American Independent Cinema

Geoff King

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781850439387
• eBook ISBN: 9780857737335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The independent sector has produced many of the most distinctive films to have appeared in the US in recent decades. From 'Sex, Lies and Videotape' in the 1980s to 'The Blair Witch Project' and New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and the ultra-low budget digital video features of the 2000s, indie films have thrived, creating a body of work that stands out from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. But what exactly is 'independent' cinema? This, the first book to examine the question in detail, argues that independence can be defined partly in industry terms but also according to formal and aesthetic strategies and by distinctive attitudes towards social and political issues, suggesting that independence is a dynamic rather than a fixed quality. Chapters focus on distribution and relationships with Hollywood studios; narrative ('Clerks' and 'Slacker' to 'Pulp Fiction', 'Magnolia' and 'Memento') and other formal dimensions (from 'Blair Witch's' 'authenticity' to expressive and stylized camerawork and editing in work from Harmony Korine to the Coen brothers); approaches to genre and alternative socio-political visions.

1

Industry

While it’s true that, in the best of all possible worlds, independent films are genuinely alternative, genuinely original visions, there’s no such thing as an absolutely independent film. There’s still an economy at work: The movie has to go into the marketplace, and people have to want to see it.

Christine Vachon¹

At the industrial level, the American independent sector stretches from extremes of low- or (according to legend) almost no-budget filmmaking to the margins of Hollywood; from grainy images shot in 16mm or digital video to glossy products that look more like those of the commercial mainstream; from small one-off, home-based production to the world of suits, offices and consolidated business enterprises. Here, as much as elsewhere, the term ‘independent’ encompasses a wide range of activities in the broad territory located between Hollywood and the outer reaches of ‘non-industrial’ experimental or avant-garde cinema.

Part of the romance of independent cinema is the notion of producing films at extremely low cost, outside or on the edges of the mainstream, free from dependence on the corporate oligarchy comprised by the major studio system. Successive generations of filmmakers, as well as critics and enthusiasts, have been inspired by tales of feature-length movies being made on tiny budgets, shot in spare time, financed on credit cards or through funds scrambled together from other unlikely sources. One of the most often cited examples is El Mariachi (1992), shot single-handed by Robert Rodriguez and edited on borrowed equipment for the absurdly low sum of $7,000. Others include Robert Townsend’s use of a string of newly acquired credit cards to pay for the completion of Hollywood Shuffle (1987) and the stupendous return on investment achieved by The Blair Witch Project (1999), which grossed an extraordinary $140 million in the USA on an initial budget estimated at between $22,000 and $60,000. In one of the more unlikely sounding endeavours, Michael Almereyda shot his second feature, Another Girl Another Planet (1992), on a plastic toy Fisher-Price PXL 2000 camera costing just $45, recording images onto audio cassette. Over a period of four decades, the potential for access to the otherwise seemingly expensive, closed and exclusive arena of feature filmmaking has been demonstrated by the appearance of films ranging historically from John Cassavetes’ Shadows at the start of the 1960s to the latest explorations of ultra-low-budget digital video (DV) production in the 2000s. Previous claims to the status of all-time-low budget were put in the shade by the production of James Portolese and Rene Besson’s DV feature Boxes (2000), which was sold to the Independent Film Channel after being made for the princely sum of $285.12 (half of that spent on haircuts for the principal characters!).

Microbudget production was the norm for first-time independent filmmakers by the mid 1990s, but this was not always the case. Ultra-low-budget films such as John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980; $60,000) and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986; $80,000 to initial prints) were occasional exceptions during the 1980s, when low-budget generally meant $500,000 to $1 million, figures for which finance was usually available in the independent sector at the time.² Two factors were responsible for change in the early 1990s: a financial squeeze and the success of three microbudget features that appeared in the same year, 1992 (Laws of Gravity, directed by Nick Gomez, budgeted at $38,000; Gregg Araki’s The Living End, $22,700; and El Mariachi). A series of articles by Peter Broderick in Filmmaker magazine served as a catalyst for the shift of emphasis, giving a detailed breakdown of each of the three budgets and underlining the strategies that permitted feature production at so little expense.³ The key to the new model was scripting on the basis of a prior assessment of resources that were already available at no cost, classic examples including a bus and a dog used by Robert Rodriguez in El Mariachi and the convenience store at which Kevin Smith worked that served as the principal location for Clerks. Other ingredients of the microbudget recipe include the use of small and committed casts and crews prepared to work without salary, other than deferred payments to be secured in the event of future profits, a very low shooting ratio and the use of borrowed equipment.

Production on these lines can be remarkably inexpensive, especially when compared with the tens of millions routinely spent by Hollywood. Lowness of budget has been played up as a publicity and marketing device on numerous occasions. Production at this end of the spectrum can have the appearance of something closer to a non-industrial, home-movie enterprise. Substantial sums of money are still involved in most cases, however, especially for those without the benefit of wealthy and generous relatives or other sources of personal income. (If Townsend put $40,000 on credit cards for Hollywood Shuffle, for example, less trumpeted was the fact that he was able to supply an initial $60,000 from his earnings as an actor.) A great deal of effort can be expended, sometimes over a period of years, on the frustrating business of putting together from various sources the funds for even a modestly priced independent feature, a process that can become as creative as making the film itself. The ultra-low-budget model was designed in part to cut through such delays, reducing significantly but not entirely the extent to which filmmakers were dependent on outside sources of finance.

The variety of independent cinema examined in this book remains best characterized as an ‘industrial’ activity, even if it sometimes overlaps with the extreme low-budget, no-budget or artistic-grant-funded territory of home-made, experimental or avant-garde cinema. This is even more the case when it comes to the realms of distribution, marketing and exhibition. The business of actually getting indie movies seen by audiences entails very much higher costs than the headline budget figures associated with examples such as El Mariachi, Clerks, The Blair Witch Project or the latest DV marvel. Getting a film in the can, in a sufficient state to secure a deal with a distributor, is one thing. Having it at the stage where it is ready to be shown commercially, in the cinema or on videotape or DVD, can be quite another. The completion of a version of El Mariachi for $7,000 was an extraordinary achievement, but that was not for a film print on 16mm, let alone the favoured release format of 35mm. For $7,000, Robert Rodriguez had a master tape on three-quarter-inch video, the medium onto which he transferred to edit the film.⁴ It was originally intended to be sold to the ultra-cheap Mexican direct-to-video market. Obtaining a 16mm print alone would have cost more than $20,000, nearly three times the headline figure. At around $27,000 taken to 16mm, El Mariachi would be in the same budget league as the cheaper of the late-1980s and 1990s indies: examples such as Slacker (1991; $23,000), Laws of Gravity, Clerks ($27,000) and The Blair Witch Project.

These are still very small numbers for the production of a feature, but they remain incomplete. Budgets such as these can be multiplied several-fold to include a number of requirements that have to be met before a film can go into distribution. It will have to be blown up to 35mm unless it is to be shown only in the limited market with facilities for projection in 16mm or digital video. A sound remix, to replace what may be a crude original, is another often-obligatory requirement. These and insurance costs were estimated to add at least another $60,000 in 1995 by John Pierson, a producers’ representative who helped many of the earlier indie ‘classics’ to find distributors. Other average costs – including music rights, deferments and laboratory costs such the ‘music and effects’ mix, in which the sound and dialogue tracks are separated out to permit redubbing for international distribution – take the total up to $100,000.⁵ Figures of a similar scale are suggested by the independent producer Christine Vachon, whose credits include Poison (1991), Swoon (1992), Go Fish (1994) and Happiness (1998).⁶ A higher estimate is reached by James Schamus, co-founder of the production company Good Machine, who suggests a cost of $300–500,000 for an international release of a ‘no-budget’ film.⁷ These costs may be incurred by the distributor and deducted from future revenues. Alternatively, the deal with a distributor might require the producers to supply a print taken to some or all of these stages of completion, in which case a higher advance might be expected to be paid. It is important to note that these are only pre-release costs. They do not include the potentially huge costs of distribution and marketing, including the expenses of attending festivals, making multiple prints for exhibitors and, especially, advertising. In the case of Clerks, Pierson suggests, completion costs totalled $200,000 with another $1.7 million spent by the distributor Miramax on print, radio and television advertising during the six-month theatrical run. Completion costs for The Blair Witch Project were some $300,000 for transfer to 35mm and sound editing. The first stage of promotion was very cheap, making innovative use of the internet. The distributor, Artisan Entertainment, initially intended to spend $4.5 million on prints and advertising. Once the film started to become a media phenomenon, however, $20 million was committed, the equivalent of the originally anticipated domestic gross.⁸ A growing tendency of the early 2000s was for advances paid to filmmakers to shrink or disappear in all but the most favourable cases, often replaced by a commitment to invest a particular sum in marketing and a guarantee to open a film in an agreed number of markets. Such commitments may prove short-lived, however, in the event of a disappointing initial opening.

2. Ultra-low-budget, but much more spent on completion and promotion: The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The story of American independent cinema in recent decades is partly one of innovative and enterprising filmmaking, whether on relatively lower or higher budgets. But it is also the story of the development of industrial and institutional frameworks that have provided the infrastructure for a sustained base of production. This chapter begins by outlining the historical background of these developments, including the broader social and economic context in which independent cinema underwent an upsurge from the mid 1980s. It also includes closer analysis of the distribution and marketing strategies that have typified the indie scene. In recent years distinctions between the top end of the independent sector and Hollywood have blurred to a significant extent, a phenomenon examined in the latter part of this chapter, which also considers the space still available today for more innovative and low-cost indie filmmaking.

Creating an Infrastructure

If the roots of the independent cinema that took off from the 1980s can in some respects be traced back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, a major difference between the two periods lies in the extent to which any sustained infrastructure was created. A few small-scale institutions were created in an attempt to consolidate the avant-garde sector during the 1950s, including the Creative Film Foundation established by Maya Deren in 1955, which granted funds to experimental filmmakers.⁹ The exhibition of avant-garde films was a fragile business, relying on museums, galleries, temporary spaces and specialized ‘little cinemas’ in major cities. A distribution outlet was created by the exhibitor Cinema 16 in New York in 1950, handling experimental films and the more accessible international art cinema of directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. This was followed by the non-profit-based Filmmaker’s Cooperative, founded in 1962 by Jonas Mekas, who became the most vocal proponent of the American avant-garde.

The avant-garde remained an extremely marginal activity in commercial terms, but the market for international art cinema thrived in metropolitan centres such as New York and San Francisco, benefiting from a number of factors including a decreased level of production by the Hollywood majors.¹⁰ The number of art cinemas in America had increased from twelve in 1945 to some 550 by 1960.¹¹ The main attractions for audiences in the 1950s and 1960s were imports but also a small number of noted American independent films, including Shirley Clarke’s portrait of inner-city life, The Cool World (1963), and One Potato, Two Potato (Larry Peerce, 1964), a study of interracial marriage. A key player was Don Rugoff, whose Cinema V controlled a number of art-house theatres in New York. Cinema V branched out into distribution in 1963, an important move in the development of a nascent infrastructure. Cinema V, as Justin Wyatt suggests, has often been seen as a model for larger independent distributors such as Miramax and New Line in the 1990s, particularly in its use of niche-marketing strategies designed to respond to the particular qualities of each individual film. A similar move from exhibition into distribution was made by the smaller New Yorker Films and Bauer International.¹² The former was founded in 1965 by Dan Talbot, owner of the New Yorker Theatre; seeking access to a number of international films, including Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964) and Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), Talbot was obliged to import them himself.

Distribution is a critical component of the film business, the vital link required if films are to find their way into cinemas and to receive the necessary marketing and promotion to secure an audience. For exhibitors such as Cinema 16 and Cinema V, and others that followed, a move into distribution was a way to secure access to films that might not otherwise be available to be screened. The process by which distributors obtain the rights to individual films usually takes either of two forms. In some cases the distributor may also be the producer, paying the entire cost of the production or investing a proportion of the cost in a joint production deal. A distributor may be involved from the start or may come on board at some stage during the production or post-production process. Many films are acquired after completion, however, as what are termed ‘negative pickups’. Involvement in production gives the distributor more control and potential access to greater profit, but at the cost of exposure to more risk. Most of the initial breakthrough, low-budget independent films of the 1980s and 1990s were completed without the aid of investment from distributors, although advance sales from sources such as video, cable television and the overseas theatrical market came to provide an important source of stability. These would probably qualify for the restricted definition of independence offered by Greg Merritt: films financed and produced independently of any entities involved in distribution and sold to a distributor (a domestic theatrical distributor, at least) only after completion. This definition is rather static, however, failing to allow for changing strategies adopted in what remained for the most part the same branch of the industry. As the independent sector grew during the 1990s, distributors came increasingly to invest in production as a way to guarantee access to a supply of suitable films and to gain an early start in the process of marketing and promotion, a move that continued into the 2000s without in itself changing the nature or status of the films produced.

Even after being forced out of the exhibition business by legal action against their oligopoly powers, the Hollywood studios retained control over the main networks of distribution, in both America and much of the global market. Where independent films have been taken up by studio distributo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: How Independent?
• 1. Industry
• 2. Narrative
• 3. Form
• 4. Genre
• 5. Alternative Visions: Social, Political and Ideological Dimensions of Independent Cinema
• Coda: Merging with the Mainstream, or Staying Indie?
• Notes
• Select Bibliography