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A Letter From the Brink
Photo by Jem Cohen Brandon Harris worked with Robin O’Hara and me at Forensic Films in the aughts as our office manager and development associate, where his passion for cinema, sharp insights and loquacious charm never failed to engage the directors who’d take a meeting around our table. Long a contributing editor at Filmmaker—he remains the only of our writers to interview David Fincher—he went on to a myriad of positions and activities, including development executive at Amazon Studios. He’s currently president and, with Shaka King, co-founder of the production company I’d Watch That.
For Filmmaker’s 25th anniversary issue, Harris essayed the state of independent film, ruefully asking, “Were the best years behind us? Was I born into an era of unspeakable decline for not only the medium but our politics and environment?” Eight years later, though, writer-director Harris is still at it. (Disclosure: I’m an executive producer of his sophomore picture, A Fresh Hell, currently in post-production.) My final issue would not be complete with his very personal reflection on continuing to play the game of independent film even as the world races toward AI-driven eco-apocalypse. — Scott Macaulay
Indie film was born dying. Thirty years ago, in an article titled “Indie Film Is Dead/Long Live Indie Film,” my friend and former boss Ted Hope both proclaimed it dead and resurrected it in these very pages. And just a few months ago in Cincinnati, at the American Film Commissioners International conference, he proclaimed it foolhardy for anyone right now to invest in a first feature, referring to it as “essentially charity.” Hard to say he’s wrong, but, given that “95 out of 100 independent movies lose money” was a truism when I first entered the field two decades ago, when was that not the case?
In 2009, on the website of this publication that has given me so much, I reflected on the aughts during the penultimate day of that harrowing decade:
The oligarchs were still, by and large, not making their money back. I’m still asking the same questions I was a decade ago, when I was but a 16-year-old aspiring filmsomething; how do I get $200,000 to make a movie? Once I do that, how do I get anybody to watch it? I’m sure many of you are asking these same questions. Many of you already have it figured out. And despite all the tragedy and hardships that this decade held, we all kept going. We kept believing in dreams.
But whose dreams? What movies were not being made? What were (and are) the structuring absences of American cinema in the aughts? What did all of this say about what was happening to our country? Why is a film like John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side embraced and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar undervalued, Lee Daniels’s (woulda, shoulda been Geoff Fletcher’s) Precious championed and Tina Mabry’s Mississippi Damned ignored by the mechanics of the movie distribution system and the gatekeepers of the media apparatus, only for audiences to submit to the easy charms of mass-marketed films while objects that more accurately and delicately reflect their experiences get pushed aside?
Back then, I already had no illusions I existed in a healthy meritocracy. A couple of years before, I had been told, along with the rest of the industry during those late Bush years, that “the sky is falling” by Warner Independent Pictures president Mark Gill, a survivor of Weinstein’s empire who had delivered those remarks in the midst of the financial crisis and Obama’s election at the now long-defunct LA Film Festival financing conference. Massive amounts of equity were retreating from the space, never to come back, drying up as quickly as home values when the housing bubble burst and Bush/Obama’s TARP bailed out everyone but the homeowners.
A few years earlier, during the period between my junior and senior year at SUNY Purchase’s once vaunted film program and while producing my first movie “professionally”—a trifle of a short directed by a well-heeled friend who went to a neighboring Westchester County college and whose mother, a Canadian commercial producer of some repute, had put me up in her then boyfriend’s small, unfinished ranch-style home perched at the edge of a cliff in Malibu’s portion of the Santa Monica mountains—I was given, by a producer friend of hers who had worked on a lousy Jerry Bruckheimer flop about well-endowed female bartenders, a piece of difficult-to-shake and assuredly hard-earned advice I still ponder regularly, perhaps more these days than ever. I don’t talk to any of these people anymore—like so many people I’ve met and loved in this work, they have mostly passed out of my life, often regretfully (you all know who you are!)—but hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about that conversation with the Coyote Ugly guy.
He had biked over to the Pacific Palisades house where we were chilling, just a few hillside streets away from Will Smith’s place, from nearly Santa Monica. Wearing a skull cap and sunglasses inside, looking a bit like Warren Beatty once he goes full wigger at the end of Bulworth, he told me that, wherever I go in the film business, whatever happens to me, good or bad, I must not let the powers that be extinguish the “fire inside me” for the medium. “Don’t let them take that from you—what you got, it’s special,” he instructed. “Trust me, they will try.”
To paraphrase Mr. T, I pitied the fool—and pity myself now—for how could I ever end up like that? My cinematic constitution, my love of the medium, knew no bounds; even at 21, I saw everything and thought I knew twice as much as I did. (Some things never change.) I was infected with love of and reverence for the movies. When I first got off the plane at LAX that trip, while waiting for my friend to pick me up, Sam Neill walked by me; although seeing or being with celebrities would soon become commonplace for me, I was tingly at the presence of the Jurassic Park and Possession star in baggage claim. We shot that short film in John Larroquette’s house and Camryn Manheim’s backyard, both people in my director’s wider orbit. Wasn’t this the big leagues, making a short film we paid people to work on in the homes of TV actors in Venice Beach? How could I ever get tired of this?
I doubt anything on that street I met Coyote Ugly guy exists anymore, of course. The neighborhood recently burned to the ground in the largest urban fire in American history; the movie business, at least as it has been practiced in Southern California for the better part of a century and a quarter, is not far behind. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2024, approximately 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture business in L.A. County. Two years earlier, that number stood at 142,000. The non-writing EP deals, like the one at FX Networks that underwrote the cinema-focused company I founded with the writer-director Shaka King four and a half years ago, are long gone, but so much more is, too; a sense of shared purpose and identity in this ecologically rich and imperiled desert is also drying up.
Still, thinking back on that conversation now, I am touched. Coyote Ugly guy could sense my palpable excitement at being in California then, at making a movie even if it was bound to be bad, at being young and in love with a craft I was just scratching the surface of. He thought my passion was precious and worth protecting from all the danger that lurked out there: the garden-variety dead ends chased, the unavoidable disappointments, the predators and charlatans and clueless wealthy that find their way into this business with a higher regularity than anything outside politics. It’s a rich kid’s game—David Ellison is my age, owns one studio and will likely soon own two, given Lina Khan is out of a job, along with a Carbon Beach Xanadu that sits across the street from the 400-square-foot apartment I lived in for most of my days as a streaming movie executive, one now surrounded by the ruins of less well fortified mansions claimed by the Palisades Fire—and some of us are just too addicted not to play, even with dead janitors for dads instead of tech moguls.
I’ll confess; I often struggle to heed Coyote Ugly guy’s advice during these distracted, worrying days. I’m in the middle of post-production on my second feature as a director, made for much more than my first, a large portion of that my own dwindling Bezos Plantation blood money. Yet it was still far from enough—I’m on the hunt for finishing funds. At the precipice of 42, I’m seeking the same things I was that first summer in Malibu, when I was 21: the economic and social freedom to make the most of my abilities, the commensurate recognition and respect one could expect from their flourishing, a place in the firmament of movies people remember and revere.
From microbudget filmmaker to mid-level corporate studio lackey, ironically accomplished video store clerk to curator of a lauded regional film festival, food stamp–collecting adjunct professor to allegedly firebrand guest critic for America’s toniest film magazine—it feels like I’ve used up at least half my nine lives in what’s left of the movie business, and all I want to do is be as excited about its (or my) future as I am nostalgic and inspired by its (and my) past. I’m told I’m not even halfway through, sold on the idea by some that I am “still emerging.” But, at any level, this work continues to be both a privilege and a grind. I’m frequently just tired, eager as anyone for a golden parachute or a chopper out of Saigon that is likely never coming. The cavalry of national film and television subsidies, of federal rebates complementing the state schemes crafted to keep productions from fleeing to Canada or Hungary, won’t be here anytime soon. (Neither are Trump’s proposed tariffs on international cinema, at least.) It’s as it has always been in American movies—every man for himself and God against all, to bite Herzog.
Even as it remains, theoretically, easier than ever to make a feature film—your AARP-eligible insurance saleswoman mother or Tik Tok-obsessed nephew will be able to “make” them pretty soon, on Sora 3 or whatever, with the help of the stolen intellectual property of more or less the entire history of the medium at her prompt’s disposal—what of getting it seen and appreciated by all the equally distracted and increasingly impoverished or time-starved others? Especially when that movie your mother makes on her prompt, owned as it will be by some dude bros gooning away in Cupertino, is erased after her viewing, a simulacrum of artistry the corporation conjures and then atomizes away. A culture is supposed to be shared, and this form especially, which once courted us to join each other in communal darkness and that we now indulge from the comfort of our own digital prisons, will not thrive in the isolation of our individual predilections.
For those of us who want to make and consume them the old-fashioned way—with other people—the revolution empowering creators of aesthetically or thematically unusual movies, long promised in a variety of digital forms back in the early film journalism days of my “career,” never really arrived. The “long tail” that savvy techies hyped in my 20s only ever delivered more efficient means of surveillance extraction capitalism for “Magnificent Seven” companies currently propping up the American economy while paying pennies on the dollar to creators on Spotify or Tubi.
I’ve seen the decision-makers in Hollywood up close now; they have even less courage in person than you would intuit they do from the outside looking in. No oasis exists where reasonable, brave, artist-friendly execs roam, waiting to empower us all to overrun the status quo, no idyll that lives up to the possibilities of what United Artists or Film-Makers’ Cooperative or Borscht—to name three wildly different, filmmaker-driven collectives introduced at vastly different places and cultural moments in the history of the medium—were meant to be in the eyes of their creators. Meanwhile, the best indie producers of my generation—the smartest and most dynamic of people, the ones I looked up to, envied, tried to fuck and drove home when they got drunk at parties, those with whom I occasionally collaborated, swapped gossip or made fun of mumblecore, who I learned to read budgets from—they too have passed through studio exec jobs, or left the industry entirely, have had babies or are working in AI and trying to find a billionaire to join on a life raft to whatever comes next, when all our labor is devalued or usurped by the machines. .
What does it matter, of course? AI has bigger fish to fry; on a recent episode of the essential bi-partisan (but anti-centrist) YouTube news program Breaking Points, Nate Soares, president of George Washington University’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, predicted that a child today has a better chance of being mass exterminated by AI than graduating high school. Of course, what does it mean to graduate high school when you can just ask a computer to do all the learning for you, to write your papers or do your algebra, to titillate you and keep you company? As I write these words, the trick-or-treaters are scarfing Reese’s Pieces and the American box office closes out the worst non-pandemic October since 1997, a couple months before Titanic came out. Things are bleak everywhere one looks.
What to do? I wish I had the answer. Getting off your ass and going to the movies will not save us, but even the sinking ship in that James Cameron movie had a piano player until the bitter end. Whatever you do to preserve the ecosystem of cinema, do it with the sense of optimism, wonder and possibility not fully ground out of you, fire not yet extinguished, ready to fight, hand in hand, for that which is worth preserving: our minds, our bodies, our freedom and our souls. I bet, wherever he is, that is just what the Coyote Ugly guy had in mind.
