From DB:

Recently a representative from Fox Searchlight visited my campus. He talked to my colleagues Erik Gunneson and Meg Hamel, as well as to me, asking our ideas on independent film. The scattered remarks I shot from the hip led me to ask: What did I really think about indie moviemaking? Here are some notes, drawing on arguments made at greater length in The Way Hollywood Tells It .

1.) Independent filmmaking goes back to the early years of film history.

A working definition of American “independent film” is film production (also perhaps distribution) that occurs outside the center of control in the industry. In the early 1900s, that center was occupied by the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust run under the auspices of Thomas Edison. Then little companies like Famous Players and IMP were “independents.” The small firms moved west, organized themselves, and defeated the Patents Company. Within a few years they formed several of the studios that we all know today–Paramount, Universal, MGM, Fox–and they were now what economists like Doug Gomery call a mature oligopoly. They were in control.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, independent films were still being made. Some catered to ethnic minorities or particular tastes (especially erotica). Other independent films were prestige productions undertaken by well-placed industry figures like David O. Selznick, Charlie Chaplin, and Walter Wanger and distributed by the studios.

During the 1950s, the studios relied much more on independent producers for their releases. Around 1960, regional independents arose, particularly in New York (John Cassavetes) but also in Los Angeles (Roger Corman). During the 1970s, Billy Jack, black-themed films, and other independent work got access to screens. In the late 1980s what we now consider independent cinema came into being, crystallizing around Stranger than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It, and other films aimed at college students and hip baby boomers. (You can find more on these trends in Film History: An Introduction.)

2.) Calling a film independent says nothing about its aesthetic commitments.

The press has exaggerated the distinctiveness of indie films. People are always looking for novelty, but the fact that something is noticeable doesn’t mean that a seismic change has hit.

A low-budget indie can be completely conventional, as The Brothers McMullen and My Big Fat Greek Wedding are. Many of the most celebrated crossover entries are in familiar genres, like mystery and crime, romantic comedy, melodrama (You Can Count on Me, In the Bedroom) and the social problem film (Boys Don’t Cry, Monster). In indie films, even the most purportedly character-driven ones, the plots tend to follow the three-act/ four-part scheme and cohere around consistent point-of-view patterns, appointments, deadlines, motifs, and other traditional narrative devices.

Even the more unconventional indie films aren’t that unconventional. The Usual Suspects and Donnie Darko rely heavily on our knowledge of traditional Hollywood genres. Moreover, the films are often constructed to balance their novel elements with familiar ones, to help us accept and understand the novelty. For example, Memento seems at first blush very daring in telling its main story backward. But I argue in The Way that this strategy has several precedents, the film obeys some long-standing structural formulas, and the narration and structure provide a lot of redundancy to help us follow it.

This isn’t to say that some independent films don’t push the envelope quite far. My favorite example is Primer. It won acclaim at Sundance, got a distributor, played theatres, and went to DVD. But I think most viewers would agree much of it is just mystifying. The conventions of the time-travel movie, which it obliquely relies on, don’t help us all that much. I don’t even know how to pronounce the title. The fact that it played a maximum of 31 screens and grossed less than half a million dollars suggests that the film hit the limits of how incomprehensible an independent film can be.

My friend J. J. Murphy suggests that Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Julian Donkey-boy are also examples of an indie film putting severe demands on the audience. J. J. has studied this problem closely, and his book Me and You and Memento and Fargo (Continuum, due out spring 2007) talks quite a bit about what counts as an independent film.

3.) Indie film develops its own traditions of stories, stars, and genres.

Pulp Fiction is probably the most influential indie film of the 1990s. It made the clever and self-conscious crime film the best candidate for a crossover hit. It revived the sort of time-juggling that had been explored in film noir (1940s and 1950s) and in British and American cinema of the late 1960s-early 1970s. It highlighted the sort of “network narrative” (A’s story brushes against B’s story which intersects with C’s story) that would become a prominent strategy in the indie realm. Pulp Fiction also brought to the forefront the prospect that big-name stars would perform for less than their top salary in a high-profile niche picture.

Interestingly, some of the strategies reinforce one another. It’s easier to get a big star, for example, if you have an ensemble cast, if only because he or she doesn’t have to be on the set that much. Moreover, independent cinema has built a parallel star system own around the likes of Steve Buscemi, Martin Donovan, Lili Taylor. Julianne Moore is virtually the Greta Garbo of Indiewood. Some of these actors, like Moore, become mainstream stars.

The result is that the person who likes indie films develops skills in following their familiar features. Stars generate a following, and help sell new projects, while people come to understand the conventions of unconventional storytelling. Viewers steeped in Short Cuts, Pulp Fiction, and Magnolia can quickly come to grips with Crash or Happy Endings or Me and You and Everyone We Know. Once savvy audiences like this exist, a major company like Paramount can see the benefits of distributing Babel.

4.) Indie film is an integral part of the US entertainment economy.

To be strictly accurate, Babel will be distributed by Paramount Vantage, the indie branch of Paramount. This suggests a final point. Now companies believe that every niche is worth mining and that consumer tastes in popular culture follow the long tail.

The studios have set up their own classics and indie subsidiaries, and today they’re zeroing in on ever-narrower demographics. Focus, the indie division of Universal, established its Rogue unit for genre films (Assault on Precinct 13, Unleashed). Fox has Searchlight, Fox Atomic (for ‘tween pictures), and a “faith-based” unit for Christian audiences. At the thinnest part of the tail are the films handled by the hundred or so independent distributors, who still have to negotiate with powerful exhibitors and DVD distributors.

In short, movies can come from a studio’s core unit and aim at the mainstream market. Or they can come from a studio’s boutique division. Or from an independent distributor. All these outlets participate in the same economic system. It’s like buying a pot for a plant. You can get your pot at Target, or Pottery Barn, or at the cart set up in the mall concourse, but you’re still shopping at the mall.

Kristin here–

For nearly a decade now, morning talk shows and round-the-clock cable news channels have routinely announced the weekend box-office rankings. Why? Partly because they can. In 1997 and 1998, the various Websites that now provide overnight BO figures went online, and typically they post estimates for the weekend on Sunday afternoons. That’s great for those of us who write about films for a living. During the years when The Lord of the Rings was coming out, I looked in on Box Office Mojo almost daily as part of my research for The Frodo Franchise. But why would a college student or a lawyer or a dentist care about what film “won” the weekend?

I suppose it’s partly the notion that box-office takes are like scores in a contest. The number one film is the winner, and people tend to like to hear about winners. The news covers big lottery results, even though virtually none of us is affected by them. I suppose, too, that there’s a vague assumption that if a film is packing them in, people must like it and therefore it’s worth seeing. Thus reports of big ticket sales in many cases may prolong the a film’s success.

The trouble with this is: Although gross BO returns are the only things getting reported on TV news, they are far from the only gauge of a film’s success. There’s a lot more to be learned by browsing through a site like Box Office Mojo.

First, consider the total number of screens a film is playing on. These days big films routinely start out in around 3000 theaters, and a few that are virtually guaranteed to be hits start out in even more (3858 for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 4223 for Shrek 2). In multiplexes, they play on two or even three screens. Unless a blockbuster is released on the same weekend as another blockbuster (and the studios juggle their schedules to avoid such confrontations), it’s almost bound to win the weekend.

But how many people are in each of those theaters? If you were the owner of a small local chain of movie-houses, you’d care more about that than the total gross. Anything over $5000 per theater is considered reasonably successful, but usually the top films do better than that. This past weekend, for example, the chart’s topper, The Departed, averaged $8911, and runner-up Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning pulled in $6563. Not great, but decent.

Judged by per-screen averages, there are quite a few independent and foreign films playing in art houses that do very well indeed. The current indie hit Little Miss Sunshine opened in only seven theaters its first weekend (July 28-30), but it brought in $52,999 in each. (It had actually opened July 26, so that was actually a five-day count.) It was only number twenty in the weekend BO race, but on the basis of its early success, it eventually topped out at 1602 theaters and is still playing in 824.

Even now, though, after eleven weeks in release, Little Miss Sunshine has “only” grossed $55,010,203. Does that mean it’s actually not a hit? The same news sources that announce the top films of the weekend often mention when a film crosses the $100 million dollar mark. That’s a sort of benchmark for a blockbuster to be labeled a success—or it used to be, before productions budgets ballooned into the multi-hundred-million-dollar range.

That’s the other big figure, of course: the budget. Miami Vice makes for an interesting comparison with Little Miss Sunshine. Miami Vice just went out of distribution a week ago, on October 5. It had been in theaters for ten weeks, and its domestic total gross was $63,450,470. Little Miss Sunshine has now been out for eleven weeks and is number eleven on the BO chart. Its total may creep up to a point somewhere close to Miami Vice’s by the time it leaves theaters. The difference is, Miami Vice cost about $135 million and Little Miss Sunshine was bought by its distributor, Fox Searchlight, for a reported $8 million at the Sundance Film Festival. So although Miami Vice topped the chart on its opening weekend and Little Miss Sunshine never climbed higher than the number three slot (on its fifth weekend), it’s pretty clear which one was a hit.

That strategy of opening a film in only a small number of theaters is called “platforming.” It’s done with small films that the distributors think will get good reviews and word-of-mouth. If it fails, at least the company will have saved on prints and advertising (P& A).

P & A create costs for the distributor that often go well beyond the announced production budget. A major Hollywood company can spend tens of millions of dollars on them. In extreme cases P & A add fifty per cent to the total cost of making, marketing, and distributing a film. The public seldom hears figures for P & A, so people may get the impression that a film is more profitable for its maker than it really is.

Of course not all the money in those high gross figures announced on Monday mornings goes back to the studio. Across a film’s run, on average about half of its ticket income stays with the theater owner (and more than that overseas). So a Hollywood film has to gross roughly twice its production and P & A costs just to break even. That actually doesn’t happen all that often, so the studio makes its real profits on the DVD (which costs little to make and brings in about $11 in profit per disc to its maker).

The “horse race” figures announced by news sources are just for domestic grosses (that is, the USA and Canada). These days, big blockbusters tend to make more abroad than domestically. The Lord of the Rings, for example, took in about two thirds of its gross BO outside North America. Little Miss Sunshine, however, probably won’t do so well abroad. Comedies tend not to, given that different cultures have different senses of humor, and comedies also depend on dialogue that may not be conveyed well by subtitles.

All these factors (except P & A costs) can be traced on Box Office Mojo. Follow links on the menu at the left to find weekend BO summaries for any weekend since the site began. These include numbers of theaters, the percentage of change in each film’s earnings, the film’s production budget (where known), per-theater averages, and total earnings to date. (Weekly charts are also available.) The site also covers “international” BO (i.e., outside North America) and “worldwide” (i.e., really worldwide).

That “percentage of change in each film’s earnings” is another key to why winning the first weekend isn’t the most important factor. If a film has legs, as Little Miss Sunshine has, its percentage change from one weekend to the next will be low. A drop of over 50% is generally bad news. Miami Vice dropped 60.2% its second weekend, from first to fourth place on the chart, while the surprise hit The Devil Wears Prada went down only 38.6%. After Brokeback Mountain earned a record-breaking $109,485 per screen on its opening weekend, it expanded from five to sixty-nine screens, and its second weekend percentage rose 358.2%.

On a grander scale, Box Office Mojo charts of all-time BO winners. These can be accessed for domestic, international, or worldwide, and even broken down by genre and other categories. Newscasters like these charts, too, and occasionally when a new film breaks into the top ten, as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest recently did, they announce the fact.

Dead Man’s Chest is currently number three in the elite group of films that have grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, with Titanic at number one and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King number two. Usually that’s taken to mean that these three have earned more than any other film ever made. Uh, not exactly …

That’s only in unadjusted dollars. Inflation has driven tickets prices gradually up, and naturally films released at a time when one commonly pays around $8 to get into a movie will make more on average than those released thirty years ago. Unfortunately it’s impossible to adjust all the miscellaneous currencies for all the countries where movies are shown, so Box Office Mojo can only offer a chart of domestic BO grosses adjusted for inflation.

On the unadjusted domestic chart, Titanic is number one, Dead Man’s Chest number six, and Return of the King number nine. Adjusted for inflation, though, they are at numbers six, forty-four, and forty-nine, respectively. The real top three money-makers in theatrical release are Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, and The Sound of Music.

Box Office Mojo is a fun site to click around, either to trace the fortunes of your favorite titles or to get a general sense of how the film industry works. You can search any title and get a set of basic figures on it. And you can talk back to your TV on Monday mornings and say, “Ha! But what about the per-screen averages?”

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry that the same issue of American Cinematographer (October 2006) reports that Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus worked a cross motif into the architecture, lighting, and set design of The Departed. “These crosses, which the crew dubbed the ‘X motif,’ appear whenever a character is in mortal danger,” explains the article’s author Stephen Pizzello. He quotes gaffer Andy Day: “We even had grips and electricians saying, ‘Hey, we could put an X here!’ Michael was always very excited if someone found another place to put an X. He and Marty did it partly as a homage to the great noir films, and also to create a sense of imminent doom” (p. 47).

Two comments: (a) I noticed it a couple of times; I wonder if viewers catch it explicitly or sense it intuitively? (b) Ballhaus says that it refers to a motif in T-Men, which I confess I never noticed. But the same motif was used in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), as Hawks himself explained in interviews. It’s quite heavily stressed in that film, most memorably during a sequence in a bowling alley, when a pencilled X records a strike just before a crook is gunned down on the lane!

DB

Did you know that South Korea represents the fifth largest theatrical box office in the world? (More than Germany.) Or that Korean films and TV shows are sweeping Asia, with middle-aged ladies in Japan and the PRC swooning over SK pop stars? Or that Hong Kong star Andy Lau Tak-wah (Infernal Affairs, As Tears Go By, Running Out of Time) has been in 130-plus movies?

Variety for October 9-15 has a nice supplement pegged to the Puchan Film Festival detailing what’s on there. Kristin and I went once, and we had a great time (despite my coming down with pneumonia). It’s fall’s most important Asian film festival, with Hong Kong playing a parallel role in the spring. Online you can go to VARIETY or SCREEN INTERNATIONAL.
This year’s outing gives the award for Asian Filmmaker of the Year to Andy. He is of course a major pop idol–singer, TV star, film star, and model for fashion, shoes, watches, cameras, and God knows what else. After twenty-five years in the business, he still has charisma; I’ve seen a stadium full of teenage girls burst into a frenzy, screaming, “Tak-wah!”

Andy’s used his clout to benefit local and regional cinema. His production company Focus has supported a lot of recent work, notably Crazy Stone, and his First Cuts program underwrote such films as Patrick Tam’s After This Our Exile and Ou Yuhang’s Rain Dogs. (On the last, see my Vancouver blogs). And Andy is only 45 (though he looks about 30, dammit).

DB