The sky is falling on indie film

Film Department chief Mark Gill, who has spent most of his adult life in the indie film business -- first during the glory days at Miramax, then at the late, unlamented Warner Independent Pictures -- knows better than anyone how bad things are today in that world. Wall Street money is drying up. Indie films have been tanking at the box office. Studio specialty divisions are getting the ax or fleeing the scene (as Gill described one of the cost-cutting moves, "New Line's staff was cut by 90%, and the survivors were sent to hell ... I mean ... Burbank.")

So when Gill gave a keynote speech Saturday at the L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference, it was sort of like hearing Al Gore preach about global warming -- who could possibly have a better vantage point (no pun intended!) from which to deliver the really unhappy tidings? (Go here to read the whole speech.) For the most part, it was a good, unsentimental, bracingly candid speech. One of my favorite parts was where Gill laid out the grim odds facing indie filmmakers:

"Of the 5,000 films submitted to Sundance each year -- generally with budgets under $10 million -- maybe 100 of them got a U.S. theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of 1%. Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure."

We've known that the indie business was full of peril for years. But is there a way out of the current doldrums?

That's where I think Gill's speech falls short. He ends up returning to the ancient wisdom of Sam Goldwyn, who once offered the pronouncement: "Make fewer better." Gill rightly says that in the current tent-pole environment, where advertising costs are skyrocketing and instant buzz can derail a new release before it has found its legs, big studios have a big edge with their marketing muscle. So indie filmmakers have to make better films to survive. Using Netflix as a salient example, Gill reminds us that quality is a potent weapon: the most popular picture among Netflix's 6 million subscribers is a relatively obscure 34-year-old film, Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation."

Gill's conclusion: "As simple as it sounds, it all comes down to a good story, well told." But for me, that's not just simple, it's too simple. The indie biz is full of people trying to make quality films. What this ignores isn't just that most films aspiring to quality don't end up achieving quality, but that many quality films don't make money because their subject matter is too narrow or dark or solipsistic to find a sizable audience.

The real problem with the indie business isn't quality, but discipline. We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films at studio prices. (The poster boy for this would be Wes Anderson, a gifted artist who makes increasingly idiosyncratic cinematic sketches on a far-too-costly canvas.) We also have a generation of studio executives who've been willing to, essentially, use specialty films as a loss leader to launch their divisions. That's why "There Will Be Blood" cost $40 million-plus and "No Country For Old Men" and "Babel" cost $30 million-plus to make, which along with the untold tens of millions spent to run Oscar campaigns, made the films a losing proposition.

If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money. Discipline is not antithetical to art. The oldest and most consistently successful specialty division, Sony Pictures Classics, keeps making money because it resolutely, sometimes to a fault, never overspends on a film. When there is a bidding war, you can always find SPC chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker running in the other direction.

Ditto for Fox Searchlight, an equally disciplined, incredibly well-run company that only acquires movies it knows how to sell. When my colleague John Horn recently wrote a story noting that Paramount Vantage had nearly 100 employees and had yet to make a profit, Paramount production chief (and Vantage founder) John Lesher called him and launched into a profanity-filled tirade. Instead of yelling at a reporter, Lesher, not to mention many of his indie film colleagues, should be doing some serious soul searching. The indie film business isn't going to get any better until filmmakers and studio executives stop their spending sprees and start making indie movies for a true indie price.

photo credit: Yoshio Sato / Focus Feature

Comments

[HulaGirl]

Oy Gevalt!

Don't send this to my parents, they'll be hectoring me to give up film and work at the DMV.

I can't be the first person to observe that studios get away with recycling bad TV shows, remake and ruin classics like Psycho, and make films such as the latest Indiana Jones and any recent Star Wars sequel look like big screen video-games

Can many Indies be worse than this? (Juno is not an Indie, it's a 2hr sitcom).

Quite frankly, nobody under 30 goes to the movies - they have YouTube, Video Games, FaceBook and porn to keep them busy.

Goodbye Hollywood - you've become as relevant asm the printed newspaper full of nothing but advertising and lowest-common denominator stories (See USA Today).

Viva la foreign film, classics and documentaries - the only respite from this digitally enhanced, over-hyped dreck.

[Tatiana]

I really can't say this is the most disturbing thing I've heard today. It was something I was saying throughout film school and that was long after the digital revolution took off. Hurrah to quality over quantity.

P.S. - This is one of the most intelligent blogs on film and film culture that I've come across. It's very refreshing to hear someone write on film from a journalistic standpoint in an incredibly erudite manner. Kudos.

[Dirty Harry]

Patrick... Seriously, welcome!

--DH

[gunnerdh]

while I agree with you that Mark Gill's solution: make better movies, is the "same old same old" (as if that hadn't occurred to anybody), I also don't think your point of fiscal responsibility is the solution either. Not withstanding a few fortunate filmmakers, the budgets for independent films are ever shrinking with everybody involved expected to work for next to nothing, which they will do because they believe, wrongly or rightly, that they are making something of quality. What is happening to these films when they are finished is the depressing conundrum.

[Sujewa]

Not everyone is worried about the "sky falling" on indiewood:

http://diyfilmmaker.blogspot.com/2008/06/real-indie-film-perspective-backlash-to.html

What's happening is a relatively minor change, in face of overall positive changes in the world; digital filmmaking & the web equals more people being able to make movies/Hollywood dominance & control of the medium ending. Soon the film business landscape will look more like the book industry: tens of thousands of titles being released each year in avenues appropriate to each (some Hollywood backed wide release blockbusters, some web & festival distributed films); in general the size of the industry will increase, with more revenue being generated (i think we will go from 500 or so Hollywood movies drawing 50 or so million customers a year to 10,000 movies all together - Hollywood & real indie - drawing 150 or so million custoemrs a year - or, Hollywood will still be the core of the business, but the outlying edges will expand massively - due to affordability of film production & distribution enabled by web, etc.).

- Sujewa
http://www.diyfilmmaker.blogspot.com/