Truly Independent Cinema

By BRUCE HANDY

This is show business at its most elemental. The annual Independent Feature Film Market, which took place last month at a Manhattan multiplex, typically features some 200 feature-length movies (many not yet even finished) competing for investors, distributors, exposure, oxygen, life. With an atmosphere of equal parts hubris and desperation, it is a cross between a trade show, a film festival and a bazaar, and a far cry from what most people envision when they think of independent film: Matt Damon smoking cigars at a Miramax Oscar party. Since I had long been curious about the unsung breadth of no-budget filmmaking--the new American folk art?--off I went to the IFFM in search of cinema's slush pile.

Near the end of the market's five-day run, the lobby of the Angelika Film Center was still aswarm with writer-producer-directors passing out handbills, waving placards, showing trailers on handheld DVD players, almost literally collaring people to see their films. It was marketing as hand-to-hand combat, an uneasily direct communion between filmmaker and potential audience member. The pitches: a blaxploitation parody starring a white guy! An ex-cop grandma wages war on her grandson's kidnappers! A lost relic with aphrodisiacal powers--Jesus' foreskin--turns up in Manhattan! "Pringles financed my movie," a commercial actor turned documentarian told me. The budget for one "romantic drama" came from the insurance settlement the writer-director received after he was injured in an auto accident. You had to admire the sheer nerve on display. And who knows? Maybe I was talking to the next Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) or Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen), both of whom got their start at the IFFM. But probably I wasn't.

The odds are that no one besides a handful of people will ever see these movies (an organizer guessed maybe five or six of the 200 would find distributors). While there are no hard figures, experts say the number of independent films made in this country, most for budgets in the low ten thousands, has probably doubled in the last five years. The reasons are varied: the inspiring do-it-yourself success of films like Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, which was made for $7,000 and grossed over $1.6 million; the surplus of film schools; cheaper and more accessible technologies (credible-looking features can now be shot on digital video at a cost of about $20 for an hour of tape, as opposed to, say, $15,000 for an hour of 35-mm film stock and processing); easy credit. Estimates of the total number of independent films that will be made this year range upwards of 1,100. "And that's only completed films," says Jeff Lipsky, an executive at Samuel Goldwyn Films. "Lord knows how many more at least start production." By Lipsky's count, maybe 150 to 170 will see the light of day with some form of distribution, however limited; of those, maybe 20 will get significant exposure and make some money. After all, there are only so many theaters, so many moviegoers, so many hours in a life.

But lest you think countless Citizen Kanes are falling through the cracks, people whose job it is to see hundreds of independent films will quickly disabuse you of that romance. "There's this notion that there are all these amazing movies out there, and it's just not true," says John Cooper, a programmer at the Sundance Film Festival (which this year received around 800 feature submissions for 45 slots). Still, the idea that many hundreds of movies are going unseen each year--even movies worse than the ones we do see--is sobering. Yes, show business is designed to shatter dreams, but come on.

Dreamers like Carman David Gallo remain undaunted. He is a Toronto marketing executive and real estate heir who recently placed a full-page ad in Variety soliciting investors for his as yet unmade film, Princess Diana Saves the World. It is the story of how the dead title character rounds up other "good angels" (including Frank Sinatra and J.F.K.) and staves off global destruction. "Imagine Diana sitting at God's knees like a little girl--that's the first scene," Gallo explains. "This is a monster. This will sink Titanic." He clearly has a vision. I have a vision of my own: a democracy of moving images. Not everyone can be Martin Scorsese--that hasn't changed--but anyone who wants to, it seems, can now be Ed Wood. The Internet has nothing on that, except eyeballs.