Motion Pictures: The Independents

Motion Pictures: The Independents

"Indie" pictures

By the final decades of the twentieth century, independent, or "indie," movies were no longer just low-budget pictures with unusual subject matter that were usually shown in small, so-called art-house theaters because of their lack of appeal to the general public. Instead, an "indie" picture became defined as any movie that was funded by sources other than a major studio, and some of them cost just as much to make as movies made by the studios. Some critics have pointed out that this trend tends to discourage experimentation and risk taking among movie makers. Faced with high production costs, they need to attract wider audiences or risk losing money.

Award Winners

Two of the best independent movies of the 1990s were Sling Blade (1996), written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton, who also starred in his movie, and Fargo (1996), written by Joel and Ethan Coen and directed by Joel Coen. In Sling Blade Thornton plays a mentally deficient man who murders out of good intentions. Roger Ebert commented that "if Forrest Gump had been written by William Faulkner the result might have been something like Sling Blade!' The movie was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and earned Billy Bob Thornton an Academy Award for best screen adaptation and a nomination for best actor. Fargo, a darkly comic movie about midwinter kidnapping and murder in a small Minnesota town, earned Frances McDormand an Oscar for Best Actress and a Best Screenplay Oscar for the Coens.

Reynolds's Comeback

Directed by twenty-seven-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights (1997) was praised by critics and billed as a comeback for actor Burt Reynolds. A detached, unprovocative study of the adult-movie industry, Boogie Nights had little to do with sex or pornography and a great deal to say about how makers of porn movies create and promote them as consumer products.

40 Acres and a Mule

Spike Lee, whose independent production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, had two big hits in the 1980s with She's Gotta Have It (1986) and Do the Right Thing (1989), made news in the 1990s with three thought-provoking movies that examine how Americans look at race issues. Jungle Fever (1991), starring Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra, is about the consequences of a love affair between a happily married, successful black man and his white secretary, and it includes a subplot that deals realistically with the destructive nature of the urban crack-cocaine culture. Lee's biggest movie of the decade was Malcolm X (1992), starring Denzel Washington with a script by Lee and Arnold Perl based on Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Because Warner Bros, was distributing the movie, radical black activists feared that Lee would cave in to the Hollywood establishment and make a "safe" movie that would ease the fears of middle-class blacks and whites, but Lee declared, "This is going to be my vision of Malcolm X." Lee was also criticized for allowing the movie to be promoted with merchandise such as Malcolm X hats and T-shirts. In the end the movie offered a balanced and intelligent portrait of the black separatist leader—including his inflammatory speeches on race separatism, the divisive in-fighting among black nationalists, and his later transcendent experience in Mecca. Lee hoped that the movie would help to establish a dialogue between the races that would enable them to move beyond stereo-typing and race baiting to get to the truth of Malcolm X's message. Another Lee movie, Get on the Bus (1996), starring Ossie Davis, focuses on a group of twenty black men taking a cross-country bus trip to attend the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C. The movie does not avoid the anti-Semitism and white racism of march organizer Louis Farrakhan, but presents the Million Man March as being about family and mutual understanding, not about Farrakhan and his views.

The Most Profitable Movie Ever Made

In 1999 a low-budget independent movie, The Blair Witch Project, surprised everyone by becoming a cult phenomenon and then a box-office success. Owing in large measure to innovative on-line internet advertising and promotion, it grossed $140 million, far less than big-budget blockbusters such as Star Wars and Titanic, but since University of Central Florida film students Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez spent only $30,000 to make the movie, its net earnings made it the most profitable movie of all time. The movie was shot in eight days with a script that changed daily; it featured unknown actors; its "special effects" were created by people talking to each other; and it was shot entirely with hand-held film and video cameras, resulting in such shaky images that some moviegoers complained of dizziness and nausea. The movie took advantage of the late 1990s obsession with "reality programming," videotapes, and the internet. Millions of people logged on to The Blair Witch Project website, which included details left out of the movie. As one fan put it "Netizens have finally seen their own image on the big screen, and are ready for more." The movie was picked up by the independent distributor Artisan Entertainment and released nationwide in summer 1999, possibly creating a trend for marketing such low-budget movies to national audiences. The success of The Blair Witch Project led to predictions that mainstream moviemakers might begin using video cameras to reduce production costs.

Attacking White Supremacy

Another independent movie that received critical acclaim was conceptual artist Tony Kaye's directorial debut, American History X (1998). Edward Norton plays a skinhead who has served a prison sentence for the murders of two young black men and has renounced his white supremacist views. When he returns home to Venice, California, he discovers that his younger brother, who idolizes him, has adopted the same extremist views. According to screenwriter David McKenna, "The point I tried to make in the script is that a person is not born a racist. It is learned through environment and the people that surround you." McKenna interviewed several "skinheads" and said he "wanted to write an accurate portrayal of how good kids from good families can get so terribly lost" and to examine the "possibility for redemption."

THE TOP "INDIE" MOVIES

When the Internet Movie Database asked its users to rank the top fifty independent motion pictures of all time, thirty-seven of the fifty were movies released in the 1990s. (Number one was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964]). As of 11 September 2000, the 1990s movies on the list included: no. 2, The Usual Suspects (1995); no. 4, Pulp Fiction (1994), no. 5, Being John Malkovich (1999); no. 7, The Silence of the Lambs (1991); no. 8, American History X (1998); no. 15, Reservoir Dogs (1992); no. 19, Sling Blade (1996); no. 24, Fargo (1996); no. 34, Good Will Hunting (1997); no. 37, Secrets & Lies (1996); and no, 47, The Cider House Rules (1999).

Source:

"Top 50 Independent Movies, internet Movie Database, 11 September 2000, online at <us.tmbd.com>.

Sources

Harry Allen, "Can You Digit?" Premiere, 13 (November 1999): 93-103.

Douglas Brode, Denzei Washington: His Films and Career (New York: Carol, 1996).

Roger Ebert, Review of Sling Blade, Chicago Sun-Times, 1996, online at <www.suntimes.com/ebert>.

John Horn, "Trading Places," Premiere, 12 (October 1998): 57-61.

Janet Maslin, "Vanished in the Woods, Where Panic Meets Imagination," review of The Blair Witch Project, New York Times, 14 July 1999, pp. El, E5.

Josh Ozersky, "The Blair Witch Project," Atlantic Unbound, 11 August 1999, online at <www.theatlantic.com/unbound>.

Peter Travers, "Fargo," Rolling Stone, no. 730 (21 March 1996): 104.