Ecosystem Examination #3: What really happened to make #IndieFilm blossom in the 90's? Could we have something similar happen now? What were the factors then, and what are the differences now?
What was new in the 90’s when it came to Indie Film? Access to information, improved tools & new technology, those that wanted to create all gathered in the same densely populated areas (NYC & LA in the US) allowing group learning/discovery, disruption of a system based on scarcity, expansion of audience, a shared desire for something other than the corporate manufactured crap that the studios were pushing. Mostly though, a new technology and consumer product — home video — turned everything on its head. All across the world, video shops were hungry for titles to stock on the shelves and in each of those countries filmmakers were experimenting if making movies cheaper could bring something new to the art and business.
But was that all that there was (or was something more happening)?
As I stated before, for me, and many of my friends, we just wanted to make stuff. Sure we aspired to make GOOD stuff, but mostly we just wanted to make stuff on a regular basis that we weren’t ashamed of. We were genre agnostic. We were budget agnostic. And we were thrilled if we could just earn our living doing what we loved.
We weren’t looking to actually make a good living. We never dreamed that we might own property — or rents would be so high that we had to earn a fortune to live in NYC.
As we discussed, Indie Film was first ruined by the fact that people started making money and for some they made a lot of it. Everything shifted once it became a real business. Or rather once it became primarily a business and not an art form for most of the participants. The films changed. The work changed. The attitude changed. But perhaps it can also change back, and with it maybe the movies will improve again. That’s what I want; I don’t know about you but I feel the business has been overwhelmed by the mediocre. So much of the work has no courage, little discipline, and even less to say.
And to be clear, I get it too. I can be just as guilty of aesthetic or narrative slack. I too get tempted to give the buyers what they want. I too make many compromises I regret, but the fight for what’s right is often too hard to maintain day in and day out from every direction. But, I know it doesn’t have to be that way.
Can we find common (or even new) factors NOW that could allow for a similar expansion & improvement of cultural art forms -- especially cinema -- today that we had in the 90’s? Can those factors lead us to new actions which in turn strengthen first community and then conviction?
Seems to me that not only do we have another convergence of disruptions in both the business and the technology, but also a potential artist & audience rebellion fed up with the crap that’s been served and fed. Just like after a decade of corporate fed cinema diet the audiences of the 90's demanded a new authenticity, we are now pretty close to experiencing something similar. It’s not a coincidence that Manhola Dargis launched her year end round up with a quote from Godard and one that inspired Canby (both from the 80’s), that was pretty much what I am moaning about now, only said a whole lot better.
It feels to me that virtually everyone has been pushing the repeat and remake button over and over again for the last 5 years. I don’t think I am alone in thinking that this is one of the worst years for cinema in a good long time.
Could an aesthetic counterbalance be coming? Are artists and audiences mad as hell and going to not take it any more? What does it take to start a movement? Can we throw the right matches on the right gasoline puddle? Do we first have to stop dreaming that film can be anything more than a decent living? Isn’t it enough to do what you love and still survive?
Okay, maybe not this dream, but…
You nailed a key factor in that Indie film was TOO successful. Once the financial value reached a certain level investors and business interests naturally moved in. It is not evil, it is part of the system in that profits generate interest because they represent consumer demand.
For this reason, the vast majority of businesses work on a profit motive. But there is another model - sustainability/growth motive. In this approach, maximizing revenue is replaced by using profit to build up. This is common in young startups. One can make the decision to share the revenue through compensation (the employee-owned model) and use a larger percentage to invest back into the business. This means little excess profit and thus less interest to outside investment.
There is actually a film model for this - the studio system of the mid 20th century. Now, before focusing on the negatives of that, think about some of the benefits it had. Development of young talent in front of and behind the camera; secondary products with niche markets (B films) which included niche genres like horror; and the ability to build infrastructure that fed back into the system.
A modern day indie studio could function similarly by providing a growing pool of talent and portable resources to accommodate productions in our distributed world. The studio could handle distribution in physical locations but also provide a core streaming platform because the reality is the audience may not always be local. That platform being sustainable-oriented would provide an access point where these films wouldn't be competing with budget monsters so making it easier to find these niche films by the audience.
Indie needs to embrace the changing world by recognizing that access to your audience is even better than it ever was; the key is making sure that access that can be found in the big money generated noise. The indie folks also need to explore how they can use these new capabilities to enhance their storytelling in ways that actually engage and interact with the audience.
Thus through telling interesting stories to smaller audiences and providing "easter eggs" of experiences to engage the viewer to catch some attention; provide an outlet for material that may not be interesting to the profit-oriented entities but can be interesting enough to sustain itself.
Just a thought.
Thanks for articulating this - my friends and I often refer to the 90s as the Golden Age of film we were lucky to be alive for.
For me the key difference between then and now was that there was sufficient competition across the sector (distributors, video stores, indie cinemas, broadcasters, pay-TV), each with viable businesses, giving many paths to multi-party finance a good-but-risky project.
It feels now that some of this old world holds on, just about, with the help of soft money & tax breaks – but the majority of the English language indie sector has moved to single-party, end-to-end, all-rights financing from the SVoD platforms. A superindie might be able to play Apple TV and Amazon (& HBO/Netflix/Disney) off against each other to get a good deal, but that's largely it. In the 90s there would be at least one adventurous broadcaster *and* distributor *and* sales agent *and* financier, in *each* major territory to approach for pre-sales & acquisitions - as well as the major studios. A determined producer could patchwork something together. But the indie sector is now dependent on studio-like super-platforms, mostly buying all-platform, all-territory rights, which has narrowed output to a relatively few decision-makers. The studio system has been reborn online, but the counter-indie culture hasn't yet emerged as far as I can tell (beyond near-no budget short-form/micro-form on AVoD video platforms).