Three Kings (1999).

DB here:

Why, asks Sharon Waxman in the New York Times, have the much-touted directors of the 1990s slowed their output so drastically? Kimberly Peirce released Boys Don’t Cry in 1999; her second film, Stop-Loss, will come out this spring. Darren Aronofsky followed Requiem for a Dream (2000) with The Fountain, which hit screens last fall. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is over four years old. David O. Russell, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Baz Luhrmann, and several others of their generation have, Waxman points out, “taken long hiatuses before stepping back up to the plate.”

Immediately, exceptions spring to mind. Some filmmakers who built their careers in the 90s are pretty prolific. Soderbergh is the prime instance; he sometimes releases two movies a year. Christopher Nolan has given us several one-two punches: Memento in 2000 and Insomnia in 2002, Batman Begins in 2005 and The Prestige in 2006. James Mangold is now doing postproduction on 3:10 to Yuma, his seventh movie since 1995. Kent Jones reminds me that Richard Linklater has finished twelve features in under 16 years!

Still, the slow pace of some heralded filmmakers is noteworthy. Waxman’s explanations, culled from interviews with Hollywood cognoscenti, intrigue me. Probably no one explanation will provide the answer, but it’s worth thinking about the many forces at work. I’ll run through Waxman’s five main points, commenting on each. Then I’ll toss in a few of my own.

1. Filmmakers undergo closer scrutiny and quicker judgments than at earlier times. Critics, audiences, and studios pounce on every failure, and with investments becoming more precarious, a single weak showing can push the director down the list.

Seems plausible to me, given the dumping of Shyamalan after Lady in the Water. Shyamalan is ambitious in his storytelling aims, trying to turn genre movies into art movies/ event movies à la Kubrick. Unlike Kubrick, he’s not winning a secure place as a person you want to be in business with. Strange as it sounds, a director who has earned over a billion dollars at the global box office is making the rounds trying to sell his newest idea.

2. Filmmakers are pressured to write lucrative scripts rather than direct questionable projects, or to direct sure-fire franchise hits (e.g., Bryan Singer and Superman and X-Men).

Partly true. But a producer friend commented to me that a lot of indie filmmakers whom he meets sincerely want to direct big films. Bryan Singer, who admires Spielberg, hasn’t made a secret of his desire to be a mainstream filmmaker. Aronofsky was long involved with Frank Miller on a new Batman, and Karyn Kusama moved from Girlfight (2000) to Aeon Flux (2005).

3. An overindulgent studio culture lacks strong executives who would challenge precocious filmmakers to extend themselves.

Put aside the fact that this explanation is somewhat opposite to the previous one. It’s hard to claim that today’s executives are too complaisant; surely one reason for the delays in output is resistance from the studios’ to directors’ ideas. If executives might be reluctant to derail a project, certainly stars are willing to do so. Once a picture enters production, however, it is more difficult for today’s executives to curtail the pricey directors to the extent that classic studio-era moguls could. The director’s demand for final cut, for instance, is still a powerful chip in the game.

4. The 90s directors might not be capable of dealing with the big issues of a post-9/11 world. Waxman writes: “Perhaps Quentin Tarantino, child of the video culture, feels at a loss when faced with the war in Iraq and global terrorism.”

It might be too early, though, for filmmakers to come to an initial understanding of this ongoing crisis. The major films treating Vietnam appeared some years after we pulled out: Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and so on. Moreover, not all films need to deal with big issues, at least directly. What aspects of American politics did Pulp Fiction and Memento address?

5. There’s no shared creative community, in which filmmakers help and compete with one another. Three currently successful directors from Mexico, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron exemplify how a cadre of friends can offer frank criticism and spur one another on.

Oddly enough, James Mottram’s book The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood maintains that just this sort of community exists among several 90s directors. The book opens with a meeting of the Pizza Knights, a cadre of young filmmakers who gather every month to watch 70s classics. The group includes Fincher, Jonze, Anderson, Peirce, and Payne (p. xv)—the very directors whom Waxman lists as surprisingly unproductive. They may not bond with older directors, but according to Mottram they constitute a pretty tight group.

Some other possibilities strike me.

*Maybe this particular batch of directors is just an easygoing demographic. Tarantino took his time moving from Jackie Brown (1997) to Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). The Virgin Suicides came out in 1999; does Lost in Translation (2003) look like a movie it took four years to make? They don’t call it Gen X for nothing.

*We should consider the possibility of burnout. Dwight Macdonald once remarked that the stress of making one film is much more intense than painting a picture or even writing a novel. It’s deeply exhausting on many levels. MacDonald speculated that across their careers filmmakers are likely to slow down or burn out or just make weaker films. We can all think of exceptions (Manoel de Oliveira is still turning out extraordinary films at age 98), but filmmaking does require a lot of energy. This might be especially the case if a director achieves early success, because the demands of each new project can escalate before the director finds her or his comfort level.

*Making just one film takes a long time. Aronofsky’s years of effort to produce The Fountain are well-known, as are Luhrmann’s problems with a life of Alexander the Great. Even a midrange project might be years in preparation before it finds backing. Once the project is approved, there can be months of preproduction, several months of shooting, and over a year of editing. To launch any big film, the director and stars will be meeting the press, traveling to foreign markets for promotional events, and preparing the DVD supplements. A lot of this will be happening just before or soon after the film’s release, slowing progress on the next project. The avalanche of such demands can only increase your respect for the stamina and multitasking abilities of Spielberg and Soderbergh.

Hong Kong and Japanese directors can be more prolific because the industry is more small-scale and there isn’t the same demand to promote the film afterward. Johnnie To turns out two films a year, Miike Takeshi more than that. They get to develop a body of work that, despite its ups and downs, has a texture lacking in one- or two- or three-shot wonders.

*The market has consolidated. An earlier wave of indie directors like John Sayles, Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant, Oliver Stone, and the Coens faced a fairly diverse marketplace. Their films benefited from the emergence of home video, overseas television outlets, mini-majors, and small but fairly well-funded distributors. They quickly built up individual identities–brands, if you like–that still give them some clout with studios and make them more productive than the group Waxman profiles. Although there are many distributors on today’s landscape, most are tiny. The younger indie auteurs, I think, face a more homogeneous system, with studios and their boutique divisions controlling a larger share of funding and more distribution outlets. There are fewer cozy niches for small, quick projects.

*Finally, there’s critics’ hype. Perhaps too much was expected of these rather untried directors. If you’re called a genius on your first or second outing, how can you top that? Consider these heroic descriptions:

With their films, the rebels of the 1990s shattered the status quo, set new boundaries in the art of moviemaking, and managed to bend the risk-averse studio structure to their will. They created a new cinematic language, recast audience expectations, and surprised us—and one another.

Quentin Tarantino, the rabble-rousing writer-director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction . . . very early in the decade broke every rule in moviedom.

The movies of the new rebel auteurs . . . played with structure, wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form, fiddled with the film stock, and ushered in the whiplash editing style true to a generation of video game children.

In the perspective of film history, these claims are sheer nonsense. (I try to show why in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) They aren’t good prophecy either. I ♥ Huckabees and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn’t exactly bend the studios to their directors’ will. In any event, such guff overheats the creative climate. Filmmakers aren’t granted a more gradual and modest exploration of their strengths and limits. When they fail, they may fail spectacularly.

By the way: the author of the souped-up passages I just quoted? None other than Sharon Waxman. (1)

(1) Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), x-xi.

PS Monday: Based on some intriguing box-office data, Karina Longworth gives a sharper-tongued rebuke to Waxman in her lively post here.

An American Crime

From DB:

In an article originally called “Sundance Movies Are Bad for You!” but now more tamely titled “The Trouble with Sundance,” Richard Corliss complains that indie movies have become so predictable that they form a genre in themselves. They focus on relationships, especially those of a dysfunctional family or a fumbling love affair, and treat their principals with a dutiful mix of pathos and humor. Where, he asks, are the more imaginative narrative and stylistic maneuvers fostered by the Coen brothers, Jarmusch, Tarantino, and the like?

That’s only half the story. True, indie films are often pallid comedies and melodramas. But just as often, and sometimes at the same time, they’re desperately sensationalistic. In these the formal conservativism to which Corliss objects is wedded to hot-button content. We call a bland Indie film quirky, but there are others we call dark. They’re Indie Guignol.

The very distinction is suspiciously simple, I admit. I don’t deny that there are independent films that manage to be riveting without being either cutesy or stomach-churning. Recent examples are Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart, Phil Morrison’s Junebug, and Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night. Some of these even won praise at Sundance. But most such films don’t get the sort of enthusiastic applause that darker efforts do, nor are their makers heralded as iconoclasts.

Where did Indie Guignol come from? As with most things Indie, sex, lies, and videotape was surely an important model, though I suspect that another template was furnished by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, that Hardy Boys mystery turned fetid. In any case, for a couple of decades the indie scene has taken on ever more provocative themes and subjects, from Suture and Boxing Helena through Happiness and Boogie Nights to Hard Candy and Little Children.

Reports from Sundance indicate that the trend isn’t flagging. There’s a docudrama about men having sex with horses. Hounddog, which Todd McCarthy portrays as a God’s Little Acre for the new century, is already better known as the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie. Reviewing An American Crime, a film about torturing a child, Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge tells us that it centers on “unspeakable and repeated violence and abuse.” Needless to say, he’s full of admiration. “Although often excruciating to watch, it is so well-crafted and well-acted that its portrait of casual savagery in the ‘burbs resonates long after the end credits roll.” In this climate, no wonder that the MPAA is politicking to rehabilitate the NC-17 rating, which would presumably help indie films from studio boutiques get onto more screens.

The central conceit of Indie Guignol is that to be creative in cinema you have to be dangerous. James Mottram’s book The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood is an informative overview of Indiewood, but too often it equates being a “maverick” and having a “vision” with an adolescent naughtiness. He approvingly reports Fincher’s reaction to the ending of Se7en. “While it reinforced the notion that justice will prevail, Fincher takes a private goulish pleasure in imagining Mills being ‘carted off to be gang-raped by prison inmates.'” Mottram notes, perhaps unnecessarily, that Fincher has a “sour vision of humanity” (155). Likewise, Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot celebrates the fact that her “rebel auteurs” made movies that “combined their brutality with humor” (xi), as if violence and comedy didn’t ricochet off one another in virtually every student horror film ever made.

Producer Christine Vachon, who named her company Killer Films, likewise identifies creative energy with edginess. Her book A Killer Life provides informative glimpses into independent production while showing how to create an indie brand based on scandal. For Vachon, indie cinema is outsider art; she tries to “guard a filmmaker’s autonomy and agency” and let him or her tell “unconventional stories” (15).

Actually, only certain kinds of unconventional stories. When Vachon is told that The Laramie Project is focusing on Matthew Shepard’s murder, she replies that she’d rather make a film about the killers and “their reported meth addictions, and the speculation that they had known (and maybe even slept with) Shepard” (19). One in-the-works project is “about the Bakelite plastics family murder plus a little pinch of incest” (209); another is about the killing of the Scarsdale Diet doctor.

Vachon, like most of her colleagues, thinks the indie tradition is dangerous.

The most dangerous movies Killer has made are the ones that reflected the real world back with the least amount of artifice: Kids, Happiness, Boys Don’t Cry. . . What they are, are stories without clear heroes or redemptive “arcs.” People may or may not get what’s coming to them, and those plots spook an industry premised on wish fulfillment and getting the girl (75).

The dismissal of Hollywood genres is characteristic of the Indie attitude. A good movie can be based on getting the girl, as Girl Shy, The Awful Truth, A Man’s Castle, The Apartment, Jerry Maguire, and Tsui Hark’s The Chinese Feast show. Likewise, just because a movie spooks the suits doesn’t mean it’s good. A movie lacking heroes and redemptive arcs and a happy ending may still be a shoddy piece of work.

Perhaps Indie Guignol is picking up on the Gothic turn of the New York art gallery scene, seen in the lucrative Saatchi show “Sensation” and Matthew Barney’s fascination with innards and dismemberment. Just as likely, the indies’ grotesquerie shadows the rise of gore and splatter in the mainstream. From The Silence of the Lambs to Saw, Hostel, and last year’s The Hills Have Eyes, we’ve seen the horror film turn up the dial on nihilism and disgust, and both the low-budget indies and Indiewood have moved in sync. It would be ironic if the vaunted personal visions of Solondz, Larry Clark, and the like were made palatable and marketable by the hyperviolence of the dreaded megaplex movie.

Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist. Long before the sort of recyclings that Corliss identifies, unconventional moviemaking turned out to have its own conventions–unfulfilling or risky sex, pedophilia, damaged self-images, chancy links among the characters. More surprisingly, the daring indie film often trades on the same clichés that haunt program pictures and prestige items. Sunny small towns harbor nasty secrets, manicured suburbs conceal rot, sex is degrading and only an excuse for power plays, rural folk are racist peckerwoods, corporations grind your soul, siblings vie for parental approval, serving in the military makes you a hairtrigger bully, high school is hell, and so is grade school. Dark visions these films may have, but the landscapes and populations they reveal are pretty familiar. The marketing genius of Miranda July’s You and Me and Everyone We Know was to blend Indie Quirky and Indie Guignol with the figures of the kooky woman and the lovable loser well known from romantic comedy.

Despite its well-worn materials, Indie Guignol is treated as trailblazing. Mottram, Waxman, and other admirers consider Fincher, Russell, Sofia Coppola, and their peers as unswerving rebels against the Hollywood tradition. That tradition, represented by Lubitsch, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Borzage, Sternberg, McCarey, Minnelli, Lang, Preminger, and all the rest, is to be pitied for lacking today’s freedom of expression, or even that afforded in the holy 1970s. Yet this condescension doesn’t consider that these studio directors made virtues of their limitations and produced something far more enduring than almost anything on offer from our outlaws. I’m reminded of Truffaut’s remark on the breakdown of the studio system: “We said that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves; what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.”

Mottram quotes Christine Vachon as saying of Todd Haynes’ Poison, “All of Todd’s movies confound expectation. That I think is their greatest strength. If people don’t keep making movies like that, the medium will get stagnant and die” (24). But shock value is only one way to thwart expectation. I grant that America’s oppressive political climate encourages us to think that rebellion is inherently virtuous; but some rebellion is just posturing. If Vachon really wanted to confound expectations and tell “unconventional stories,” she would back a film about a woman who voted Republican, served in the military with pride, found a job in a vets’ hospital tending to the Iraq wounded, and never once considered experimenting with autoerotic suffocation by means of a colostomy bag.

I’m not against visceral and disturbing filmmaking. I’ve written appreciatively about hard-edged Hong Kong movies, from Chang Cheh blood feasts to harrowing items like The Untold Story. Buñuel and Stroheim are worthy of respect, as are films like Godard’s Weekend and Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The point is simply that good filmmaking doesn’t have to flay its audience. Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Dreyer, Renoir, Ford, Tati, Keaton, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kiarostami–the list could go on indefinitely–present distinctive views of the world. They don’t try to be outlaws; they don’t strut; they don’t trail brimstone; they are not cool. Their films display a mature tact that goes deeper than either quirkiness or bleeding-edge daring.

Most Indie Guignol flaunts itself as cynically knowing, tapping into some dark current that the squares can’t face. The filmmakers I’ve just mentioned have done something that’s rather different and that’s becoming increasingly rare. Their subject usually isn’t life’s corrupt underbelly but the poetry of the drab and the ordinary. Their work is formally innovative, but in quiet ways–ways that have taken us decades to understand. Their films, even when they’re pessimistic, have a poise, nuance, and complexity that most independent cinema never approaches. Instead of talking about being radical, these directors have made movies like grownups. They’ve counted art more important than attitude.

Kristin here—

Our friend Brian Rose kindly send us a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern’s “Set the DVD Player to ‘Random’” (28 October 2006, p. 10; the WSJ website is by subscription and wouldn’t let me link to the article). In it Morgenstern claims that iPods playing songs in random order, video games offering constant choice, multi-tasking, and all the supposedly distractive aspects of modern life are wrecking movie logic. The latest evidence? A new release called The Onyx Project, an inexpensively produced interactive movie starring David Strathairn that allows its viewer to wander through the narrative in random order.

According to Morgenstern, The Onyx Project is just further indication that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation, both economic and perceptual. Kids who used to turn out for movies every weekend now devote themselves to videogaming, instant messaging, MySpacing and YouTubeing, sometimes simultaneously, while movie executives, pacing studio corridors, worry rightly that they no longer understand how kids’ minds work.” (Haven’t studio execs always paced and worried about how to understand spectators’ minds?)

Morgenstern even cites Pauline Kael’s essay, “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” where she cited the “creeping Marienbadism” in modern cinema. If only! Yes, I can just see today’s teenagers lamenting the fact that Last Year at Marienbad is out of print on DVD and searching eBay for it. Morgenstern simultaneously cites Marienbad as having brought fragmentation into the movies and praises such art films as Breathless, L’Avventura, and Caché, as well as sophisticated Hollywood storytelling in The Matrix and The Godfather Part II. But again, if fragmentation is what kids want, why aren’t they watching Caché?

It’s hard to know where to begin.

For a start, the makers of The Onyx Project declare on its website, “But NAVworlds are not movies.” (NAV stands for “Non-Linear Arrayed Video.”) Further, “They are not ‘interactive movies.’” The site compares these NAVworlds, quite logically, to videogames, but there’s a difference: “Video games present worlds. We love video games. But video games are programmed. NAVworlds are written, directed, acted and edited.” It’s a subtle distinction, but the point is, The Onyx Project is probably closer to a game than a movie. The fact that it is available only as a piece of software playable in computers but not in DVD players should be a clue.

But whatever we call The Onyx Project, is it really totally fragmented? Richard Siklos’ more temperate New York Times review, “In This Movie, the Audience Picks the Scene” (2 October 2006) points out that The Onyx Project retains some of the traits of a Hollywood narrative. “One idea behind the venture,” he declares, “is that no two viewers may see the movie unfold in the same way, yet its basic facts, characters and message will permeate the experience.

Sounds like a type of unity to me. Moreover, “The mystery at the center of the story is not revealed until the end.” Suspense and curiosity are maintained, controlled not by the viewer/player but the makers.

Let’s go back to that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation” claim. One of the reasons that The Onyx Project is creating a little stir is that it is so atypical. These kinds of experiments in time shifting are often used specifically for mysteries, traditionally the genre where the story starts the latest in the action and then backtracks for the final reveal. Think Memento, The Usual Suspects, or any of the neo-noir follow-ups to Pulp Fiction.

In 1985 when Hollywood attempted to introduce a mild form of forking-paths storytelling into theatrical filmmaking, they chose Clue, not only a mystery but a game. Then viewers simply saw one of three possible endings. Presumably the spectator was supposed to be intrigued by this gimmick and see the film three times. Few proved willing to sit through it even once, and the film flopped. Naturally all three endings were included in the video release, giving the viewer a mild dose of interactivity. Now the technology has caught up to make this approach far more sophisticated and intriguing.

More important, though, is the fact that most movies that young people see in theaters are not fragments or shuffled in challenging ways. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may have been too long, but its cause-effect flow wasn’t fragmented, and it has earned over a billion dollars worldwide. Look at the most popular and/or lauded films of the past decade: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Beautiful Mind, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo … the list could go on and on. These films are linear and causally tight for the most part, and when something is unclear, it’s a mistake, not a deliberate strategy. Even The Sixth Sense (another mystery of sorts) is easy to follow, and the twist, though genuinely surprising for most, is not baffling. A truly fragmented narrative is hard to find, in part because these sorts of films appeal to a very broad audience and have to be comprehensible if they are to succeed.

It’s easy to link the coincidence of the invention of gadgets like iPods with the trend toward Memento-like trickiness. As usually happens if one looks closely, though, complex narratives of this sort predate modern forms of interactivity. Even apart from the art cinema (whose main audiences from the end of World War II well into the 1970s and 1980s contained a large number of college students and graduates), there are Hollywood films that play with time in pretty sophisticated ways. In the 1940s there were the films noir, like Double Indemnity and The Locket, the latter with its flashbacks nested like matrioshki dolls. Later on but still in the pre-iPod era, there were playful films like Groundhog Day (1993) and Pleasantville (1998). MTV and the 1970s generation of American auteurs brought up on art cinema probably had more impact on story-telling than the iPod and similar devices have.

Moreover, even in traditional arts where interactivity would seem highly unlikely, one can find occasional works that offer choices. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (1979 to the present) include numerous options about how to proceed. (Greg Lord offers an analysis of one of the books.)

Besides all that, the shuffle feature on iPods is usually used for songs, which are short, self-contained artworks. I doubt that people watching old episodes of Moonlighting on their video iPods skip among chapters randomly.

One thing most people tend to forget (if they ever knew it) is that in pre-television days, when movie theaters were a lot fuller than they tend to be now, there were continuous screenings. That meant the times when the screenings would start were not typically given in ads, and people just went to the theater, often standing in line until a seat became available. A lot of people ended up coming in in the middle of the feature and just sat through until they got to that point again. They didn’t seem to be much bothered by the fact that the film was “fragmented” in a random way. (In Storytelling in the New Hollywood I argue that comprehension was aided by a considerable redundancy in the flow of narrative information. David picks up on that idea in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) Notably, among the first theaters to list start times and sell reserved seats were early art houses, presumably because the more challenging films shown there were less easy to grasp unless seen beginning to end.

If The Onyx Project succeeds, it may usher in a new storytelling medium somewhere between films and videogames. If not, it will be the Clue of its day. Either way, most filmmakers in Hollywood and elsewhere will continue to try and make movies with stories that people can easily follow.

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.