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Industry Beat
by Anthony Kaufman
The More Things Change: How the Independent Film Business Has Changed Over 33 Years
Craig Gilmore and Mike Dytri in The Living End, courtesy of
Strand Releaseing “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says veteran distribution and marketing executive Ira Deutchman. In the business of independent film “before it even had a name,” Deutchman helped market films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1975, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989. For Deutchman and others working at the dawn of the American independent film movement, our current era of corporate consolidation, economic uncertainty and urgent need for dogged do-it-yourself showmanship isn’t so different from the past. “With the rare exceptions of particular moments in time when there was a need for enormous amounts of additional product for one reason or another,” says Deutchman, “it’s always been incredibly difficult.”
What can today’s emerging filmmakers learn from their forerunners, when few people were talking about “business models” or “career sustainability”? When Filmmaker was founded 33 years ago in the fall of 1992, the indie “industry” was just beginning to take off, with the rise of home video, Miramax and other specialty divisions. But no one remembers that period as easier than any other time.
As Deutchman explains, “The home video boom created an environment in which all of a sudden there was unlimited funding available for anything with friggin’ sprocket holes, but that reality lasted for about five minutes in the grand scheme of things. The same thing happened with streaming: They wanted everything they could get their hands on; then that ecosystem exploded, and everybody’s depressed again.” Even back in 1995, producer Ted Hope had already declared in this magazine, “Indie Film Is Dead.”
Anthony Bregman, who got his start with Hope as an associate producer on 1995’s The Brothers McMullen and has since produced such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and In the Heights, remembers it this way: “Instability in the distribution landscape; financiers fixated on what worked last time and scared of untested ideas; evolving digital technology that was both promising to make our lives better while simultaneously terrifying us that it would cheapen and destroy our work; and the constant demand to reduce budgets to levels that inhibited quality filmmaking.” Sound familiar?
Bregman fears that the current moment is more ominous than ever before—“This time it’s really seriously finally over,” he worries—but also offers a glimmer of hope. “The lesson,” he adds, “is that we can look back and see how there were still good times ahead, and there probably will be now.”
Other producers working during the Wild West days, before there was AVID, digital video and Netflix, offer some additional tried-and-true learnings from the past that we can still apply to our precarious present.
Changing Your Expectations
In the 1980s, when the likes of John Sayles, Gregg Araki and Todd Haynes were just starting to make films, the idea of a distributor bidding war at the Sundance Film Festival didn’t exist. Sundance—or, rather, the Utah/United States Film Festival—didn’t even become “Sundance” until 1991. While the landscape is obviously hugely different today—though yes, a few films do get bought for big money at Sundance now (still far fewer than in the ’90s and aughts)—filmmakers might consider leaning into the pre-Netflix, pre-Weinstein days to align their hopes and dreams with the current marketplace. “Because there was a comparative boom in the recent past,” says producer Mary Jane Skalski, who got her start working under Hope and Good Machine partner James Schamus and is now at Echo Lake Entertainment, “people coming into the industry now are waiting for permission, and asking, ‘Who is going to make my movie? Is Netflix going to make my movie?’ But back in the ’90s, you didn’t think there was a knight in shining armor that was going to come and finance your movie. I feel that’s how it is again.”
Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu, a producer and distributor of Gregg Araki’s films, including his 1992 breakthrough The Living End, agrees. “I talk to all these young filmmakers, and they’re talking like, ‘How can I become an immediate mogul?’” he says. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
“You have to temper your expectations,” adds Deutchman. “There’s this mythology that things are bad and they used to be good, but you just have to keep reminding people, ‘Things were always bad, with occasional good spots.’”
Building Your Theatrical Audience
While the marketplace has changed now, with fewer venues and exhibitors, Hu says that “the need for grassroots marketing has not changed. Before, it was going to universities [and] clubs and getting flyers out there. Now, it’s social media and Letterboxd.”
Deutchman speaks of marketing films “on a very hyperlocal basis by understanding what the people in that community really want, curating the right way and then direct[ing] marketing to the people who are actually your audience. I believe people are building up those muscles again, and the tools available now for them are more powerful than anything we had at our disposal way back then.”
Deutchman also points to “eventizing” theatrical releases, which used to be called “stunts,” whether Spike Lee selling tube socks to advertise She’s Gotta Have It or calculated Weinstein-infused scandals and controversies to raise films’ profiles. When Deutchman released Stop Making Sense, he remembers they had a contest sponsored by a local radio station for which ticket-buyers could wear the biggest suit (in a nod to David Byrne’s wardrobe) to the film’s premiere. “We had camera crews out in front of the theater and a line of people all the way down the block,” he recalls. “The winner couldn’t even fit through the door of the theater.”
According to Deutchman, we’re now in a moment similar to the ’90s, where theatrical releases remain of utmost importance, despite the massive cultural shift to streaming. “Especially with independent films, I totally believe in the importance of theatrical,” he explains. “I think that all the streamers are coming around to that idea, perhaps with the exception of Netflix.”
Deutchman contends that the future distribution model for smaller movies is forgoing the big SVOD platforms (which have largely forgotten about indies anyway) and “rather, making sure you are available in the Amazon store and maybe even having a platform that’s completely focused on making independent films available on an a la carte basis. So, I see it coming back around to exactly where things were the last time.”
Finding Sympathetic Funders
Despite all the economic uncertainties in the U.S. economy and the deliberate chaos inflicted on the markets and entertainment companies by the Trump administration, there are still film-interested high-net-worth individuals with disposable income. While it may seem like cinema isn’t the same sought-after or glossy investment opportunity it might have been in the past, producers say the money is still out there. Skalski says, “As long as there are people that have more money than they need, there will always be people fascinated with the entertainment industry.”
Veteran independent producer Christine Vachon says government-backed arts grants—now, of course, largely extinct—may have helped early filmmakers like Todd Haynes, but she’s now starting to see a new group of financiers who are sympathetic to independent film. “I think it’s very much in progress,” she says. “But I think there is a new category of investor that is starting to think these stories aren’t being told and they’re important, and [that] they can spend their money wisely, but also with their heart.”
Vachon says film still has “cultural wattage” in our crowded media landscape, and there are still those looking to get on board. “At the end of the day, it’s just capitalism,” she says. “If character-driven stories serving underserved audiences are perceived as profitable in any way, people are going to fill that gap.”
Embracing New Technologies
When Bregman produced his first film, Love God, in 1996, it was clear that the money raised wouldn’t deliver the special effect shots required of the horror-satire. “So, we used all this very nascent technology—the first generation of DV cameras, computer visual effects from a single operator who had honed his craft on cartoons and an emerging laser-based video-to-film technology [that] had never been tested before—to create the movie.”
For today’s filmmakers, producers say AI is here to stay in the same way. “It’s hard not to look at AI right now as a parallel,” says Bregman. “Just as before, there were anxieties about cost-saving technologies helping or hurting the creative process and ‘Will this new technology destroy our industry, or make everything possible again?’”
Being Scrappy and Just Doing It
In the very first fall 1992 issue of Filmmaker, Andrea Sperling, who produced Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day and But I’m a Cheerleader and is now a prolific TV producer (Transparent), wrote an article called “Freeway Filmmaking: No-Budget Producing, L.A. Style,” in which she offered several tips that still resonate today, from working with SAG to the permitting process. (Others, like obtaining cheap film stock, are admittedly outdated.) But Sperling says filmmakers should always request steep equipment discounts, “because you won’t get one if you don’t ask. There are always deals to be made. Part of producing is getting creative with the money you have. Filmmaking quickly teaches you how to stretch limited resources, and that skill never stops being useful.”
Even as Sperling now produces big-budget series such as A Murder at the End of the World, she says, “You never have enough time or enough money, so I think we should tap back into our old film school mindset, get a little scrappy and find creative solutions.”
“It’s incredibly hard to break into this business, and even harder to get anything made,” continues Sperling. “That’s why I still tell people who are first starting out, ‘Just go make something.’”
