Independent Film

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Independent Film

INDEPENDENCE IN EARLY AND SILENT AMERICAN CINEMA
INDEPENDENCE IN CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD
INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD
INDEPENDENCE IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD
FURTHER READING

"Independence" is in many ways the Holy Grail in the film business—something most everyone who makes movies strives for but can never quite attain. To be independent in the film business denotes a freedom from something, whether the vicissitudes of the commercial market or the matrix of companies that dominate the production and distribution of motion pictures in America. Such an independence can be attained only by degree. So long as a feature is screened in commercial theaters and/or aired on pay or network TV, so long as it carries a PCA seal or MPAA rating system designation, independence is a relative term.

What then is meant by the term "independent film"? At bottom, independence is attained within either or both of the two principal and intersecting characteristics of the movies as a medium: the artistic and the commercial. Huntz Hall (1919–1999), an actor famous for his appearances in the Bowery Boy B movies of the 1940s, once mused that you can recognize an independent film with a simple test: if the whole set shakes when someone slams a door it's an independent film. Though reductive and true for only the least ambitious of independent pictures, Hall's quip hints at the larger budgetary concerns of the vast majority of independent films. What we have come to recognize as an independent aesthetic—small-ensemble casts, limited use of exterior and location shooting, and an emphasis on conversation over action and exciting special effects stems primarily from an effort to stay within tight budgets. There is a mantra shared by independent directors: "Talk is cheap; action is expensive." When budget considerations loom over a production, it is always cheaper to film two people talking in a room than a car chase or a UFO landing in Washington, D.C.

Independent films are also recognizable by how they are "platformed" in the entertainment marketplace, by the way promotion and advertising is handled, and by selective versus saturation distribution. Big films are released into thousands of theaters all at once, while with some independent titles, only a handful of prints are available for screening at any one time, and they are screened almost exclusively in small, so-called art-house theaters. At every stop along the way in the various commercial venues available for films in the United States, independent films are at once marginal and marginalized. Independence thus assumes a distance from the commercial mainstream that is systematically and industrially maintained.

Two Hollywood adages that inform independence are worth considering here. The first is a bastardization of an H. L. Menken quip: "When they say it's not about the money, it's about the money." In other words, what makes a film independent is its stake in the commercial marketplace: limited access (to big commercial venues) results in almost every instance in limited box office. An independent film is thus defined by the money it makes (not a lot) and the audience it reaches (a select, small group). The second adage is even more to the point: "You take the money, you lose control." It is generally believed that independence has something to do with a refusal to make concessions. To that end, the Independent Spirit Awards, founded by FINDIE (the Friends of Independents) in 1984, annually celebrate the "maverick tradition" of independent film in America. But such a maverick tradition, evinced in some producers' and directors' refusal to kow-tow to industry pressures, is founded on the relative commercial inconsequence of the films in question. A degree of independence is possible only when films make so little money they simply are not worth the studios' time or effort to own or control. The strange fact of American filmmaking, especially in the modern era, is that a director—even an unknown and inexperienced director—can expect to enjoy far more creative autonomy working on a $1.5–3 million so-called independent film than on a $15–30 million studio picture. The minute significant studio investment is in play, the minute significant box-office is at stake, a filmmaker's independence is subject to second-guessing by executives whose primary task is to protect the company's bottom line.

While the relation between independent and mainstream or commercial cinema has been an important question in every nation that has had an established film industry—Japan, India, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, for example—what follows surveys the history of American independent cinema beginning with the very first alternatives to Edison's early films and the cartel he subsequently founded. Of interest as well are the niche films that proliferated in the early years of studio Hollywood, the Poverty Row B-genre pictures of the 1930s–1950s, exploitation cinema from the 1920s through the 1960s, the so-called new American cinema avant-garde in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, and the various independent cinemas that emerged as Hollywood conglomerized and monopolized the entertainment market after 1980.

INDEPENDENCE IN EARLY AND SILENT AMERICAN CINEMA

So far as most American film histories and the US Patent Office are concerned, movies in the United States began with Thomas Edison (1847–1931). First there were the patents on the Edison Kinetograph (the photographic apparatus that produced the pictures) and the Kinetoscope (the "peep show" viewing machine that exhibited them) in 1891. And then there was the first public demonstration of the Edison motion picture apparatus at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in May 1893, the place and date of what most agree was the first publicly exhibited movie. The speed at which things moved from this first showcase (which included the screening of Edison's crude moving picture Blacksmith Scene, showing three men, all Edison employees, hammering on an anvil for approximately twenty seconds) to the production of entertaining and occasionally edifying short movies was astonishingly fast. Edison had his Black Maria Studio in New Jersey fully outfitted by the time the Brooklyn Institute showcase was held. His first full slate of movies was available for screening by January of the following year.

In the spring of 1894, Edison renamed his company the Edison Manufacturing Company. The new name highlighted the business of making and selling Kinetoscope equipment that seemed so promising in 1894, and also clarified Edison's vision about the medium and his role in it. Movies were produced not by artists but by experts in the technology of motion picture production. They were made much as other products of industry were made on assembly lines, by nameless, faceless workers toiling on behalf of the company whose name was featured prominently on the product.

American cinema was initially just Edison, but domestic competition in the new medium emerged fairly soon thereafter. Viewing independent cinema as an alternative to a commercial mainstream, it is with these first companies that took on Edison that independent American cinema began. Edison's first real competitor was the American Mutoscope Company, later renamed the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (routinely referred to simply as Biograph). Biograph was a particularly irksome competitor for two reasons: (1) one of the principals in research and development at the company was William K. L. Dickson (1860–1935), an inventor who resigned from his position at Edison in 1895 after doing most of the work on the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope; and (2) the company worked in 70mm, a superior format that provided four times the image surface of the Edison and international industry standard of 35mm. With its first slate of films, Biograph courted the carnival crowd. While Edison stuck mostly to documentary short subjects, the Biograph company founders Harry Marvin, Herman Casler, Elias Koopman, and Dickson viewed cinema as first and foremost an attraction. Their first films featured boxing bouts and demonstrations of fire-fighting equipment, but soon thereafter their "bread and butter" became crude gag films (that is, short films that played out a single comic skit).

Once the movies caught on—and it did not take long—several other film companies emerged. In December 1908, when it became clear that such a free market (of independent film producers and distributors) might quickly cost Edison his prominent role in the industry, the inventor created the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) trust. The trust linked the interests of Edison and nine of his competitors: Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig Polyscope, Lubin, Star Film, Pathé Freres, and Klein Optical. The MPPC effectively exploited key industry patents on motion picture technology to fix prices, restrict the distribution and exhibition of foreign-made pictures, regulate domestic production, and control film licensing and distribution. The trust was supported by an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company, the principal and at the time the only dependable provider of raw film stock. By the end of 1908, the ten film companies comprising the MPPC owned and controlled the technology and maintained exclusive access to the raw material necessary to make movies. In 1910, the General Film Company, the key middle-man in the film production/distribution equation, joined forces with the MPPC trust, making an already strong cartel even stronger. With the help of General Film (which purchased studio films and then leased them to theaters) exhibitors could more quickly and more systematically change their programs. To meet the increase in demand for product, the studios ramped up production. Everyone made more money.

But despite such intra-and inter-industry collusion, the MPPC trust's domination of film production, distribution, and exhibition was short-lived. The first big problem for the MPPC arose in February 1911, when Kodak, miffed that it did not have a profit interest in the trust, exploited a clause in the original agreement and began to sell film stock to local independents. These independents had organized into a cartel of their own: the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Corporation (or Sales Company). The Sales Company "independents," led by Carl Laemmle (1867–1939), William Fox (1879–1952), and Adolph Zukor (1873–1976), were well organized and fiercely competitive.

After the Kodak defection, non-MPPC production units boasted record revenues; by the end of 1911 they accounted for approximately 30 percent of the film market, a reasonably large piece of the pie in the absence of fair and free trade in the film market. To attract such a considerable market share, the independents introduced an alternative product: the multi-reel picture. As early as 1911, the independents were moving toward producing feature-length films. The MPPC trust maintained throughout its existence a strict single-reel, 16-minute standard.

In a landmark case, The Motion Picture Patents Company v. IMP (Laemmle's Independent Motion Picture Company), decided in August 1912, a US Circuit Court gave the independents access to formerly licensed and restricted equipment. The victory in court put the independents on a level playing field with the MPPC. By 1914, the MPPC was out of business and the so-called independents took over. Laemmle founded Universal, Fox founded Twentieth Century Fox, and Zukor founded Paramount. In the years to follow, what independent cinema would be independent of, and from, would be the very companies that first insisted upon independence from Edison and his cartel in 1911.

INDEPENDENCE IN CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD

When the so-called independents successfully bucked the MPPC and became the ruling cartel in the film business, independent cinema became the province of small outfits making movies for small and specific target audiences. For example, as early as 1915, Noble Johnson's (1881–1978) Lincoln Film Company produced films made by and for African American audiences. These so-called "race films," like those directed by the entrepreneurial auteur Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) (who went door to door to raise money to shoot his movies), played in select urban venues and on the "chitlin circuit" (venues in the Southeast where daily life featured a strict racial segregation). Another alternative independent cinema, Yiddish films, emerged to serve the many Eastern European immigrants in the urban northeast. Featuring dialogue in Yiddish, a language that combines elements of German and Hebrew and was spoken by many first-generation Jewish immigrants, these films had their own stars and exhibition venues. Over forty Yiddish language "talkies" were made between 1930 and 1950.

After the advent of sound, the studios standardized the film program. Going to the movies in the 1930s routinely involved seeing an A (big budget) and a B (low budget) feature, along with a newsreel, perhaps another live-action short (often a comedy) and/or a cartoon. The studios made their own B movies, which were distributed primarily to fill out a bill headlined by the studio's A attraction.

As demand for films to fill out double bills increased, smaller film companies emerged, giving rise to "Poverty Row." Most of the Poverty Row companies were head-quartered in Gower Gulch, a small area in Hollywood that was home to the soon-to-be-major studio Columbia, as well as a handful of well-organized and financed smaller studios such as Republic, Monogram, Grand National, Mascot, Tiffany, and some more transient production outfits like Peerless, Reliable, Syndicate, Big-Four, and Superior. The Poverty Row companies filled out film bills with inexpensive formulaic genre pictures. Though far less ambitious than the bigger studios, they made films faster than their better financed counterparts. Speed proved a distinct advantage when responding to fads, such as the singing cowboy rage in the mid-1930s. Republic was quick to exploit the fad with films featuring Gene Autry (1907–1998), such as Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935), and Grand National banked on their singing cowpoke Tex Ritter (1905–1974) in Sing, Cowboy, Sing (1937). The B western was extremely popular in the 1930s, as were cowboy stars such as Johnny Mack (1904–1974), Harry Carey (1878–1947), Hoot Gibson (1892–1962), Tom Mix (1880–1940), and the soon-to-be A-list movie star, John Wayne (1907–1979).

B action-adventure films were made to take advantage of the popularity of a previous studio film or current radio show. For example, Republic made an adventure film set in India titled Storm Over Bengal (1938), after Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) were successful for the major studios. Grand National produced a series of films featuring "The Shadow," a character on a popular radio suspense show. A tendency to reflect (writ small) the work being produced at the major studios dominated independent B-movie production at the time, suggesting a dependence on (rather than independence from) the studios for raw material. This commitment to simple genre entertainment mirrored the less ambitious aspects of studio filmmaking. Thus the notion that B-movie studios provided an alternative to studio fare seems, at least in the studio era, inaccurate.

SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF
b. Fort Dodge, Iowa, 12 June 1918, d. 16 September 2001

In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective tribute to the producer Samuel Z. Arkoff and his company American International Pictures (AIP). At the time, Arkoff seemed an unlikely choice for such an honor. For well over twenty years in the film business he had clung to a single guiding principle: "Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture." The sorts of films he produced at AIP were as far from the high art world of the museum as one could imagine.

A quick look at Arkoff's oeuvre at AIP between 1954 and 1979 presents daunting evidence of his success as a purveyor of a particular sort of teen-oriented exploitation cinema. He made over 500 films, including The Fast and the Furious (1954) , The Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1956), Hot Rod Girl (1956), Shake, Rattle and Rock (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), The Cool and the Crazy (1958), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), Beach Party 1963), Dementia 13 (1963), Summer Holiday (1963), The T.A.M.I. Show 1965), The Wild Angels (1966), What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), The Trip (1967), Wild in the Streets (1968), Three in the Attic (1968), Bloody Mama (1970), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Boxcar Bertha (1972), Blacula (1972), Dillinger (1973), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), and following the sale of AIP to Filmways, Love at First Bite (1979), The Amityville Horror (1979), and Dressed to Kill (1980).

With his long-time partner James Nicholson, Arkoff, a lawyer by training but a huckster by instinct, clung to a simple template, the so-called "A.R.K.O.F.F. formula": Action (excitement and drama), R evolution (controversial or revolutionary ideas), Killing (or at least a degree of violence), O ratory (memorable speeches and dialogue), Fantasy (popular dreams and wishes acted out), and Fornication (sex appeal, to both men and women). Though best known today for the Beach Party films (1963–1965) and his adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories (all directed by Roger Corman between 1960–1965), Arkoff should be remembered more for the opportunities he provided over the years to talented writers, directors and actors struggling to make it in Hollywood, including Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Yates, Woody Allen, Robert Towne, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, and Jack Nicholson. AIP films inevitably bore the Arkoff stamp, no matter who wrote, directed, or starred in the feature. Though he never directed a film, Samuel Z. Arkoff was one of the most prolific and influential independent filmmakers of the twentieth century.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Fast and the Furious (1954), The Day the World Ended (1956), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), Beach Party (1963), The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967), Wild in the Streets (1968), Three in the Attic (1968)

While the B-movie studios made films to fill out programs headlined by studio A pictures in exchange for a quick, modest payoff, exploitation filmmakers like Kroger Babb (1906–1980), a savvy carnival huckster, made films that openly defied the strictures of the MPPDA production code. Kroger is best known today for his sex-hygiene film Mom and Dad (1945), which dealt with material (venereal disease and teen pregnancy) that mainstream films could not, and did so with frankness and explicitness. Because of its prurient content, Mom and Dad could not be shown as part of a larger, legitimate film program. Instead Babb traveled with his film, renting out theaters for a weekend (an arrangement called "four-walling"), and staging his own film shows. Babb advertised his shows with lurid posters (which would have been forbidden by the mainstream industry's Production Code) promising just what the studios could not deliver: "Everything shown. Everything explained." To give the show a semblance of respectability, for many of the screenings of Mom and Dad Babb hired an actor to play the part of the noted sexologist Dr. Elliot Forbes, who, after the screening, answered questions from the crowd. Like any good huckster, Babb made a lot of money by never overestimating the intelligence and taste of his audience.

Throughout its existence, exploitation cinema depended upon an apparent defiance of commercial Hollywood, a defiance signaled by its promise of material prohibited in more mainstream fare. One popular exploitation genre in the 1950s was the nudist colony film. Films such as Garden of Eden (1955), Naked As Nature Intended (1961), and World without Shame (1962) showed ample on-screen nudity, which was forbidden by the Production Code. Claiming documentary status of a sort, nudist colony films successfully challenged previous limitations on First Amendment protection for cinema. In the precedent-setting 1957 case Excelsior Pictures v. New York Board of Regents attending a New York ban on screenings of Garden of Eden, a state appeals court found that nudity per se on screen was not obscene. Such a ruling freed exploitation cinema to go even further. In 1959, the independent filmmaker Russ Meyer (1922–2004) produced The Immoral Mr. Teas, a film about a man who gets conked on the head and acquires a gift of sorts, the ability to see through women's clothing.

Meyer's film—made very much with the Excelsior decision in mind—spawned a brief new wave of independent exploitation pictures. These more visually explicit films included a variety of colorfully termed new genres: nudie cuties (suggestive, often light comedies with nudity but no touching, such as Mr. Peter's Pets [1962], Tonight for Sure [1962], and Adam Lost His Apple [1965]); roughies (depicting anti-social behavior as well as nudity, as in The Defilers [1965] and The Degenerates 1967); kinkies (with revealing titles such as Olga's House of Shame [1964], The Twisted Sex [1966], and Love Camp 7 [1969]); and ghoulies (merging kink with gruesome humor, as in Satan's Bed [1965] and Mantis in Lace [1968]). The common element among all these independent exploiters was on-screen nudity.

Striking a less salacious note, another group of independent filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s took aim at the burgeoning youth culture and found a ready and willing audience. Chief among the purveyors of this slightly tamer exploitation cinema were Samuel Z. Arkoff (1918–2001) and Roger Corman (b. 1926), who together and then separately released films under the American International Pictures (AIP) and New World banners. Notable among Arkoff's oeuvre as a producer and distributor of low budget exploiters are two film franchises, the Beach Party films (Beach Party [1963], Muscle Beach Party [1964], Bikini Beach [1964], Beach Blanket Bingo [1964], and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini [1965], all directed by William Asher [b. 1921]); and a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories starring the veteran horror film actor Vincent Price (1911–1993) (House of Usher [1960], Pit and the Pendulum [1961], Tales of Terror [1962], The Raven [1963], and The Tomb of Ligeria [1965], all directed by Corman). While the vast majority of Arkoff's films, bearing titles such as The Beast with a Million Eyes (1956) and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), were produced quickly and cheaply and paid off modestly at the box office, a few of his later titles—The Wild Angels 1966), a motorcycle film starring Peter Fonda that foreshadowed and foregrounded Easy Rider (1969), and the sex-farce Three in the Attic (1966)—were top-twenty films for their year of release.

With producer credit on well over 300 films in over forty years in the business working for Arkoff at AIP and then at his own company, New World Pictures, Roger Corman became the most important and most successful purveyor of low-brow independent cinema in American motion picture history. Key titles in Corman's oeuvre (in addition to those mentioned above) include his own A Bucket of Blood (1959), Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and The Trip (1967), as well as Dementia 13 (1963), Francis Coppola's first film as a director.

Another important exploitation filmmaker is George Romero (b. 1940) whose series of zombie films—Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005)—have acquired for the director a cult status of sorts. The blood-letting in Romero's films is so extreme that many in his intended audience—young horror film fans, mostly—find them funny. Despite an almost campy appeal, terrible acting, and low-end production values, many serious critics and reviewers seem drawn to his films as well. They have found the films profoundly political, even "important," contending, for example, that Night of the Living Dead offers a commentary on race relations, with its black American hero who is hunted in the end by a white sheriff and his vigilante posse, or that Land of the Dead should be seen as a metaphor to post-9/11 hysteria. Romero is unusual among American auteurs in that he has displayed a commitment to his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he shoots and sets most of his films. Romero is one of America's few regional auteurs.

While exploitation filmmakers like Arkoff, Corman, and Romero offered an alternative, independent cinema that pushed the boundaries of good taste and resisted the strictures of content regulation, in the 1960s a group of New York filmmakers emerged offering their own independent alternative to commercial Hollywood filmmaking. The filmmakers in this so-called "New American Cinema" borrowed from avant-garde theater and visual art and from documentary cinema to produce an alternative to the escapist cinema produced on the West Coast. Filmmakers such as Robert Frank (b. 1924) and Alfred Leslie (b. 1927) (Pull My Daisy, 1958), Michael Roemer (b. 1928) (Nothing But a Man, 1964), Shirley Clarke (1919–1997) (The Cool World, 1964), and most famously John Cassavetes (1929–1989) (Shadows, 1959; Faces, 1968) made avowedly personal films with a seeming disregard for box-office appeal. Employing realist aesthetics and improvisational acting, these films provided an antidote of sorts to the fantasy world perpetuated by the mainstream studios.

Of these New York–based filmmakers, only Cassavetes enjoyed any significant crossover success. For almost three decades, Cassavetes financed his independent films in part from money he made as an actor in mainstream pictures such as Rosemary's Baby (1968) and he brought an actor's sensibility to his work. In an effort to create the impression of realism, Cassavetes asked his actors to think, talk, and behave in character. Such an emphasis on improvisation made his films seem slow and talky to the uninitiated, but they nonetheless felt "real" and packed a profound emotional punch. In addition to Faces and Shadows, notable among his films as a director are A Woman under the Influence (1964), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Gloria (1980), all films about otherwise unexceptional people brought to the end of their rope by the pressures of everyday life.

Historians routinely locate the roots of Cassavetes's rebellion against commercial Hollywood in the avantgarde cinema of the 1930s and 1940s (filmmakers like Ralph Steiner [1899–1986], Paul Strand [1890–1976], and Maya Deren [1917–1961]), but a more proximate source lay in the various, mostly thwarted efforts at independence by movie stars and directors to gain more control over their films and by extension their careers during the so-called classical or studio era. For example, James Cagney (1899–1986), one of Warners' biggest stars, bristled at continued typecasting and broke with the studio. In 1942 he established (with his brother, the producer William Cagney) Cagney Productions, an independent production outfit. Though the move gained Cagney a modicum of freedom and independence, the cost of releasing a film made a distribution deal with a studio a necessity and thus made real independence impossible. The director Fritz Lang (1890–1976) similarly broke with the studios to establish independence, but like Cagney, Lang could not get his films into the marketplace without studio help. Cassavetes seemed to learn from the frustrations of Cagney and Lang and scaled his productions down so significantly that he maintained a degree of autonomy on the far margins of the studio system.

INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

During the 1970s, a period historians have since termed the "auteur renaissance," an independent spirit emerged within mainstream, commercial cinema. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939), Martin Scorsese (b. 1942), Robert Altman (b. 1925), Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939), Terrence Malick (b. 1943), Brian De Palma (b. 1940), Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), and George Lucas (b. 1944) enjoyed an independence within the system that was unique in American film history. Auteur films like Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), Coppola's The Godfather (1972), and Spielberg's Jaws (1975) made a lot of money for the studios, all of which were struggling after an almost generation-long box-office slump. But the studios' indulgence of the auteur theory was by design temporary; it held executives' interest only as long as was necessary. Once the studios got back on their feet at the end of the decade, they abandoned the auteurs in favor of more formulaic films produced by directors who required and/or demanded less autonomy and independence.

Most of the 1970s auteur directors struggled in the 1980s: Coppola, Scorsese, and De Palma made fewer films and their work had far less impact after 1980; Altman adapted stage plays for art-house release; and Kubrick, Bogdanovich, and Malick went into semiretirement. The only two directors to continue their ascent were Spielberg and Lucas, and consequently their particular brand of entertainment cinema became the industry template.

It was counter to this Spielberg-Lucas template that a renaissance of sorts in independent cinema took shape in the 1980s. This indie scene became the site for a new American cinema, one that again mirrored on a smaller scale what had taken place in bigger films, for bigger stakes, just a decade earlier. Consider, for example, the top studio films of 1984: Ghost Busters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, all of which depended on special effects and/or star-power and were platformed as event films in wide distribution strategies that only a major studio could afford to mount.

The studios' collective embrace of the so-called event film enabled an independent film market to emerge, or perhaps it just made necessary. At a time when the studios were committed to a kind of bottom-line thinking that emphasized cost–benefit analysis (typical of production units under conglomerate ownership in any business), independence became once again a matter of cash and content. Independent films produced and released in 1984 included Jim Jarmusch's (b. 1953) stagey, offbeat comedy Stranger Than Paradise (shot in overlong single takes and in black and white); Wayne Wang's (b. 1949) small ethnic picture Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, a character study of Chinese Americans; Gregory Nava's (b. 1949) unflinching chronicle of Mexican "illegals," El Norte; John Sayles's (b. 1950) futurist parable Brother From Another Planet, which tells the story of a drug-addicted alien loose in New York City; Alan Rudolph's stylish neo-noir Choose Me; veteran independent filmmaker John Cassavetes's melodrama Love Streams; and Robert Altman's adaptation of a one-man stage play about Richard Nixon's last days in the White House, Secret Honor.

Independent films the following year included Blood Simple, the stark, deadpan neo-noir by the Coen brothers (Joel, b. 1954, and Ethan, b. 1957) that was the talk of the 1985 New York Film Festival; Susan Seidelman's (b. 1952) punk-inspired romantic comedy Desperately Seeking Susan; Horton Foote's (b. 1916) regional comedy adapted from his stage play The Trip to Bountiful; and Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a film that tracks a single eventful night in the life of one very unlucky New Yorker. That a filmmaker of Scorsese's reputation had to turn to the indie scene to make a movie speaks volumes on the state of the industry at the time.

While independence afforded these filmmakers a degree of creative freedom, it also relegated their films to a modest art house release. Very few independent films have crossed over into commercial theaters in any big way. Among the few that have are Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), distributed by Miramax in 1994, which grossed over $100 million, as did the surprise 1999 teen horror picture The Blair Witch Project for Artisan. A few film festival winners like Steven Soderbergh's (b. 1963) sex, lies and videotape (1989) or David Lynch's (b. 1946) Mulholland Drive (2001) have crossed over to modest mainstream commercial successes, but these are rare exceptions. For every crossover success such as Napoleon Dynamite (2004), a droll comedy produced for $400,000 that earned over $40 million, there are hundreds of independent films that reach only small audiences and are hurried into DVD and video release. These films seldom turn much of a profit.

Niche films (that is, films produced by and for a very specific and small target market) comprise essential indie product lines, but almost never enjoy crossover success. For example, lesbian-themed films such as Go Fish (1994), The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995), High Art (1998), and Better than Chocolate (1999), which are thematically similar but very different in tone and content, all earned about the same amount ($2 million). Such relatively dependable but modest payoffs await any reasonable effort at meeting the needs of the lesbian audience, which might be acceptable for a small outfit like TriMark, distributor of Better than Chocolate; but for the big studios in the 1990s such action was distinctly small time.

Niche films are consistent, modest moneymakers because niche audiences are starved for films about people like themselves. Many of these films are written and directed by women and people of color—who, in Hollywood studios, are seriously underrepresented behind the camera and in the front office. The ranks of 1980s and 1990s indie filmmaking is a who's who of "minority" and distaff filmmakers: Charles Burnett (The Glass Shield, 1995), Lisa Cholodenko, Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, 1983), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, 2001, and Lost in Translation, 2003), Rusty Cundieff (Fear of a Black Hat, 1994), Vondie Curtis-Hall (Gridlock'd, 1997), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991), Tamra Davis (Guncrazy, 1992), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, 1996), Carl Franklin (One False Move, 1992), Leslie Harris (Just Another Girl on the IRT, 1992), Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, 1996, and Lovely and Amazing, 2001), Reginald Hudlin (House Party, 1990), Leon Ichaso (Crossover Dreams, 1985), Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills, 1998), Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou, 1997), Jennie Livingston (Paris is Burning, 1991), Maria Maggenti, Gregory Nava, Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don't Cry, 2000), Matty Rich (Straight Out of Brooklyn, 1991), Nancy Savoca (True Love, 1989, and Dogfight, 1991), Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization, 1981), Susan Seidelman (Smithereens, 1982), Jill Sprecher (The Clockwatchers, 1997, and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, 2001), Julie Taymor (Frida, 2002), Robert Townsend, Rose Troche, Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, 1981), Wayne Wang, and Anne Wheeler. Add to the list above openly gay male directors or directors who specialize in gay-themed films, such as Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation, 1995) and Todd Haynes (Poison, 1991), and it becomes clear how much and how completely independent cinema, which is showcased almost exclusively at art houses and/or in limited theatrical runs, is at once marginal (to the commercial cinematic enterprise) and marginalized.

Most of even the best-known indie titles—including those that fall into more traditional commercial genres—make far less of an impact at the box office than one might suspect. The Addiction (1995), Bodies Rest and Motion (1993), Box of Moon Light (1997), The Clockwatchers (1998), Fear of a Black Hat (1993), Federal Hill (1994), Female Perversions (1997), Heathers (1989), The House of Yes (1997), Just Another Girl on the IRT (1993), Killing Zoe (1994), Matewan (1987), Men With Guns (1998), Naked in New York (1994), Party Girl (1995), Simple Men (1992), and The Underneath (1994) are among the most highly regarded, well-known, and popular films, but they all made $1 million or less at the box office—1/100 as much as the average blockbuster.

INDEPENDENCE IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD

Auteurism and independence converged in the early 1980s as Hollywood conglomerized and the new Hollywood studios devoted their attention to blockbuster filmmaking. The audacity and creativity that had fueled the Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s got pushed out of or at least found a new home on the margins of the studio mainstream. This remained an accurate description of the Hollywood/indie divide throughout the subsequent twenty-five years even as the independent landscape slowly changed.

JOHN SAYLES
b. Schenectady, New York, 28 September 1950

John Sayles is one of the most important [of] contemporary independent filmmakers. Because his loyal fan base shares his politics, Sayles has consistently been able to provide an alternative to the big bang of the often politically conservative Hollywood blockbuster. Making movies that depend on meaningful conversation and tackle significant moral issues, Sayles has produced films of ideas at a time when they seem sadly lacking in mainstream cinema.

Like his fellow cineastes Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, John Sayles got his first big break from exploitation impresario Roger Corman, for whom he wrote a screenplay for the tongue-in-cheek gore-fest Piranha (1978). A year later, Sayles earned legitimate success, winning a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for his more personal screenplay, The Return of the Secaucas Seven (1980), his debut as a writer-director. The Return of the Secaucas Seven, the story of a handful of twentysomethings trying to make sense of contemporary America, established something of a template for Sayles with its emphasis on dialogue and multiple intersecting narratives.

With the money earned for his screenplays for the Corman-produced sci-fi quickie Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and the excellent werewolf film The Howling (1981), Sayles wrote and directed Lianna (1983), a film about a young woman struggling with her sexual preference. At a time when Hollywood dealt with lesbianism as either kinky or aberrant, Sayles handled the issue with an admirable matter-of-fact realism.

Sayles took on another hot-button issue, labor relations, with his subsequent film Matewan (1987), a historical reconstruction of an ill-fated West Virginia coalminers' strike in the 1920s. And in his next film Eight Men Out (1988), about the infamous "Black Sox Scandal" of the 1919 World Series, Sayles delivered a similarly heartfelt pro-union message—noteworthy because at the time the anti-union sentiments of Reaganomics held sway in America. While the story pivots on a moral transgression, Sayles focused instead on the exploitation of the players by team owner Charles Comiskey. Though what the players do is wrong, Sayles renders the story in terms that make one crime an inevitable response to another.

Sayles cemented his reputation as a political filmmaker by focusing his attention on race issues. The Brother from Another Planet (1984) told the story of a black alien who lands in the inner city and gets hooked on drugs. The ironically titled City of Hope (1991) focused on the thorny issue of affirmative action in a small metropolis. Lone Star (1996), for which Sayles received an Academy Award^® nomination for Best Screenplay, examined Mexican-American relations in a border town and Sunshine State (2002) took a long look at the human cost of gentrification at an old Florida beachfront town abutting the one beach where African Americans could swim during segregation.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Lone Star (1996), Sunshine State (2002)