Independent Streak

It could almost be the plot of a Hollywood movie. A band of renegade moviemakers runs around the country creating low-budget genre pictures: campy horror flicks, quickie thrillers, schlocky sci-fi. Then the Los Angeles movie moguls figure out that there are profits in these pictures. They horn in on the little guys' turf and turn the stuff of B-grade pulp into A-grade pulp like The Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars.

Cut to real life. This is exactly what happened to the generation of postwar moviemakers led by Roger Corman, '47, the godfather of American independent film. But this story has a sequel. Call it revenge of the indies: A new generation of talented young filmmakers--equally at home on a shoestring budget--has now emerged as a potent force in American movies. In the last decade or so they've created a vibrant alternative cinema, spawning such indie classics as Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape.

A big chunk of this talent has followed Corman's footsteps straight out of Stanford. From the bittersweet Picture Bride (1995) to the deft social satire of last year's Citizen Ruth, young Stanford moviemakers are behind the kind of pictures that have come to embody these new independents. But even as the story lines have turned more self-conscious, serious and artsy, the low-budget spirit pioneered by Corman is still very much a part of the indie movement.

This plucky willingness to take on gigantic movie studios can make economic sense. The majors spend millions on marketing and distribution for a single movie, and recouping that money requires titanic audiences. But when a $1 million film like Sling Blade sells almost as many tickets as a $115 million Hollywood extravaganza like Dante's Peak, the profits speak for themselves. And Sling Blade went on to win an Academy Award, too.

How does a young filmmaker navigate the road to the Oscars? We found six Stanford alums using every trick in the indie book. Taken together, their stories create a montage of today's independent industry.

 

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Don Klein, '93, lives in San Francisco and writes frequently on education and the arts. He has also worked on independent movie productions.

 

Purists might say Alexander Payne isn't a true independent. After all, his latest movie, Citizen Ruth, had $3.5 million in backing from Miramax and starred Laura Dern, Burt Reynolds and Swoosie Kurtz.

Still, $3.5 million is paltry when you consider, for example, that Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford pulled down $30 million for acting in the money-losing The Devil's Own. And besides, Payne says, "the term 'independent film' has come to mean more an independence of spirit'--of not just wanting to do Hollywood formula films."

So-called "production company indies" like Citizen Ruth are the most successful segment of the new industry. Before filming ever starts, modest financial backing and a distribution deal already are in place.

Payne began his career on the strength of a film-school short that landed him a deal with Universal Studios. He would write movies and--if the producers liked them--Universal would finance them.

But after a year, Payne and Universal parted company without agreeing on a project. "What happens to people like me is, you do a film that attracts the attention of Hollywood, and they say, 'Wow, we love the film you made--it's so new and different! What do you want to do next?' " he says. "Then you give them a script, and they say, 'Uh, nope, this is just too new and different.' "

Payne and his co-author, Jim Taylor, knew their script for Citizen Ruth had potential. Set in Omaha, Neb. -- Payne's hometown -- the bitingly comic story revolves around a pregnant woman (Dern) torn between the equally manipulative forces of anti-abortion zealots and pro-choice fanatics. To make the picture, Payne went back to his indie roots. He contacted a producer he'd met when he first left film school, Kerri Woods (Kids, Beautiful Girls, Only You). Using his connections in the world of production company indies, Woods put the writers in touch with the right people at Miramax.

Citizen Ruth received wide distribution and considerable praise from critics. Payne is now working on his second feature, a satire about student council politics called Election.

Sometimes only a legislative act can kickstart a movie. That was the secret Kayo Hatta discovered in the making of 1995's Picture Bride.

To finance the saga of a Japanese girl who becomes a "picture bride" for a Hawaiian sugarcane worker, Hatta teamed up with co-producers Lisa Onodera and Diane Mark. They began by tapping foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute for $20,000 to $50,000 grants. Next, "We did a kind of grass-roots approach," Hatta says, "creating brochures, sending them out to the community and asking for donations of anything from $10 to $10,000." But the breakthrough came when Hatta and her producers pitched the story to the state of Hawaii. Through an act of the legislature, the state gave $360,000 and made the project a reality.

But for an indie, fund raising is never done. Halfway through shooting in Hawaii, Hatta ran out of money and filming stopped. With harvest season about to drastically change the look of the sugarcane fields that made up much of the locations, Hatta didn't have time to go back to L.A. to scrape up more cash. That's when she caught a lucky break. Her lead actress, Yuki Kudoh, phoned a lingerie magnate in Japan, whom she knew from a modeling shoot. On the spot, the actress convinced the executive to buy the Japanese rights to the film. With the crisis averted, the shooting continued. Hatta eventually sold the film to Miramax, which distributed it after financing the crucial post-production editing and sound.

Hatta's movie may have been one of the last to get such a big chunk of its financing from arts grants. "Those were the good old days," she says of 1993. "The NEA doesn't give grants to individual artists anymore, and the Hawaii program is being phased out."

Picture Bride won a Sundance Film Festival Audience award in 1995.

The movie business has its moguls and its mini-moguls. Think of J. Todd Harris as a micro-mogul. The former director of the Stanford Student Film Festival, Harris has made a career of putting together financing for small movie projects he likes. His first success came in 1994 as the producer of Denise Calls Up, the story of seven yuppies who conduct their personal lives via cell phones, pagers and e-mail. Harris corralled 35 investors who put up the $600,000 budget. He also assembled the cast and crew, which included actor Tim Daly, actor and co-producer Dan Gunther, '80, and director of photography Mike Mayers, '81. The film won Special Mention at Cannes and was picked up for distribution by Sony Picture Classics.

Harris parlayed his producing savvy into a deal with Davis Entertainment Co., a big Hollywood production company. He runs his own division, called Davis Entertainment Classics. In the short time since Denise Calls Up, he has already raised the money for and produced Lewis & Clark & George, Cadillac Ranch, Bad Manners, Digging to China and Dinner at Fred's.

Sometimes, moviemakers shoot first and ask questions later. It's called the "guerrilla school" of independent film, and it works like this: You scrape together money by maxing out credit cards, gathering small investors and cashing in favors.

Then, if the movie gods are smiling, a distributor spots the finished picture in a festival and offers you the kind of deal that made Clerks and The Brothers McMullen the guerrilla hits of 1995. That was the risky path Alan Jacobs, MBA '88, and Ian McCrudden, '94, followed when they made their first features.

To make Nina Takes a Lover, Jacobs formed a limited liability partnership and started dialing for dollars. Most of the calls went out to friends from his years at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The script he hoped investors would back tells the story of Nina, a woman searching for the lost spirit in her marriage. She acts out an elaborate charade with her husband, pretending to meet, and ultimately fall for, a new lover.

Nina is a juicy role, and Jacobs had an idea that it could attract a name actor who would, in turn, draw attention to the picture. He hired a casting director and told him to go after Laura San Giacomo, the star of sex, lies, and videotape (1989). The casting director said, "No way, not for so small a film." So Jacobs found a new casting director, and this one told him, "All she can say is 'no.' "

She didn't. San Giacomo loved the script. If Jacobs could guarantee her a base-line equity salary, she would do it. "Nina is an intelligent and sexy woman who takes charge of her love life by taking some risks," Jacobs says. "That was the kind of character she wanted to play." Nina Takes a Lover played at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals in 1994 and was picked up by Columbia Pictures for worldwide distribution.

McCrudden, for his part, got seed money by selling hisToyota truck for $7,000. He used the cash to set up a limited liability company. From there, he began selling shares in his movie, Trailer, at $5,000 apiece. Then came the hard part: making the picture. McCrudden's script follows Val, Dip, Penny and Anne on a zany road trip through the Southwest desert as they use the ruse of making a big-time movie to rob stores and dupe starry-eyed clerks out of their possessions.

McCrudden hired a crew--cinematographer, assistant cameraman, soundman, gaffer, grip, production people--for a month of shooting in Taos, N.M. He paid each of them $1,500 to $2,500. Other major costs included film stock (around $10,000) and the rental of lights and vehicles. This spending spree quickly demolished his $120,000 budget. But McCrudden hadn't run out of guerrilla tactics. He finagled free help from friends in Taos, and tapped into his Stanford network. Marjorie Crigler, '94, and Alex d'Arbeloff, '92, acted in and helped produce the movie. Kevin Donlon, '92, did the sound design.

After an industry screening in New York, Trailer won representation from producer Oliver Eberle for both foreign and U.S. sales, as well as a $50,000 advance on expected earnings.