In the early eighties, following the commercial success of such films as Parting Glances, Stranger Than Paradise, and My Beautiful Laundrette, people began to rhapsodize about a new kind of moviemaking—a genuine alternative to the studio-processed schlock that had become even more flagrant with the rise of entertainment conglomerates. Here were movies that didn’t need to gross fifty or a hundred million dollars to justify the leading actor’s salary or the studio’s massive overhead. Here were movies that could find a small sliver of an audience and still manage to earn their money back, launch careers, and—oh yes—enrich the culture.
A lot of the distributors that profited from those films developed grand designs, began to produce their own features for less-than-frugal sums, and went belly-up. The press pronounced the independent movement dead, or, at least, drained of blood; government money grew scarce; and many important exhibitors closed up shop, fatally weakened by the one-two punch of funding cuts and the rise of home video.
Then came Pulp Fiction, Shine, Sling Blade, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and The English Patient, and the movement was reborn—although it was different in important ways from what had preceded it. Suddenly, independent distributors were selling themselves to major studios, content to serve as art-house divisions, and, in some cases, to abandon the kinds of movies that had made them successful in the first place. (In the wake of Pulp Fiction, there were scores of dreadful Tarantino imitations, basically formulaic but cultivating an outlaw status, and most of them flopped.)
I’m waiting for the independent-film movement to be pronounced dead again—terminally coopted. But we’ve been down this road before. Pretty soon, a movie will come along for an audience that no studio had previously perceived; it will sell for lots of money at a festival, and kick off new careers and new genres; and, again, that phoenix will rise from those ashes. Once-marginal places like Sundance that have now become less marginal, even mainstream, will be replaced by others more marginal. (The Slamdance Festival already exists, and so does Slumdance.) As one underground becomes absorbed, another will form to take its place.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to make the same sort of films I always have—some with studio money, others with independent financing. I try not to concern myself with what the press says the new trend is, or whether I’m in or out of fashion. Mostly, what I think about is the next movie, helping the director to figure out how to translate his or her vision from the page to the screen, and finding the exact right cinematographer, actors, and crew with whom to collaborate. I feel so lucky to be able to produce films for artists like Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Todd Solondz, Mary Harron, Rose Troche, Bruce Wagner, Dan Minahan, and all the rest.
Todd Haynes and I wanted the experience of seeing Velvet Goldmine to be like that of seeing the great movies of the sixties and seventies, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, 2001, and Nashville. Those films began and you didn’t know where they were going—you had no idea what you’d see before you saw it and yet you felt happy in your disorientation, because you trusted the people who made them not to lead you astray. You were a participant, allowed to form your own judgments about the characters and their situations.
I still feel that way from time to time, at films such as Sweetie, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Boogie Nights, and the one of mine I’m proudest of—Safe.
As I wrote in the first chapter, I don’t want you to think that everyone can make a great independent movie, especially people whose chief motivation is to become rich and famous. (That can, of course, be a subsidiary motivation.)
Accessibility cuts both ways. For real artists to have the power to put their visions on film, the floodgates have to be opened to everyone, whatever their reasons for making a film. The net must be cast wide, which is why my office still reads unsolicited manuscripts. And if my work—and this book—can inspire that one little dispirited person in the middle of nowhere to go out and make a great movie, then it’s worth all the other movies that flow through those same portals.
As Bruce Wagner, the director of I’m Losing You, puts it, independent film is “a whole new arena of hope.” And what I want most passionately is for aspiring producers, directors, and writers to treat it with something like reverence. H. L. Mencken notwithstanding, a lot of people have gone broke underestimating the public’s intelligence. Whereas I truly believe that if you fashion a great work, it will—ultimately—be seen. I have to believe that, or I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.