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Subject: Dargis: Death dance for the
indie?
Subject: Manohla Dargis: Death dance for the indie?
(LA Times)
www.latimes.com/news/local/cl-ca-dargis2feb02.story
February 2 2003
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Death dance for the
indie?
Gone are the days of Jim Jarmusch, when the term 'independent
film' really meant something. Now it's a label waiting for a vision.
By
Manohla Dargis
Times Staff Writer
Park City, Utah -- Is
independent cinema dead in the United States -- or, is it just playing possum?
That question came to me during the recent Sundance Film Festival after
watching a documentary on the Weather Underground. Earnest if reductive, the
documentary held my attention but was nowhere as interesting as what happened
afterward, when former Underground fugitives Bernardine Dohrn and husband
William Ayers were greeted with enthusiastic applause.
"What advice,"
asked one woman, could Dohrn "give to a young revolutionary?" (Be born
privileged and stupid, I fumed to myself.) For Sundance surrealism, the moment
would only be matched by the news that a Park City street had to be partially
shut down when J.Lo and Ben Affleck decided to go shopping -- two perfectly
twinned happenings that made me wonder what any of this had to do with Jim
Jarmusch.
For those who came of age after Quentin Tarantino, it may be
worth mentioning that Jarmusch is one of the guys who put indie film on the
map. In 1984, the writer-director's second feature, "Stranger Than Paradise,"
which he made for $100,000, went to Cannes and became a stateside hit. To
budding cinephiles like me, the film was a revelation. At once droll and
melancholic, "Stranger Than Paradise" is about three young people adrift from
the Lower East Side to Cleveland. There's a story of sorts, but what struck me
the hardest was the film's moody cinematography and how each scene ended with
a blackout. I was moved by the film's beauty as well as the embarrassing yet
true sense of purposelessness that Jarmusch tapped into and which hung over
the film like cigarette smoke. Jarmusch seemed to know firsthand how easy it
is to get lost in your youth. More incidentally, I noticed that his characters
didn't just dress in the kind of thrift-store clothes my friends and I wore;
like us, they lived on the margins.
Jarmusch wasn't the only one to
rock my movie world. Between 1984 and 1985, Joel Coen's "Blood Simple" was
released, as was John Sayles' "The Brother From Another Planet," Jonathan
Demme's "Stop Making Sense," Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas" and Bette Gordon's
"Variety." In 1986, I was mesmerized by Bill Sherwood's "Parting Glances" and
Gus Van Sant's "Mala Noche," which would lay the ground for New Queer Cinema.
That same year, I watched Spike Lee launch a revolution with "She's Gotta Have
It," a movie I saw at a pocket-size theater where the sound was piped through
a single speaker while the , mostly black audience cheered in surround-sound.
Some other films that opened in the same period: Wayne Wang's "Dim Sum,"
Victor Nunez's "A Flash of Green" and Alan Rudolph's "Choose
Me."
Any juice left to squeeze?
In the years since, Coen,
Demme, Van Sant, Wang and Lee have each, to varying degrees and with variable
success, directed movies with bigger budgets and recognizable stars; some of
their films have been nominated for and even won Academy Awards. (Tragically,
Sherwood died in 1990.) Meanwhile, their peers have remained fixtures in
independent cinema, for the most part financing their films with non-studio
money and remaining safely below the radar of most of the American moviegoing
public. Jarmusch hasn't directed a dramatic feature since 1999's "Ghost Dog."
Last year, Nunez's "Coastlines" received a lackluster welcome at Sundance; at
this year's festival, Rudolph's "The Secret Lives of Dentists" barely stirred
the air.
What did stir the air were features like "American Splendor,"
a fine adaptation of the comic-book series by Harvey Pekar that was directed
by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, and which won the dramatic
competition. Two other notable films were Tom McCarthy's "The Station Agent,"
about three loners in rural New Jersey, which picked up two awards and a
distribution deal with Miramax, and my favorite entry, "Camp," an exhilarating
musical from Todd Graff that came to town with a distributor and left with a
lot of goodwill but no prizes. As much as I liked these films, "Camp" was the
only one that felt new. Ironically, even though it riffs on well-trodden
material, namely the summer camp movie and the musical, it was the only
Sundance feature I saw that bristled with the urgency of expression -- it felt
like a film that had to be made.
Like the year before, I returned from Sundance
with the feeling that the juice had been squeezed out of American independent
film. Not that you'd know it from the crowds that thronged Main Street during
the day and the screaming drunk kids who broke out in spring break fever at
night. Like independent film itself, the festival has gone through an
incredible growth in the decade I've been coming to Sundance, not all of it
pretty. In 1993, festival founder Robert Redford told the press that he didn't
think there was "anything to be gained from expanding the festival because I
think it serves the filmmakers pretty well. If it goes much bigger than this,
you begin to lose control." The festival attracted 5,000 participants that
year; this year, more than 20,000 descended.
They came because in
today's consumer youth culture independent film is cool, hip, edgy. They came
because everyone comes -- the stars and the studios, the press and the
players. They came because companies ranging from American Express to Skyy
Vodka put money into the festival, while Adidas, Chrysler and Levi's tried to
siphon off the vibe. They came and partied to Frou Frou and Beck, and listened
to Slash play backup for Gina Gershon, the star of the raucously overheated
"Prey for Rock & Roll." If they were lucky, they grooved to George Clinton
and De La Soul at the Warner Bros. party. Why was Warner Bros. there? Because
you had to be.
"Why does Chrysler want to make independent films?" asks
Bob Berney, president of the recently formed Newmarket Films, the distribution
arm of Newmarket Capital Group, a financing and production company. It was a
rhetorical question, and we both knew it. "The kids aren't buying their cars
anymore, they've got to seem hip. It's a giant branding thing, to try to
attack a young demographic. 'Independent' means something to them, it just
does. It's almost generic, some lifestyle thing."
Berney is best known
for being the whiz who, while working in distribution and marketing at IFC
Films, shepherded "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" into independent history. More
impressive, however, as far as movie lovers are concerned, he helped turn
Alfonso Cuarón's "Y Tu Mama También" into a bona-fide hit. Still, because its
returns were larger, "Greek Wedding" attracted the bulk of media interest,
inspiring finger wagging about ostensibly out-of-touch distributors. What
often went unsaid amid the blather about the numbers is that "My Big Fat Greek
Wedding" is a big, fat lousy movie. It may have been made outside the studio
system -- if partially bankrolled by Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson --
but the only thing independent about this feature-length sitcom was its
money.
What's in a word?
So, what do we mean when we talk
about independent film these days? It depends on who's doing the
talking.
"I define independent film as the product of a singular
vision," says John Sloss, the New York-based lawyer who represented "The
Station Agent," along with six other features at this year's Sundance. "I'm in
the financing business, and financing can come from a million different
places. To define it by financing is completely irrelevant, especially as
financing evolves. To me, independent films are not the product of a committee
but the product of a person. Most of the best films of the year are
independent. 'Adaptation' is a completely independent film; 'About Schmidt' is
a completely independent film. Scorsese's films are independent. We're talking
about auteurism, otherwise it's a slippery slope."
It's a slippery
slope for even the most independent-minded veterans. During the late 1980s and
through much of the 1990s, my movie friends and I spent a lot of time trying
to define what independence meant when it came to film, much as our music
friends fretted over alternative rock. Our problems with getting a bead on
independence were, to an extent, reflected in the changes that the Independent
Feature Project, the largest independent film organization in the country,
made to the eligibility requirements for the Spirit Awards in 1994. The IFP's
new rules deemed that features that screened in six designated festivals could
be eligible for nomination. More important, however, the IFP decided that
studio-financed films could now join the party, a change partially influenced
by Disney's purchase of Miramax the preceding year.
Over the last two decades, independent film has
changed dramatically, making it tough for everyone to define.
In his
1995 book "Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes," John Pierson, who represented
films such as "She's Gotta Have It" and "Clerks," wrote that when it comes to
independence, "like the landmark Supreme Court pornography case, you may just
have to know it when you see it." I'm not sure that's true
anymore.
"It's totally blurred," says Berney. "Is independence spirit?
Is it the freedom of the final cut? Fox Searchlight is independent in terms of
attitude and style; Sony Classics definitely has autonomy but it still uses
systems of the parent company. 'Independent' has become strictly a marketing
term to describe something, but even that is undefined. It's more of an
attitude, because, truly, the financing is so convoluted that nothing is truly
independent. I consider us independent because we're self-financed -- we're
buying movies and putting up the money -- but we'll hook up at some point with
some video company and it will probably be part of a studio."
Does any
of this matter, or is the quarrel over what constitutes independent cinema a
"sophistic debate," as Sloss impatiently put it to me when I pressed him for a
clearer definition? "What does that have to do with anything?" he asked.
"There's been a sea change in the structure of the industry in recent years,
and basically what the studios have done is that they've turned into
event-film creators with tie-ins that can generate hundreds of millions of
dollars. And the stuff that they used to do that was more character-driven,
that filled in between the event films, they've now relegated to the studio
specialized divisions. The studios don't make movies like that
anymore."
"It's just kind of berserk," Tom Bernard, co-president of
Sony Pictures Classics, says of the current scene. "The 'independent' should
be taken out of 'independent cinema'; commerce and capitalism have pretty much
taken over. When someone made a movie in the early 1980s, it was truly an
independent film with a unique voice and a unique style. Those movies were
very distinct, and commerce really wasn't an issue for them. What I see in
Sundance now is that for a lot of filmmakers a huge payday is very important.
They're in it for the money."
A crypto-Marxist critique sounds strange
coming from the distributor who has made a killing with mainstream fare such
as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," but Sony Classics has stayed close to its
art-house origins. Even so, like Miramax, New Line, Focus Features and Fox
Searchlight, Sony Classics is owned by a studio that, in turn, is owned by a
multinational corporation, affording it the security and muscle unknown to a
company that isn't.
The haves and the have-nots
All these
companies put out good movies, but their success and high commercial profile
only proves that when it comes to the independent film world there's a deep
divide between the haves and the have-nots. On one side of the divide are
filmmakers with indisputably independent vision like Alexander Payne, who make
movies like "About Schmidt" for big companies like New Line with big stars
like Jack Nicholson that get released into hundreds of theaters and are
supported by a powerful marketing and publicity infrastructure.
On the
other side are the have-nots like Przemyslaw Reut, whose "Paradox Lake" won
passionate admirers at last year's Sundance but failed to hook a U.S.
distributor willing to release an expressionistic digital feature with no
stars about a camp counselor's encounter with autistic children. The have-nots
don't come to Sundance with lawyers and publicists who know every press person
by their first name; instead, they flood the festival with posters and
postcards with desperate entreaties ("Please come!!!"). The have-nots flop
together in the cheapest accommodations they can secure in a resort town where
even a dingy room goes for $200 a night. Sometimes, if they're lucky, talented
or both, the have-nots spend the months after Sundance traveling the festival
circuit, which has emerged as a parallel distribution route for work deemed
too uncommercial for theatrical release.
For the 1991 Sundance festival, 854 dramatic
features and 2,174 short films were submitted; this year, the number of
dramatic feature submissions rose to 2,012 and short film submissions jumped
to 3,345. Now more than ever, it's incredibly easy to shoot a feature -- all
you have to do is buy, borrow or steal a digital camera. Lowering barriers is
great for filmmakers, but it doesn't make them any smarter or more creative.
There may be a lot more independent movies being made now, but there aren't
anywhere near enough good ones, which brings me back to the 1980s and
Jarmusch, Sayles and Spike Lee.
It isn't only nostalgia that keeps me
in thrall to the earlier days of the independent film movement, but a longing
for better, more formally innovative, challenging movies. Over the last
decade, Harvey Weinstein has stormed the gates of the academy and Steven
Soderbergh, the patron saint of independence, has remade a Rat Pack movie for
one of the oldest studios in town. There are independent visions still out
there, but the world that Weinstein and Soderbergh -- and Jarmusch, Sayles and
Lee -- helped to create is gone. Nobody knows exactly what will come next or
what should.
"There's a tide that raises all boats from time to time,"
says Sloss, "whether it's Quentin Tarantino or Scorsese, and there are
inescapable fallow periods. There are still great films being made, but now
they're on the margins instead of in the center."
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Manohla
Dargis is a Times film critic.