Why Indie Movies?

Welcome to The Film House blog. This will be a little place for me to talk about movies and what they mean to me. For this first installment, I will be talking about Indie Film. Not only why it is such a viable form of expression, but where it comes from. For those who don’t have the time to read an entire book like Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, let this be a tiny primer for you. It should also go without saying that the opinions and views expressed in these blog entries are not necessarily those of the entire Film House and should be attributed only to my delusional mind.

              To understand the appeal of Indie films, it is important to first define them and how they differ from mainstream films. Hollywood (and later, the world at large) churns out hundreds of movies a year, each with the purpose of making money. From the beginning, the goal of movies has been to entertain first and then, maybe, enlighten. When we think of classic films, almost all of them moved the art of cinema forward while telling a compelling story (Citizen Kane, Wizard of Oz, King Kong, etc.). In terms of pure entertainment, I believe Casablanca to be the best example of a movie that has something for everyone but offers no great insight into its characters (Nazis are bad, nobility is good, etc.). 

               With Citizen Kane, Orson Welles not only introduced a new visual vocabulary to cinema, he introduced one of the first popular character studies. I would argue that Indie movies evolved from this template of character being more important than plot. Unfortunately, before the 1960s, most films that have stood the test of time are focused on Big Issues or fantastic, epic plots rather than the complexities found within real humans.

                I would also argue that filmmakers around the world tapped into character-based storytelling faster than Hollywood did. 1952’s Umberto D (from Italy) is a pure character study that I think would have been nearly impossible to make in Hollywood at that same time. Let me be clear, this is not to say there aren’t compelling, complex characters to be found before the 1960s (Brando managed to find those roles with regularity). Rather, if those characters could be found, they were found in service to a plot rather than existing for their own sake.

                Easy Rider (1969), is a pivotal movie in the history of American cinema. Maybe you’ve seen it and think, “What’s the big deal? Hippy bikers get high and ride across America.” The content of the film isn’t all that groundbreaking, On the Waterfront or In the Heat of the Night took hard looks at the problems in America well before Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda turned an eye on the underbelly of the country. The revolution didn’t come with the content so much as the context.

                Before that movie, Independent films were exactly what they sound like…movies made outside of the big budget, Hollywood system. Mostly, this meant pornography or the cheap genre exercises of people like Roger Corman. Horror, science fiction and smut were the most you could hope to find in Independent movies. However, Corman was training an entire generation of filmmakers who would go on to become the auteur generation.

                A few years earlier, Easy Rider would have been a b-movie about motorcycles and drugs like dozens that came before it. The success of the movie (third highest grossing film of 1969) signaled a change in the audience as well as the content. People were ready to watch edgier fare if it was presented in a serious way. The whole cultural shift in American thinking took the movie industry with it and Easy Rider just so happened to hit at the right time to be the poster child for the auteur movement.

                The 1970s, then, were the proving grounds for idiosyncratic visions of plotless, character-driven movies. The big studios started throwing money at the directors who graduated from Roger Corman’s grindhouse training program to produce their own tales of humanity. That is not to say there are not some amazing plots to be found in classics from the 1970s, but each genre has an example of being deepened and fleshed out by a greater attention to character. Horror became disturbingly real with The Exorcist, the gangster film became The Godfather and westerns turned into Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The directors were given free reign and proved they could make commercially viable product that still worked as “art.”

                The film brats of the 1970s created their own demise, however. Stephen Speilberg and George Lucas were friends with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese. Speilberg created the first blockbuster with Jaws and Lucas followed it up with Star Wars. These were examples of old Hollywood plotting with a few auteur touches to make them “gritty” or “realistic.” Remember that, before Star Wars, science fiction was the realm of clean and gleaming technology. Star Wars made you believe these alien worlds were lived in. Before Jaws, a director would never stop a movie cold to let one of the characters tell a story like Robert Shaw’s recounting of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.

                The other downfall of the auteur movement was the failure of several big budget movies like Heaven’s Gate. Audiences didn’t want to sit through a four hour Western with occasional gun fights, they wanted the wall to wall action of Indiana Jones or the grungy horror of Alien. Once again, idiosyncratic directors with strong personal visions were either consumed by the Hollywood system and made to abandon their aesthetic or they couldn’t find financing at all.

                This is where Independent film becomes a viable venue for great storytelling and character work. In the 1980s, it was as if the entire cinema world had been flipped upside down. Challenging films about difficult subjects were forced underground while b-movie formulas dominated the multiplex. That isn’t to say a few wily directors didn’t slip some subversion into their work now and then, it is just the era where morality became black and white and action heroes ruled the day.

                Miramax, a small studio started by the Weinstein Brothers, became the haven for filmmakers that would have been given big Hollywood contracts in the 70s. Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and their ilk grew up loving the movies of the 70s and they reflect that love in their storytelling. No matter how action heavy a Tarantino movie gets or how many poop jokes appear in a Kevin Smith film, you can’t claim that they skimp on their characters (well, until Cop Out anyway).

                When character dictates action, the action can go to surprising places. As much as I love Marvel movies (and, oh man, I do), they are ultimately predictable in their outcomes. When I sit to watch an Indie movie, I have no idea where it is going to go. Will the creators play with the format? Will they subvert genre conventions or play into them? Will there be an homage or reference to some other work that I will recognize? There is a real freedom that comes from not being tied to a major studio’s purse strings.

                After the ascent of Miramax in the 1990s, the studios decided that there is prestige to be garnered from supporting independent movies. Many studios started their own indie divisions where blockbuster revenue helps create small, intimate movies. Now, with the variety of platforms on which to debut films, there are more independent movies than ever before (oddly, still a lot of horror). Not all of it is good. Some of it is downright intolerable. Our mission at the Film House is to bring the good stuff to your eyeballs. We hope you like it.

IF WE WERE OPEN: This is a little bit I want to do every week where I talk about a movie that is not showing in Greenville. These are the types of movies we would be showing if we were open. This week, the movie is The End of the Tour. James Ponsoldt is the director and, you may think you don’t know him but you probably do. He directed the Aaron Paul/Mary Elizabeth Winstead sobriety movie Smashed. Last year, he directed The Spectacular Now, which I have heard good things about but not seen.

                The End of the Tour is about a Rolling Stone reporter (played by Jesse Eisenberg) interviewing David Foster Wallace (Jason Segal) over a five day span in 1996. Biopics are notoriously hard to pull off in that they usually reduce a person’s real, sloppy life into neatly divided acts and emotional beats. Even the best feel artificial and weird if they attempt to tell an entire life story. I have read good things about this movie in that it appears Ponsoldt is focused on just this small window of time and uses it to illuminate Wallace’s life in general. Capote was the only other biopic I have seen that works well and that is because it narrows in on a very specific time in Truman Capote’s life.

                This movie has the potential for fascinating performances, human insight and real emotional heft. If we had a physical location, you could come see it with us this very weekend.