By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Does independent film exist anymore?: excerpting Vachon
In a 6,000+ word excerpt from her new book, “A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond,” Christine Vachon ponders what, if anything, “indie” means, working out from the example of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, of which she provides the most knowing schematic of its success I’ve read. 
“Here’s my counterexample and an argument for a new definition of the term “independent.” Bearded and intense, Mark Romanek directed music videos for over a decade. You could tell from his videos that he thinks with his eyes. He’d made videos for Madonna… Nine Inch Nails… Beck… even Michael Jackson… In 2002 he was so moved by a Johnny Cash cover of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” that he shot the video for free. He came to us with the script for One Hour Photo, something he’d written in three weeks on spec. But with One Hour Photo, we had the opposite problem of Greek Wedding: Mark’s lead character was a middle-aged, sexually deprived stalker. Studio executives believe people don’t want to spend two hours in the company of a character like that…. The whole setup of the studio versus the rugged, loner artist is, like most dualistic constructs, a false one. Look to autodidact Paul Thomas Anderson … skateboard video auteur Spike Jonze… and midwestern ironist Alexander Payne… and you’ll see directors who have made their strongest work within the studio system, with Hollywood casts. The Nation film critic Stuart Klawans has argued that “independent film” is another kind of branding, a marketing ploy. “What the [independent] movement is about is a commercial reconsolidation of the film industry” … In this formulation, B pictures are the ones independent producers like me care most about, and this hedged bet works in our favor: fewer executives are meddling because the studio’s risk is lower. Which allows me to push for the kind of independence in the filmmaking process that is crucial for our writer-directors. “Independent film” as a media brand never interested me.
And trust me, “independently financing” a film only makes my job harder. But guarding a filmmaker’s autonomy and agency—to tell unconventional stories, to cast the right actress not the star, to reject studio notes, to cut a third out of the movie right before the delivery date — is everything, since those values are what make film an art form and not just entertainment…” Each of her own productions, she writes, “‘can be somebody’s favorite movie because of its clarity of vision, because of the distinctiveness of what it’s saying. It’s that distinctiveness that allows somebody to say, Yes, this is singular and it relates to my life in this particular way.. [If] real creativity is allowed to get what it wants, that is independent film: the freedom of the vision behind it.”
