The big talk around the Academy Awards this year was that only one of the five nominated movies, Jerry Maguire, had been produced by a major Hollywood studio. The rest were independents, and they ran off with Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and both Best Screenplays. This was the culmination of several years of increasing public and critical acclaim for the writers and directors who choose to produce and distribute outside an increasingly monolithic studio system.
It would be nice to think that these indies are inherently better than the crud raining down on us from the studios most of the time -- nobler, more honest, superior in sensibility. And when that wishful paradigm holds true, a moviegoer thanks the gods of the independents -- the same gods who gave us D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, the first great independent filmmakers. But when you're stuck watching something like John Sayles's Lone Star, you may forget why you started going to the movies in the first place. Sayles's movies illustrate a central failing of the independents: The pure craft of cinema is often sacrificed in the pursuit of the maker's nebulous "vision."
Over the last two decades, Sayles has remained a loner, making the sort of movies he says he himself wants to see. But his career is more a tribute to his stamina and inventiveness as an entrepreneur than to his gifts as a filmmaker, since every one of his dozen or so pictures is badly made. In 17 years, he still hasn't worked out how to dramatize his ideas, direct actors or edit dynamically. Watching his films, you suspect that his clunkiness as a director is a statement -- that (though he's smart enough to collaborate with first-rate photographers) somehow he feels, for his part at least, that craft is too bourgeois.
Unfortunately, most of the indie writers and directors who've come up in the past few years are cast in Sayles's image. They've gone to film school, but unless it's USC or UCLA -- where aspiring moviemakers are coached to produce the kind of slick work that might get the attention of a major studio -- it's not usually a training ground in any real sense. Judging from the work they do after graduation, their teachers must award them high grades for following the beat of their own drummer and not slap their wrists if they fail to attain a basic level of competence. Todd Solondz is an NYU grad, but his Welcome to the Dollhouse looks as if it were made by someone who'd never been to a movie. The compositions are ugly, the script is adolescent and the acting is awful. Solondz got his start when he was honored at the Sundance Film Festival -- like Ed Burns, whose debut, the shockingly popular The Brothers McMullen, has a script the audience could have thought up while the cameras were rolling. Based on McMullen and its follow-up, She's the One -- stupefyingly clumsy comedies about "real" Irish-American families -- I'd say Burns was a triple threat: He can't write, he can't direct and he can't act. By current indie rules, however, his ineptitude passes for modesty and unpretentiousness.
Too many independent filmmakers like Solondz and Burns seem to have forgotten that movies are a visual medium. They don't appear to have any interest in exploring the potential for telling stories visually, or for illuminating character or evoking moods or getting unusual clusters of feelings onto the screen. You wonder why these people became filmmakers.
It hasn't always been this way. In the late '60s, young moviemakers who wanted to try out their ideas with small budgets usually brought a certain amount of finesse to their projects. These directors had an itch to infuse American movies with something new--in an era that was right for it. But they also looked back to the days of the tyrannical studio system, under which technicians of all sorts were shepherded through an apprenticing process. That's how directors, along with cinematographers and editors and designers, acquired the craft of making movies.
Still, when mainstream Hollywood filmmaking is as stagnant as it is now, the few gems that have been produced independently justify the many terrible ones you've had to suffer through. I'm thinking, for example, of Dan Ireland's The Whole Wide World, a glorious little picture about the romance between pulp writer Bob Howard (the creator of Conan the Barbarian) and a young schoolmarm in Depression-era West Texas.
It's even tougher to picture a big studio endorsing Freeway, Matthew Bright's sick-funny updating of Little Red Riding Hood with a foul- mouthed, street-smart Riding Hood taking on a psycho-killer wolf, or Stanford grad Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth, a satirical broadside that, in the finest democratic tradition, knocks down the pro-life and pro-choice movements with the same renegade energy and wholesale glee.
At their worst, indie releases make you long for the dullest Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies, in which the gloss of technical professionalism might at least keep you awake. At their best, they provide a freshness in the conception or the material or the tone -- a challenge to the prevailing lowest-common-denominator approach to filmmaking.Steve Vineberg, PhD '85, writes regularly on film and theater. He teaches at College of the Holy Cross.
