Myth has sprung up about American independent movies that goes like this: “Indies” are the great alternative film culture, a vibrant substitute for the excesses and mediocrities of Hollywood. It’s time to kill this hogwash and lay it to rest. Why? Because it’s a big lie. I haven’t come to bury the movies themselves; the real-life world of independently financed U.S. movies is a vital, maddening, fluctuating domain of provocative possibilities and wildly uneven results — sometimes great, sometimes awful. Instead, my target is an illusion: the media legend of the indies as today’s successor to the once-vital culture of foreign-language art films in the ’60s and ’70s, an arena of artistic idealism as opposed to mass-market hype and tripe.
The truth is, the mainstream of U.S. filmmaking away from the big studios no longer means what it did in the 1980s, when maverick directors like John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee were on the rise, or even the early 1990s, the heyday of “Reservoir Dogs,” “Hoop Dreams” and “Go Fish.” This is less a time of promise than of decadence.
These days, the average U.S. indie picture is often far inferior to the big studio movie it was supposed to replace. Even some of the better indies (“Happiness,” “In the Company of Men”) are massively overrated.
At film festivals I’ve attended in the last five years — including, sadly enough, that indie touchstone, Sundance — the worst entries were almost always the U.S. independent fiction features, often run-of-the-mill movies with weak subjects and uninspired technique. Many critics at Sundance ’99 agreed that the fest’s weakest section was the one for U.S. indies (the best, by contrast, were documentaries and foreign-language pictures). And Sundance gets the pick of the U.S. indie crop.
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Money troubles
What’s wrong right now with the presumed great hope of American filmmaking? Maybe it’s the swallowing up of some of the smaller companies (like Miramax and New Line) by bigger “parent companies” (Disney and Time Warner) — thus blurring the line between independent and mainstream production. Maybe it’s just a phase (we hope). But mostly, the problems come from an influx of dubiously talented writers and directors whose principal assets seem to be just that: They, or their relatives, can raise enough money to shoot a movie.
So, all too often what we get are thin pastiches or outright botches by filmmakers who lack not only a knowledge and appreciation of film history but the rudimentary skills that might have won them jobs as Hollywood hacks. At its nadir, the modern U.S. indie film scene has become the equivalent of a vanity press: a self-publication house for inept novels by rich dilettantes.
You can see the results in these movies’ limited, repetitive subject matter: the many depressingly similar films about the career and sexual problems of young people in the big city, for example. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, American independent filmmakers often tried to depict lives of people Hollywood avoided — the poor, disadvantaged or marginalized. Now, too many novice filmmakers are trying feebly to turn their own lives into ersatz Hollywood movies.
Here are the stern (but true) words of Gill Holland, an independent film producer quoted in a recent New York Times article about the sorry scene he sees around him: “There’s a lot of rich kids out there who can come up with $500,000 to make a movie with talented people. The problem is they don’t know how to direct actors, they don’t know how to handle crews, they’ve never even made a short film. A lot of them think they have talent, but they don’t. And some of them are siphoning off funds from more deserving cases.”
Worst of all, the whole fantasy of American independent film — and the way audiences and (especially) the media use it or tout it — is helping obliterate the real prime alternative to Hollywood moviemaking: foreign films. Even art houses prefer to book English-language films these days. And at festivals, film buyers tend to ignore the foreign-language prize winners while snapping up any film in English that seems barely credible as a release. (Some of those foreign gems — like recent Cannes Palme d’Or winners “Underground,” from Yugoslavia, and “Eternity and a Day,” from Greece — languish for years without reaching theaters.)
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What spoiled things
Like all myths, the indie legend has some truth at its core: In the 1980s, the first major indies were a genuine alternative. For many reasons, including an influx of cinematically illiterate young business specialists into the executive ranks of the Hollywood studios (pumped up by what was seen as the post-“Star Wars” gold rush), studio film scripts began to deteriorate wildly. If the early ’70s were the years of “The Godfather,” “Cabaret,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Deliverance,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Mean Streets” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” the ’80s were increasingly the time of “Rocky IV,” “Rambo III,” “Police Academy 5,” “Friday the 13th, Part 6” and “Revenge of the Nerds II.” Despite the good big-studio movies still available, you could hardly blame a moviegoer with brains or taste for looking elsewhere.
Up through the ’70s, that restless, more adventurous audience usually went to the smarter or more ambitious studio movies, hipper low-budget genre pictures, underground films or the foreign imports from France, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. Those films — particularly the work of John Cassavetes and, later, Martin Scorsese — all set the mold for what became the artistically rich indies scene of the ’80s.
What spoiled things was success — and a bad, overly opportunistic response to it. Where many earlier indie filmmakers were driven largely by a desire to say something personal or different in a less constricted format, too many of their followers are simply trying to hit the jackpot by copying a previous indie hit: say, “Reservoir Dogs” or “Clerks.” Concerned with finances rather than expression, they are not unlike the worst of the ignorant thirtysomething executives in the ’80s who helped conquer the big studios in the name of the bottom line. In fact, many of these so-called independents hope to attract Hollywood’s interest and win studio jobs.
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Now it’s personal
I say all this not out of anger, but out of a kind of soured love. I have strong personal ties to the current American independent moviemaking scene (old roommates and many friends and collaborators), and as a critic I’ve always been a strong supporter of the benchmark movies, from “Stranger Than Paradise” on.
So I’m not averse to the maverick spirit in film. Far from it. Over the years, I’ve willingly seen hundreds of U.S. indie features in theaters and at festivals. But that may be the problem. If I’ve seen and admired all the landmark works (such as “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Parting Glances,” “Roger and Me,” “The Thin Blue Line” “Hoop Dreams” and “sex, lies and videotape”), I’ve also seen hundreds of mediocrities and fiascoes.
I’m not counting, of course, the truly “outside” low-budget work that plays at smaller underground or independent festivals — which though interesting is often ignored.
But even above ground, for every indie sensation like the horror mockumentary “The Blair Witch Project” there are many more outright stinkers, bad but sometimes well-reviewed films like “Straight Out of Brooklyn” (a feeble Spike Lee ripoff), “Art for Teachers of Children” (minimalist sexual memoirs), “Amongst Friends” (“Mean Streets” for Long Island rich kids), “Suture” (a deconstructed art thriller), “Lie Down with Dogs” (fun on Cape Cod), “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me” (trailer-park sex), “Party Girl” (fun in Manhattan) and, more recently, “Twenty Dates” (an L.A. dating diary) and “Relax, It’s Just Sex!” (an all-star gay “Friends”).
Just as badly written and conceived as the worst big-studio movies, these mostly lack even the saving grace of technical expertise.
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Keep hope alive
It’s erroneous to believe that the new American independent films are — or ever were — the equivalent of the flourishing foreign art cinema of the ’60s: the challenging, brilliant, finely crafted work of great filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. How could they be?
But it’s a shame. Even though we’re on the brink of real breakthroughs for independent exhibition — including new theater chains and cable outlets — the overall quality of American indies has been eroding for years. Will it reverse itself? I hope so. Will all the clueless rich kids and less affluent wannabes trying to make a killing at Sundance turn to some other hobby and leave the field to people who know and love movies? I hope so.
Because, after all, the real tradition of American independent film — from Orson Welles to Jim Jarmusch to “Hoop Dreams” — is a national treasure.
