"Celluloid Mavericks," by Greg Merritt, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, c2000, 463pp.
On the one hand, filmmakers want to be courted by the studios, to receive phone calls telling them that yes, we are going to finance your picture big time. On the other hand, directors want creative control. They do not want Paramount and Warner and Fox and Universal to dictate what they put into their films. Those film- makers who are adamant about creative freedom may actually choose to raise the money for their films on their own, without any help from the big OR small distributors. What they produce completely without help from studios is called independent cinema, or indies. Some of these indies are later picked up by studios. They're still indies.
Other filmmakers are willing to accept a even considerable degree of control from the suits in return for wide distribution and big bucks. Their movies are called commercial.
As Greg Merritt points out in his lively new book "Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film," a large segment of films actually fit into a less precise category that he'd call semi-indies. Semi-indies are those works which are not produced by studios but do have guarantees of distribution before they are made. "Pulp Fiction" is his example of a semi-indie, the $2,500 "David Holzman's Diary," which consists simply of a man talking to a camera, is independent, and "Titanic" is commercial. Merritt's definition is distinct from that of "Variety" critic Emanuel Levy's, who states in his own recent book "Cinema of Outsiders" (reviewed in the February OFCS journal), that an indie is a film produced outside the studio network but one which must essentially be challenging, edgy, a personal vision. While Levy does not recognize the separate category of semi- indies, for his part Merritt does not require his indies to be edgy.
He divided the book chronologically rather than topically but within each chapter, he sorts out the movies according to genre--gay films, porno, African-American pix, films that have more gentility than edge (such as "Room with a View"), sexploitation, blaxploitation, horror and the like. What may surprise some readers is that indies did not have their origin within our own lifetimes but actually were given birth in 1896, as one-minute flicks screened between vaudeville acts at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York on April 23. One of these flicks, featuring a shot of waves breaking on a beach, caused the audience to recoil with fear of getting drenched. Talk of naivete! Today's audience might, if polite, stifle a yawn at even some of the magical, highly financed pictures produced by IMAX.
Since studios until recently had been reluctant to finance pictures representing points of view that challenged American policy, we do not wonder that during the troubled times of the
1930s, movies far to the left of center were not appreciated by the moneyed set. King Vidor won a stream of rejection letters for his proposed "Our Daily Bread" in 1934 but got his movie into production by putting up his own $90,000 and then securing a $125,000 bank loan. Though the movie was screened by Pres. Roosevelt at the White House and was ultimately released by United Artists, controversy mounted. The L.A. Examiner called the movie pinko and the LA Times refused to run ads. Truth to tell "Our Daily Bread" was not a good movie, Merritt acknowledges. The conflicts are slim and the people are not real. When asked to throw their possessions on a common pile, they comply like zombies. Conflict, says the author, should have been born out of the very concept of cooperative lving and its departures from capitalism. "Our Daily Bread" does show people finding the ultimate fulfillment through the strength of a collectivist group. No individual wealth, no structured government, no profit motive.
Greg Merritt runs through hundreds of independent and semi- independent films in this manner. The breakthrough pics are given some analysis, brief, of course, since the book weighs in at only 462 pages. For the bulk of movies, Merritt must be content with appraisals of a sentence or two each.
Here are some of his incisive statements...
He calls the 1995 movie "Safe"--which plays like a disease- of-the-week TV movie but is really a devastating critique of the self-elp movement and the devastating effects of modern society "one of the best movies of the decade." And remember that Merritt is no blurbmeister. He insists that the success of art films is driven by reviews and word-of-mouth; that those who regularly attend nonstudio fare are "typically more discerning than others and place greater emphasis on critical opinion." (Take a bow, Harvey.) When art movies are marketed, the advertsiing is literate and subdued, reflecting an aura of quality and a lack of celebrities or explosions to hype.
He describes how an ordinary person can make a micro- budget movie: 1) limit the number of locations and characters, avoiding extreme weather conditions; 2) finance with bank accounts and credit cards; 3) use a nonunion crew or union members willing to work nonunion including friends; 4) shoot 16mm black and white; 5) rent an editing machine. Still you're going to have a hard time because "most movies made without a prior agreement with a studio are never screened in a commercial theater...their directors are never known."
"Celluloid Mavericks" is not only good reading for those in the general public who want to know more about the movies but can stand as a handy reference guide for critics who can use the volume to enrich their own writing. (C) Harvey Karten
