Cinema of Outsiders

The Rise of American Independent Film

Emanuel Levy

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780814752890
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

The most important development in American culture of the last two decades is the emergence of independent cinema as a viable alternative to Hollywood. Indeed, while Hollywood's studios devote much of their time and energy to churning out big-budget, star-studded event movies, a renegade independent cinema that challenges mainstream fare continues to flourish with strong critical support and loyal audiences.

Cinema of Outsiders is the first and only comprehensive chronicle of contemporary independent movies from the late 1970s up to the present. From the hip, audacious early works of maverick David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, to the contemporary Oscar-winning success of indie dynamos, such as the Coen brothers ( Fargo ), Quentin Tarentino ( Pulp Fiction ), and Billy Bob Thornton ( Sling Blade ), Levy describes in a lucid and accessible manner the innovation and diversity of American indies in theme, sensibility, and style.

Documenting the socio-economic, political and artistic forces that led to the rise of American independent film, Cinema of Outsiders depicts the pivotal role of indie guru Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival in creating a showcase for indies, the function of film schools in supplying talent, and the continuous tension between indies and Hollywood as two distinct industries with their own structure, finance, talent and audience.

Levy describes the major cycles in the indie film movement: regional cinema, the New York school of film, African-American, Asian American, gay and lesbian, and movies made by women. Based on exhaustive research of over 1,000 movies made between 1977 and 1999, Levy evaluates some 200 quintessential indies, including Choose Me, Stranger Than Paradise, Blood Simple, Blue Velvet, Desperately Seeking Susan, Slacker, Poison, Reservoir Dogs, Gas Food Lodging, Menace II Society, Clerks, In the Company of Men, Chasing Amy, The Apostle, The Opposite of Sex, and Happiness.

Cinema of Outsiders reveals the artistic and political impact of bold and provocative independent movies in displaying the cinema of "outsiders"-the cinema of the "other America."

1
The New American Independent Cinema

IT’S OFFICIAL: The American independent cinema has arrived! The New York Times puts indie films on its front page and devotes a special issue of its Sunday magazine to the independents. Time magazine singles out Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein as one of the most accomplished Americans of 1997 and runs a major article on the Weinstein brothers. Entertainment Weekly commits a special issue to the independents, as do the stalwart industry trades Variety and Hollywood Reporter. The development of a viable alternative cinema, with its own institutional structure, may be one of the most exciting developments in American culture during the past two decades.

The success of independent films in the 1990s has prompted some critics to herald the renaissance of a vibrantly innovative cinema. Correspondingly, filmmaking has become one of the most desirable professions in the United States and a film degree one of the most sought-after diplomas in the academic world. Novelists are no longer our cultural heroes; filmmakers are. In the past, young, ambitious Americans dreamed of writing the great American novel. Today, their aspiration is to make the great American movie. With the entire globe looking to the United States for its supply of movies, the possibilities for young American filmmakers are seemingly endless.

Increased economic opportunities are certainly a factor, but passion and commitment are still the primary motivating forces. “It’s a wonderful time for independent filmmakers right now—if you have an original story, if you don’t second-guess yourself and make a Tarantino rip-off,” said Miguel Arteta, whose feature debut, Star Maps, premiered in 1997.¹ “You have to make a story you’re passionate about, because when you make one of these movies, it’s nearly gonna kill you. You’d better like it at the end of the day.”

THE GROWING PRESTIGE OF INDIES

Indie films have gained much respectability in the 1990s. One measure of their new cachet is the willingness of established actors to work for practically nothing if the role is right. A growing number of key players in Hollywood’s creative community, such as the directors Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh and movie stars like John Travolta, Bruce Willis, and Tim Robbins, now commute regularly between studio and indie films.

It wasn’t always that way. Despite his stature in the indie world, John Sayles could not always get the actors he wanted for his films. For years, agents would not even show his scripts to their top actors. “It never used to be hip the way that it is now to be in little independent movies,” Sayles recalled. “It was a signal that your career was in trouble.”²

Mainstream Hollywood product dominates both domestic and foreign box-office charts, but it is independent movies that are creating waves and winning awards at major festivals around the world, including that most prestigious forum, the Cannes Film Festival. In 1994, for the fourth time in six years, Cannes conferred its top award, the Palme d’Or, on an American picture, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The picture was described by French critics as a “typically American lowlife serenade,” a flashy salute to Los Angeles’s cool, marginal world, but American critics stressed that, if anything, Tarantino was atypical of Hollywood, that his work was a parody of America, and owed a lot to European directors.

Tarantino’s victory recalled the unexpected crowning of Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape in 1989, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart in 1990, and Joel Coen’s Barton Fink in 1991, all independent movies. American indies have also grabbed the limelight outside of the main competition. In the past twenty years, the Caméra d’Or, Cannes’s prize for best first film, has been given to several American indies, including Robert Young’s Alambrista! (1978), John Hanson and Robert Nilsson’s Northern Lights (1979), Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988), John Torturro’s Mac (1992), and, most recently, Marc Levin’s Slam (1998).

European prestige is one thing, but what really counts in Hollywood is domestic visibility and box-office clout. What better measures of these indicators than the Academy Award, the most influential award in the film world. The flowering of independents first became visible at the 1986 Academy Awards ceremony, when William Hurt won the Best Actor Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Geraldine Page took Best Actress honors for The Trip to Bountiful. Both pictures were produced by Island, a small independent company.

In 1987, all five nominees for the Best Picture Oscar were made outside the Hollywood establishment: Oliver Stone’s Platoon, James Ivory’s A Room With a View, Roland Joffe’s The Mission, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, and Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God. Announcing a major change, these pictures showed that Hollywood was opening up to offbeat, unusual work. The message was loud and clear: The independents were marching into the mainstream.

Howards End, The Crying Game, and The Player not only were box-office smashes in 1992 but also garnered more Oscar nominations than big-studio releases. This, of course, led Hollywood to seek further inroads into the independent community. Hollywood understands that indies are the soul of American film in a way that the potboilers of Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla) or Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) never can be.

Four of the five nominees for the 1996 Best Picture Oscar—The English Patient, Fargo, Secrets & Lies, and Shine—were independents, financed and made outside the studio system. In the same year, Hollywood spent its time, energy, and big bucks churning out and marketing big-budget, overproduced, special-effects, star-studded formulas like Twister and Independence Day.

Indie films have a particularly impressive record in the writing and acting categories. Recent winners of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar have included Pulp Fiction in 1994, The Usual Suspects in 1995, Sling Blade in 1996, Good Will Hunting in 1997, and Gods and Monsters in 1998. Half of the twenty nominated actors in 1997 were singled out for a performance in indies, including Robert Duvall in The Apostle, Julie Christie in Afterglow, and Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights.

HEROES OF THE NEW INDIE CINEMA

In 1992, the hottest ticket at the Sundance Film Festival was Reservoir Dogs, made by a then unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino became inspired by the success of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers in the mid-1980s. Unlike Jarmusch, the 1980s indie leader who has shown contempt for catering to the mass public, Tarantino is a natural-born entertainer whose work is more dazzling than consequential. For inspiration, Reservoir Dogs drew more on old movies than on real life, but as self-conscious as the film was, it still boasted a clever script and superlative performances by an all-star cast.

In a few years, Tarantino has evolved from an unemployed actor-writer working in a video store to the hottest American filmmaker. He has become a crucial figure, replacing Martin Scorsese as a role model for young indie directors. Like Scorsese, Tarantino is a cineaste who knows movies inside out and is deeply committed to the medium. Unlike Scorsese, though, Tarantino didn’t go to film school, instead getting his education in a video store.³

Tarantino planned to use the money he received for his first writing job—the screenplay for Rutger Hauer’s thriller Past Midnight—combined with what money his friend-producer Lawrence Bender had on his credit cards to make Reservoir Dogs guerrilla-style for $30,000. But, after reading the script, Bender felt it had potential. “I told him I could raise real money for this,” Bender recalled. “But he said, ‘No way man.’”⁴ Eventually, Tarantino relented and gave Bender a two-month option on his script to find a backer. Fantasizing about the dream cast for their yet-to-be-made movie, both immediately thought of Harvey Keitel.

Bender’s acting teacher, who knew Keitel, agreed to deliver the screenplay to him. The strategy worked. Keitel fell in love with the script, and his involvement changed everything. “Suddenly,” Bender recalled, “we weren’t two guys peddling a script around town, now we had Harvey Keitel.”⁵ With Keitel in the cast, Live Entertainment, a division of Carolco, committed a budget of $1.5 million. Things came easily after that. Keitel put up his own money to fly Tarantino and Bender to New York, where they assembled a top-notch cast that included Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Lawrence Tierney, and Steve Buscemi. With no further financial worries, they finished Reservoir Dogs in time for Sundance, where it began its conquest of the festival circuit.

Reservoir Dogs swept through Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto like a brushfire. Distributors who saw the film at Sundance were worried that it would end up with an NC-17 rating for its graphic violence, which drove many viewers out of the theater. That particular fear didn’t materialize, although eventually the violence worked against the film’s broader acceptance. Reservoir Dogs left Sundance without winning any awards, but it became the festival’s most talked-about movie, and Miramax decided to distribute it. Over the course of that year, Tarantino turned up at festival after festival, receiving lavish praise from intellectual critics for making the hottest indie of the year.

Tarantino and Miramax milked the festival circuit before going public. When the movie finally opened, it played for only a few weeks despite critical support, confirming initial fears that it was too violent. Miramax’s sparse marketing resulted in a modest box-office gross of $1 million. The movie was rereleased after the success of Tarantino’s second feature, Pulp Fiction, but even then it failed to generate box-office excitement.

Lack of commercial appeal didn’t stop Reservoir Dogs from attaining cult status within the industry. Most of the press focused not on the movie or its issues but on Tarantino as a self-taught auteur. In the end, Tarantino didn’t promote Reservoir Dogs; Reservoir Dogs promoted him. Tarantino quickly rose from obscurity, and the fact that the film didn’t do well didn’t matter. It created enough of a stir to give Tarantino the clout to make his next film, Pulp Fiction, with a larger budget ($8 million) and a high-caliber cast.

Nihilistically cool and vastly diverting, Pulp Fiction won the Cannes Palme d’Or and went on to become one of the most commercially successful indies ever. Naysayers and skeptics rushed to label Tarantino as flavor of the year, although he proved them wrong and sustained the brilliance of his two instant classics with a third one, Jackie Brown (1997), which garnered decent reviews and respectable box-office takes.

Was Tarantino just lucky, the right director at the right time? Was he too talented not to be noticed? Tarantino was fortunate in one respect—his first film was embraced by cerebral critics as well as a national publicity machine starved for new heroes. Many indie directors resent the enormous publicity Tarantino continues to receive, as they resented Miramax’s aggressive marketing campaign, which helped Pulp Fiction garner box-office grosses of more than $100 million along with seven Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. But Tarantino’s artistic accomplishments shouldn’t be underestimated because of the hype he generates as a media-created celeb.

Tarantino is the most loudly sung but certainly not the only hero in the new milieu. Richard Linklater raised the money for his charming feature, Slacker (1990), from friends and relatives and by drawing on credit cards and savings. A sale to German television and deferred fees for cast and crew made it possible to complete the movie for a meager $23,000. Most of the actors were nonprofessionals, either the director’s friends or people he met on the street and hired on the basis of their offbeat looks. Slacker was shown for a whole year on the festival circuit before opening at the Dobie theater in Austin, Texas. Its regional success motivated Orion Classics to distribute the movie nationally.

The tale behind the making of Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992) has also become legendary. A young movie-struck director takes $7,000, earned as a medical research subject, and makes a picture he thinks might sell in the Spanish-language video market. Instead, the movie captivates agents and executives, gets a major release by Columbia, and earns Rodriguez the chance to work with better actors and a bigger budget on his next film, Desperado.

The most recent example of a director to hit it big—and quickly—is Edward Burns. In 1994, Burns was working as a messenger for a television show in New York. Living in a grungy West Village apartment, he was becoming nervous about his prospects as a filmmaker. “I was writing screenplays for six years, I just wasn’t getting my foot in the door,” he told the New York Times.⁶ Burns attended the State University of New York at Albany before switching to Hunter College in New York City, where he majored in film. Taking a job as a driver and messenger for Entertainment Tonight, he wrote The Brothers McMullen, a semi-autobiographical comedy about three Irish-American brothers, in his spare time. The film was shot at his parents’ home in Valley Stream, Long Island, for the incredibly low cost of $25,000, raised from family and friends.

Early cuts of the film were rejected by most film festivals, including New York, Toronto, and Telluride, but when Geoffrey Gilmore of the Sundance Festival saw the comedy, he immediately accepted it as a competition entry. At the same time, Tom Rothman, then president of Fox Searchlight, saw the movie and gave Burns the funds to complete it. The final cost of The Brothers McMullen, including revised editing and a new score, was less than $500,000.

The Brothers McMullen changed Burns’s life overnight, as he recalled: “I quit my old job, I’ve got a career now, I have a little money in my pocket, and I have a new apartment.” When Fox Searchlight decided to produce his next film, She’s the One, for $3 million, Burns knew it was going to be “a world of difference” from his debut: “I won’t have to do makeup myself; I won’t have to do people’s hair; I won’t have to block traffic, and I won’t have to call the actors the night before to remind them to be on the set.”

Young filmmakers know that a fearless producer can make all the difference, particularly in the early phases of their careers. Along with “hot” directors, a new breed, the gutsy indie producer, emerged. Overseeing fourteen features, including I Shot Andy Warhol, Kiss Me Guido, and Todd Haynes’s three features (Poison, Safe, and Velvet Goldmine), Christine Vachon has made a career out of producing distinctive features without making the kind of compromises that afflict other well-intentioned indie outfits. In the early days of her career, she was associated with the new wave of queer cinema, represented by Tom Kalin and Haynes, among others. Vachon then coproduced Larry Clark’s controversial Kids and executive-produced the breakthrough lesbian comedy Go Fish.

A founder of the nonprofit film foundation Apparatus, for three years Vachon co-ran the unit with Haynes and Barry Elsworth, producing shorts. “It was an exciting time,” she recalled. “I was able to play at being a producer.” She then formed Killer Films with a partner, Pam Koffer, and produced Velvet Goldmine and Todd Solondz’s Happiness (with Good Machine’s Ted Hope), both of which premiered in Cannes, and Bruce Wagner’s debut feature, I’m Losing You, which played at Telluride. In a prolific, sustained career, Vachon has specialized in making films that do not seem to be marketable.⁷ Though Vachon can’t do the under-$2-million dollar movies any more, she readily admits that low-budget movies are truly exhilarating, “because people are really making the things they are the most passionate about.”

Along with “hot” directors...