination of the independent film scene. Exploring the uneasy relationship between independent films and the major studios, the contributors trace the changing ideas and definitions of independent cinema, and the diversity of independent film practices.

They consider the ways in which indie films are marketed and distributed, and how new technologies such as video, cable and the internet, offered new opportunities for filmmakers to produce and market independent films.

Turning to the work of key auteurs such as John Sayles and Haile Gerima, contributors ask whether independent filmmakers can also be stars, and consider how indie features like Boys Don't Cry and Shopping for Fangs address issues of gender, sexuality and ethnicity normally avoided by Hollywood.

For all students of film studies and American studies, this cultural journey through independent film history will be an absolute must read.

Chapter 1
Introduction

From the margins to the mainstream

Chris Holmlund

From the margins to the mainstream

The popularity of independent films today is indisputable. ‘Indies’ – among them Chicago (Marshall, 2002), Gangs of New York (Scorsese, 2002), Far from Heaven (Haynes, 2002), The Pianist (Polanski, 2002), Frida (Taymor, 2002), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002), and Bowling for Columbine (Moore, 2002) – dominated nominations and awards at the 2003 Oscars.¹ Everywhere you look, you find independent features: in art-house miniplexes and special theaters; as videos and DVDs; on regular, cable, and satellite tv; increasingly on the web; more infrequently yet often prominently (as is the case with the above titles) in wide release.²

Admittedly, audiences for these movies vary – by age, across region, in size, because certain indie films target ‘niche’ audiences, while some tap diasporic populations, and others address trans-national communities. Each year, moreover, hundreds of other independent movies see no distribution, in part because – like production costs – price tags for prints and advertising have soared. Miramax’s Gangs of New York surely tops the ‘heavyweight’ price list, with production costs rumored to be $100–120 million dollars (Oppelaar 2002: 62).

With so many expensive independent feature films now produced and released by mini-majors and the majors’ own independent arms, independent films would seem to have moved squarely to the mainstream, away from the margins where historically they served to supplement studio production and often expressed ‘outsider’ perspectives. Has ‘indie’ become merely a brand, a label used to market biggish budget productions that aim to please many by offending few? What does the shift towards the mainstream entail, especially for those located on the margins?

This Introduction and the chapters which follow explore the economic and ideological consequences that attend the positionings of contemporary American independent features within the mainstream and on the margins. Most of us concentrate on feature films rather than on documentaries or shorts, as the

Figure 1.1 Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), William Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis), and Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas) in Gangs of New York (Scorsese, 2002). Courtesy of Miramax/Dimension Films/Kobal Collection/Mario Tursi.

former especially have been key to industry survival and expansion. Finally, by ‘contemporary’ American indies, we envisage primarily films made from the 1980s through the 2000s, though some of us explore independents made in the 1970s that helped inaugurate current trends.

But what exactly is an ‘independent’ film? Who watches independent films? Which independent films? Why does identification as an independent matter? Common as the term is, what it is that constitutes an independent film is ill-defined and hotly debated. For numerous critics, and many audience members, too, the label suggests social engagement and/or aesthetic experimentation – a distinctive visual look, an unusual narrative pattern, a self-reflexive style. The definition advanced in 2003 by the editorial board of Filmmaker Magazine, the journal of the Independent Feature Project and the Independent Feature Project/ West, is typical, and additionally acknowledges cross-over potential. In a yearly article introducing ‘25 New Faces of Indie Film,’ Filmmaker’s editors posit that independent films are broadly associated with ‘alternative points of view, whether they be expressed in experimental approaches or through crowd-pleasing comedies’ (Filmmaker 2003).

Yet to say that personal vision or alternative perspectives characterize indies in general is to forget the hundreds of pulp actioners and horror flicks that every day jostle for space on video and DVD store shelves. Where, after all, would Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude van Damme be without straight-to-video indies? And let’s not forget all those terrifying – and terrible – treats like C.H.U.D. (Creek, 1984)!

True, a director often sets his – still more rarely her – signature on an indie feature, making these films, as opposed to studio blockbusters, more genuinely the work of an ‘auteur.’ Occasionally – witness the success of Roger Corman or Troma Entertainment – a producer or a production company becomes a trademark. ‘Thumbs ups’ from leading, even local, critics count for more than they do with mainstream film. The presence of recognizable actors (more rarely stars) is often a salient factor fueling box office take and video/DVD rentals and sales. In contemporary art-house variants the performer him/herself may even serve as a marker of ‘independence’ – per the scores of independent films in which our ‘cover boy,’ the inimitable Steve Buscemi (there, in Living in Oblivion [Di Cillo, 1995], playing ‘no budget’ independent director Nick Reve), appears. A final complication involves identification of an independent film as ‘American’: many US studios happily distribute both foreign and American independent features, while foreign monies often help bankroll American independent productions.

Given the above – at times complementary, at times contradictory – definitions, many viewers fail to recognize that a big-budget, star-laden, film like Gangs of New York is actually an American independent, even though they may know that Miramax is the leading producer and distributor of independent work and even though they may also know that Martin Scorsese made a name for himself in 1973 with the far less expensive independent Mean Streets. We would however insist, with Chuck Kleinhans (1998: 308), that ‘independent film’ has always been a relational term: what’s at stake is a continuum, not an opposition. Contemporary American independent films run the financial gamut, from ‘no budget’ (under $100,000) to ‘micro’ or ‘low budget’ (under $1 million) to – and, today, more frequently – ‘tweeners’ ($10–30 million) produced and marketed by mini-majors, even sometimes – as is the case with the Miramax–Paramount collaboration on The Hours (Daldry, 2002) – together with majors. Distribution as well may or may not be handled independently.

For us, the phrase ‘from the margins to the mainstream’ – subtitle both of this first introductory section and of the collection as a whole – thus takes on three, interconnected, meanings.

• As referenced here, argued in the next two introductory sections about indies past and present, and further explicated in the reprints and essays, independent and mainstream feature films are linked together on a sliding scale. Neither ideologically nor economically are they purely antithetical.
• Nevertheless, as also suggested by the first three sections of this introduction and developed in several of the original articles as well, in the last fifteen years key sectors of independent films have indeed migrated towards the mainstream, from the margins, with attendant effects.
• Finally, and precisely because the dominant trend has been away from the margins, towards the mainstream, many contributors choose to speak from the margins to the mainstream. As will be apparent both from the final two sections of this Introduction (overviews of our contributions and areas meriting additional research) and from several of the contributions which follow, such arguments are at times nostalgic, at times visionary – at times both, simultaneously.

That individual contributors emphasize different aspects and kinds of indie features testifies to the complexity that characterizes talk about contemporary American independent cinema. All of the contributors to Contemporary American Independent Cinema would nevertheless agree that to assess any of the many contemporary American independent cinema scenes, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the stages of American independent films past and some appreciation of the scope of independent films present. Accordingly, the next two sections sketch briefly the history of American independent film.

American independent film from the teens to 2000

With selection criteria that include ‘original, provocative subject matter’ and ‘uniqueness of vision,’ awards like the Independent Spirits fuel perceptions that independent film is synonymous with the ‘hot,’ the ‘new,’ and the ‘now’ (Filmmaker 2002).³ But independent films are not strictly ‘now’ or simply ‘new’; rather, they date back to the dawn of feature-length cinema time.

In the teens, ethnic, sexploitation, documentary, and avant-garde films made by independents provided welcome alternatives to output from the ‘Big Three’: Edison, Biograph, and Vitagraph. In the 1920s, race, exploitation, and ethnic films continued to prosper, even as studios became larger and more powerful. A few actors, like Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, started their own companies, while several famous studio directors, among them King Vidor and Maurice Tourneur, launched their careers in independent film.

In the 1930s the ‘Big Five’ (Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO) consolidated their control over big budget and ‘pro-grammer’ production, contracting workers from directors and stars on down, and dominating a good deal of distribution and exhibition as well. Yet so great was the need for ‘B’ and specialized product that independent studios sprang up to fill the need, churning out cheap westerns, exploitation, ethnic, and black-cast films, often on Hollywood sets and sound stages.⁴ As is the case today, these independent studios varied in size, from semi-independents like Monogram and Republic to the shoestring outfits of Poverty Row.

The 1940s through 1960s saw the gradual break-up of the studio system and the opening of new doors for independent producers, distributors, and exhibitors. The Paramount decision of 1948 was key, forcing the ‘Big Five’ to sell their theater chains. The number of contract players shrank dramatically, and many stars and directors – among them Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, George Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder – set up their own productions. By the 1960s, the big studios had essentially become distributors, and the ‘Little Three’ (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) had also become majors. Meanwhile the arrival of television created additional demand for films, while in theaters and drive-ins teen pix and exploitation flicks became ‘must see’ movies for the millions of postwar baby-boomers.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the loosening of the 1934 Hayes Production Code and, in 1968, its succession by the modern Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system paved the way both for a proliferation of porn movies and for the more personal, often confrontational, films that became known as ‘American New Wave.’ Independently produced (if often studio-released) youth-oriented and/or exploitation features, such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles, 1971), and Billy Jack (Laughlin, 1971), captured audiences’ imaginations and raked in money. Art-house and adult theaters flourished. By the end of the 1970s, an alternative infrastructure of festivals, organizations, and distributors capable of supporting smaller features was in place. Prime among these were the US Film Festival, founded in 1978 and now renowned as the Sundance Film Festival, and the Independent Feature Project with its offshoot the Independent Feature Film Market, begun in 1979. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, and others became famous, first with independent, then often with semi-independent and studio productions.⁵ But of all the iconoclasts making off-beat narrative films and moving between indie and studio work, John Cassavetes perhaps best embodies the spirit of resistance to what biographer Ray Carney has called ‘happy-face, entertainment-obsessed, Hollywood-addled culture’ (McKay 2001). Jack-of-all-trades Cassavetes assembled every crew and wrote each script, from his first film, Shadows (1959), on; he worked intensely and intensively with a core group of actors, coaxing them to remarkable performances in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction From the margins to the mainstream
• Part I Critical formations
• Part II Cult film/cool film
• Part III Iconoclasts and auteurs
• Part IV Identity hooks ⇔ cultural binds
• Part V Shifting markets, changing media
• Index