Independent Cinema

D.K. Holm

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781904048701
• eBook ISBN: 9781842433867
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Just what is "independent" cinema? D. K. Holm, columnist for Kevin Smith's website and author of Robert Crumb and Quentin Tarantino , aims to define a term that can be difficult to distinguish from categories such as avant-garde, underground, experimental, or art films. By contrasting studio-era Hollywood with changes in the business since the 1970s and chronicling the rise of companies such as Miramax and New Line, this book shows the birth of a commercial environment in which the new independent cinema could emerge. Detailed assessments and previously unpublished interviews with filmmakers, such as James Mangold (Walk the Line) , Jill Sprecher (Clockwatchers) , and Guy Maddin ( The Saddest Music in the World) show the vastly different roles independent cinema can play in different hands. An accompanying DVD features Paul Cronin's documentary Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16, about the founder of the New York Film Festival and one of the country's most important film societies.

INDEPENDENT CINEMA AS ALTERNATIVE TO COMMERCIAL STORYTELLING: JILL AND KAREN SPRECHER

If you wanted to come up with a style guide to a modern independent film, the first port of call would be the films of Jill and Karen Sprecher. Their films provide a checklist of core indie components. In the sceptical imagination, a typical American independent film is a precious, twee tale notable for its novelty casting of, say, Shelley Winters, or some other semi-retired star from the classical age, opposite, say, Pee-Wee Herman and two or three young adult stars from contemporary sitcoms, all enacting scenes set in one huge, budget-preserving house in which various relatives gather for a contentious Thanksgiving dinner, which results in tears, smiles and hugs. The satire of independent cinema, For Your Consideration (2006), got the solo setting and the washed-up actress right, but in other respects Christopher Guest’s normally accurate anthropology was defeated by a lack of observed reality; for example, indie films of the type he parodied are almost always set in the present, rather than the American South in the 1940s, and usually on practical location sets rather than in Los Angeles studios.

Films by the Sprechers do indeed have some of these comical components, but with one major difference. Their films are good.

Jill and Karen Sprecher are the Coen Sisters of indie cinema. The Midwest natives make films solely from their original screenplays, which Jill directs and Karen produces, although these traditional divisions of labour blur and interact. Jill Sprecher went to the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree in philosophy and literature, then moved to New York where she studied film and worked on the periphery of the film industry, as, among other roles, a production coordinator. There are other directors who came to filmmaking from a circuitous route. Horror maestro Wes Craven was an English professor, and in the 1990s there was a vogue for painters turning to filmmaking, with Julian Schnabel helming Basquiat (1996) and Before Night Falls (2000), and Robert Longo directing Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Karen Sprecher, meanwhile, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and then received an MSW from New York University, after which she worked as a clinical social worker counselling teens and young adults in Chicago. Her ‘break’ into show business came during a visit to Jill in New York City, when her sister hired her as an assistant production coordinator on an independent film. Karen then went on to work on several indies including The Last Good Time, Stonewall and Enemies: A Love Story.

Jill and Karen began writing Clockwatchers together on weekends ‘as a diversion’, according to Jill, ‘never thinking it would get made. That’s about it. We’re lazy.’

The Sprechers’ Clockwatchers made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival and won prizes at other international festivals in 1997. It is quintessentially ‘indie’ in its use of a varied cast, including Lisa Kudrow, then one of the stars of the sitcom Friends, Parker Posey, a young actress who was rapidly becoming an axiom of independent cinema, and Toni Collette, a respected Australian actress. It was also confined to one setting, primarily a single floor of a business office. Their subsequent film, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, was a top ten-list film favourite of many critics and viewers in 2001.

Some might detect a little of the early Woody Allen in the Sprechers’ films. Just as Allen inserted references to books such as The Denial of Death and other serious works into his comedies, the Sprechers are absorbed by large questions of happiness and meaning in life. In both Clockwatchers and Thirteen Conversations, an unhappy central character performs a selfless gesture that changes, in some small, perhaps even unseen way, the life of another. As Bertrand Russell wrote in The Conquest of Happiness, one of Jill Sprecher’s favourite books, ‘So long as [a person] continues to think about the cause of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centered and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle… The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.’

But a significant difference between films by the Sprechers and other similar-seeming filmmakers is the milieu in which their characters appear, which is generally the workaday world, complete with its class differences and hierarchies. In this way, the Sprechers resemble the screenwriters and directors of the Warner Bros films of the 1930s and such later gritty filmmakers and writers as Samuel Fuller, Paddy Chayefsky and Richard Brooks (at least in late films such as Looking for Mr Goodbar).

Jill Sprecher’s untraditional route into the movie business suggests one reason why she favours screenplays with ordinary life content over special-effects-driven tales. She is interested in stories rather than lavish visual pyrotechnics. She wants to explore the truth of human dynamics rather than offer the viewer something to simply pass the time. She therefore shoots her films in a deliberate style with only subtle flourishes, when she draws, for example, on the visual style of a specific painter. Not only does the Sprechers’ concentration on working life assure their films entry into the ‘independent film’ world, but also into a rising genre among indie films.

On the surface Clockwatchers seems to be just another arty suspense film, a slim tale of revenge, with one of those existential edges that makes movies seem ‘thoughtful’. Or it could be called a stalker film, a favourite genre of young filmmakers trying to break into Hollywood. But in fact it’s an addition to a whole new genre, or sub-genre, of the ‘workaday’ film, which, for want of a better phrase, could be called ‘heroic alienation’.

Heroic Alienation films tend to be big productions set in small worlds, and generally follow the travails of a lead character who finds the corporate world dispiriting. There are a surprising number of films in this genre. Among them are Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), Richard Linklater’s subUrbia (1996), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), and most of the films directed by Wes Anderson, PT Anderson, and the sardonic Todd Solondz. There’s even a foreign contingent, with Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin de l’empire américain (1986), Jaco van Dormael’s Toto le Heros (1991), the late Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Leolo (1992), and Laurent Cantet’s Time Out (2001), among many others. Most genre-defining, however, are the Sprechers’ Clockwatchers, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) and David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), a mix of independent releases and studio projects. These last films lay the foundation for the alienated worker themes of the genre, where people lead drab lives while oppressed in the workspace, their dreams frustrated, the office politics vicious.

In American Beauty and Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo (2002) one can discern a more explicitly vicious attack on the American family as an institution that’s corrupt to its core, at best a fraud, a 1950s-style charade that squashes the life out of everyone, not only those in it, but also those on the outside, achingly, misguidedly looking in.

The rise of a genre such as Heroic Alienation is unimaginable without the latitude and creative freedom that independent cinema, at its best, offers. Although Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) is similar to Clockwatchers and was made more or less within the traditional Hollywood system, in the present day the increasingly cookie-cutter feel of Hollywood’s output from the mid-1980s on has closed off whole areas of the American experience to filmgoers. It probably also helped that most Heroic Alienation films are comedies, making them more palatable to the public. By contrast, network television traffics almost wholly in ‘work place’ stories, from sitcoms to crime shows. It was a paradox of the 1950s that workers would come home from eight-hour shifts and sit down before television shows that reiterated the experiences they’d just escaped from. But were it not for original filmmakers such as Jill and Karen Sprecher, who felt the urge to explore this facet of American life, there would probably be much less American film worth watching.

Clockwatchers (1997)

Directed by: Jill Sprecher

Written by: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher

Produced by: Gina Resnick

Edited by: Stephen Mirrione

Cinematography: Jim Denault

Cast: Toni Collette (Iris Chapman), Parker Posey (Margaret Burre), Lisa Kudrow (Paula), Alanna Ubach (Jane), Helen FitzGerald (Cleo), Jamie Kennedy (Eddie), Bob Balaban (Milton Lasky), Paul Dooley (Bud Chapman)

Clockwatchers is about the experiences of Iris Chapman (Toni Collette), a temp hired by Global Credit, an anonymous and tense working place. There she meets and briefly befriends three other women, all of whom are oppressed by their jobs, and at odds with society. Margaret Burre (Parker Posey) is the crazy, rebellious one; Paula (Lisa Kudrow) is an aspiring actress; and the life of Jane (Alanna Ubach) revolves around her fiancé. A series of office thefts makes everyone mutually suspicious, and draws scrutiny onto the temp staff, who are eventually corralled in Kafkaesque paranoia. Gradually, the temps leave. Only Iris is left, and she sets out to solve the mystery of the thefts and bring a form of justice to her experience.

Clockwatchers has many of the ‘features of convenience’ of a typical ‘independent’ movie. The narrative takes place mostly in one place: the office space shared by the temps. Auxiliary locations include the bathroom, coatroom, a smoking area, the street outside their building and a nearby bar. The poverty of location actually works to the film’s advantage, suggesting and inducing claustrophobia and constriction. Clockwatchers also shows indie spirit in its eclectic selection of cast members. More important, it does not attempt to tell a crime story (though there is a crime at the centre of the plot), a romance or comedy (though it is funny in the satirical spirit of, say, William Gaddis’s novel JR). Rather it tells an ‘eccentric’ tale in a setting that’s unusual for American movies, the workspace, examining the lives of ‘ordinary’ women. In effect, we already have the traditional ‘Hollywood’ version of this story, in the form of the outlandish 1993 thriller The Temp.

Clockwatchers begins with Iris (Toni Collette) waiting in the foyer of Global Credit Associated. She is a temp arriving for her first day of work, but the receptionist (Joshua Malina, later of series The West Wing) is reading a catalogue while waiting for the clock to announce the beginning of his workday. He won’t ‘do business’ until 9 am.

Iris instantly establishes herself as a meek and mousy person (she waits an unnecessary two hours before starting work because she takes literally the instructions someone has given her to ‘sit and wait’). The corporation is presented as a spare, impersonal place, with only its name adorning the walls, and with everyone playing strictly by a set of rules passed among the employees like some kind of bureaucratic oral tradition.

The tableau of the opening shot and scene establishes this dichotomy. Iris is a ‘have not’; she is a temp, the lowest possible person in a business hierarchy because she isn’t really an employee. The pastels of the lobby are consistent throughout Global Credit’s work environment; a pathetically cheerful series of colours augmented by nonstop Muzak. Iris is instantly sucked into this inhuman and hierarchical place, one that is at once both impersonal yet competitive. This workspace sits within a cinematic tradition; the Sprechers drew upon King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), for example, Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (The Sound of Trumpets [1961]) and Wilder’s The Apartment (which itself nods at The Crowd with its uniform mass office space).

Iris soon finds herself swept up into the concerns of the office’s three other temps. First she meets Margaret who tells Iris that the woman she is temping for, Louise, won’t be back for a while. Margaret shows Iris the lay of the land, pointing out who is fussy, who controls supplies, and who has a shoe fetish. Margaret is the most dynamic of the film’s characters, the sort viewers often wish they could be, reckless and per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• INDEPENDENT CINEMA AS ALTERNATIVE TO COMMERCIAL STORYTELLING: JILL AND KAREN SPRECHER
• INDEPENDENT CINEMA AS STEPPING STONE: JAMES MANGOLD
• INDEPENDENT CINEMA AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY: WHIT STILLMAN
• INDEPENDENT CINEMA AS TRULY INDEPENDENT: GUY MADDIN
• THE FUTURE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA
• INTERVIEWS WITH…
• INDEPENDENT FILM RESOURCES
• Copyright
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