Fighting for independent films

Sunday, April 18, 1999

Fighting for independent films

Popularity of non-studio films is at an all-time high, but the chance for commercial success is dwindling in the flood of new movies

Tonight's the night for The Dream Catcher, a low-budget independent film shot largely in Ohio.

Its debut before an industry-heavy audience at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival is about as big a break as a low-budget, non-studio film can get. It's the crowning moment to years of grueling labor.

Yet the film may never be booked into a theater. It may never run on cable or turn up on video.

It belongs to the class of film that Cleveland International Film Festival director David Wittkowsky had in mind when he said, “It's not just that very few will recoup their costs. Very few will ever see dollar one.”

The movie is a prime example of a growing national paradox: Grass-roots filmmaking, far from the big money and big names of the mainstream industry, is exploding at the same time that the mega-corporate character of the movie business has never been more dominant.

More and more independent filmmakers struggle and sacrifice to make passionate, personal movies, while the odds against bringing those films to audiences grow longer all the time.

Poised to step into a hostile marketplace, The Dream Catcher has advantages — artistic promise, extraordinary exposure and influential friends.

Most importantly, its behind-the-camera team gives the film what the Village Voice called “a serious indie-film pedigree.” Producer Julia Reichert of Dayton (Emma and Elvis) is among the pioneers in the independent movement. She and editor Jim Klein (Taken for a Ride) shared Oscar nominations for the documentaries Union Maids and Seeing Red. Producer Steven Bognar scored an international success with is documentary Personal Belongings. Co-producer Peter Wentworth produced Whit Stillman's Metropolitan. Director Victor Nunez (Ulee's Gold), lent moral support and expensive camera lenses to the project.

Such associations help the movie make up for its lack of recognizable actors, usually considered an absolute must for commercial success by an independent film.

T.C. Rice, an executive with Stratosphere Entertainment, said his firm, like other distributors of independent films, keeps track of most non-studio movies in the production pipeline or on the festival circuit. The number in the tracking system right now: 4,328.

Of those, he estimated that 25 percent may be distributed to theaters, cable or video. Most of the remaining 75 percent will never be released at all.

The best hope for many independents, he said, is that their films are seen on the festival circuit and earn enough respect to give the filmmakers a second shot.

The competition for a spot on a release schedule, Mr. Rice acknowledged, is “mind-boggling.”

Yet, that competition has not discouraged flocks of new filmmakers from staking many thousands of borrowed and begged dollars on the chance that they might rise where most others fall.

At the Midwest Filmmakers Conference during the Cleveland festival in March, dozens of filmmakers traded tales of near-bankruptcy, creative credit-card juggling and living on Ramen noodles to get their movies made. Eagerly soaking up their tales of woe and inspiration were scores of aspirants looking for ways to get their movies made.

In one workshop, documentarian Charlie Humphrey quoted his fellow Pittsburgh filmmaker Tony Buba (Dawn of the Dead) to the effect that filmmaking has become for the middle class what basketball has been for inner-city youth — a ticket out.

The evidence that he's right is everywhere. Books, magazines, videotapes and computer programs about screenwriting multiply like dandelions. How-to workshops are booming. Five years ago, one low-budget independent film was shot in the Tristate. Last summer, at least a half dozen were in production.

Filming is only half the battle. To play in theaters, films must have distributors who pay daunting costs. “You have advertising, prints, creating a trailer,” said Mr. Rice. “Even if it's the smallest, littlest tiniest release, if the (distributing) company does a responsible job, you're looking at a quarter million just to open in New York and Los Angeles.”

That reality has done nothing to stop the flood of people trying to add their visions to the cinema landscape.

“I think perhaps one of the reasons there has been this great explosion in independent films is because of the corporate overtaking of filmmaking in America,” Mr. Wittkowsky said.

“There are so few stories being told and so few voices being heard... that people are pretty numbed by what they are seeing coming out of Hollywood.”

Corporate control
What's coming out of Hollywood is determined by conglomerates that own the production studios. Even smaller film companies that helped put independent films on the commercial map show the distinct imprint of the corporations that now own them.

A striking example came this month. Disney, which owns the most successful former independent, Miramax, decreed that neither Miramax nor any other Disney subsidiary would release Dogma.

The movie is a religious satire made by Kevin Smith, a leading light among independent filmmakers. He created a splash — and made a lot of money for Miramax — with Clerks and Chasing Amy. In this case, the corporation feared that Mr. Smith's trademark irreverent, foul-mouthed, bitingly honest comedy would offend Catholics.

Bob Gosse can claim insight to both sides of the eternal struggle between art and commerce. He is a filmmaker (Niagara, Niagara) and an executive with the Shooting Gallery, the company that financed Sling Blade.

Mr. Gosse said the pressure for studios to turn out safe, predictable movies is rooted in these economic realities: The average cost to make a studio movie is $54 million; the average cost to market it is $24 million; overall studio profit margins are about 3%.

“Who would be in that business? It's nuts,” he said. The real motive, he said, is the merchandise that movies create for auxiliary businesses — music labels, books, toys, video games, amusement parks — that return much bigger profits to their corporate owners.

Even politically touchy issues boil down to dollars in Hollywood, said Mike Sargent, director of Personals, a romantic comedy starring Malik Yoba of New York Undercover.

“One of the interesting aspects of what's going on with black film is it's not so much that it's about racism is that it's economics,” Mr. Sargent said.

“The reason we keep seeing 'hood films and stupid comedies is a 'hood film came out and made money, and so they know how to market them. So they make another and another.”

Mr. Sargent predicted that a more sophisticated variety of films, particularly by African-Americans, will find audiences as new distributors launch specialized campaigns. He cited the new movie marketing arm of the BET cable TV channel as an example.

In the case of his own film, he said, “I believe we'll be able to have a good enough marketing plan we'll be able to show them how it should be sold. It's not a "black' film. It's a film about dating and about somebody who figures out who he is.”

The demands of the corporate studios for profits, and for inoffensive entertainment, has doomed the independent artist in Hollywood, said Guy Ferland, director of the Kevin Bacon feature Telling Lies in America and the new indie thriller Delivered.

“It all boils down to the reasons why people make movies, especially independent filmmakers, who are motivated by artistic impulse ... versus studios, which only want saleable merchandise.... I am not sure the two are even meant to be part of the same system,” he said.

Mr. Ferland, who also recently directed a made-for-TV movie for ABC, said the closer a filmmaker works with the mainstream industry, the greater the compromises required.

“There is no apparatus in Hollywood to make a Reservoir Dogs today,” he said. “The future of true independent movies lies only in regional filmmaking.”

Future is debated
What the future holds for independent film is a matter of debate among filmmakers in light of the blinding speed at which radical new technology is arriving.

Sophisticated, high-resolution digital cameras could make film obsolete, some say, while film loyalists swear they will never give up celluloid.

Mr. Gosse is not one of them. “I can't fix cars. I'm a filmmaker, I tell stories, I connect with that medium. If you bring me new toys, I am going to use them.”

Digital technology, he said, will make the process more democratic because it will be much cheaper than filming. A movie that now costs millions and requires a crew of 100 will be made for thousands with a few dozen people, he said.

Yet new technology will not change the art form, Mr. Gosse said. “The word processor didn't change literature per se.”

Oh yes it will, said David Manocchio, director of the ultra-low-budget Crime Noir. He likened digital technology to the unexpected effect in the mid-1800s when paint began to be packaged in small containers. Artists could easily leave the studio and concentrate on natural subjects, which in turn gave rise to impressionism.

New technology is part of the reason more artists are working outside traditional channels, he said.

“I think what you you are seeing is people saying, "I'm not going to have boundaries put on me, and certainly not by a bunch of people in suits sitting in Hollywood,' ” he said.

“To me, independent film means never having to ask if you can make it,” said Cleveland nativeMike Barron, who shot festival entry The Language of Kickball for a cash outlay of about $30,000. “You just make the movie.”

While he counts himself a fan of new technology, Mr. Barron said the medium ultimately is secondary. “Film, digital, video, Super 8, it doesn't matter. The question is, do you have a good story to tell?”

Mr. Rice predicted important change will come with digital delivery to theaters, by satellite transmission, fiber optic cable or on discs. “It's going to make all the difference in the world,” he said, by eliminating the need for costly 35mm prints and allowing more flexible scheduling.

He also said that large multiplexes may start welcoming more foreign and independent films. He cited the owner of three Oklahoma multiplexes who scored a success turning one auditorium of her theater in Norman into an art house.

Cauleen Smith, whose film Drylongso was popular at Sundance and other festivals, suggested that more “really tiny distributors will crop up” to handle non-mainstream films.

“There is still an audience for the true character-driven low-budget movies,” she said. “The audiences I meet all the time at festivals feels really frustrated that they can't see more independent movies.”

Veteran help
As he contemplated what the shifting sands of the industry portend for the future of The Dream Catcher, Mr. Radtke referred to some industry veterans who have signed on to represent it.

Ira Deutchman is representing the film to potential buyers. He is a founder of Fine Line Features and a producer whose credits include independent legend John Sayles' film Matewan. Publicist Carol White is a co-founder of a major entertainment PR firm and former vice-president for Tristar Pictures.

“They are amazingly resourceful and have been around and they don't get too excited prematurely,” Mr. Radtke said. “We're sort of hopeful and giddy about the whole event, and they're far more pragmatic about it.

“Ira he told me — and I took this to heart — he said, "Ed, just remember this: You have done exceptional work... and you're making a contribution we love to support. But that's as far as you go.

“The rest is about an oversaturated market and an incredibly fierce and unpredictable reality.'”



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