Beyond Miramax.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Indie films and their impact in the industry - Review

Far from Hollywood, new filmmaking communities emerge

In 1999, Apple unveiled a new commercial for its iMac computer. Through a video screen attached to a digital camera, we see a little boy riding a bicycle. A wire connects the camera to a desktop computer, where an unseen auteur reorders the images, adds a title, then views the result: a short film titled My First Wheels. Meanwhile, the voice of Jeff Goldblum translates what we're watching into a sales pitch. "This holiday season," he intones, "the most original, most emotional films may not be in theaters. They'll be on your desk. Introducing the easiest way to create and compose and edit and polish your own home movies."

Don't worry, I'm not trying to sell you an iMac. I mention the ad because it implies a number of interesting things. One is that the most ephemeral of film genres, the home movie, has undergone a radical change: It now involves editing as well as photography, allowing the domestic director to arrange his images in a coherent way. The difference between the traditional home movie and its modern descendant is the difference between a cluttered attic and a collector's den.

That in turn implies that the boundaries between the home movie and the independent film have blurred, and may soon break down entirely. In the '60s, devotees of "underground" cinema could speak vaguely of East Coast and West Coast filmmaking scenes. Today, one might find comparable communities in neighboring suburbs, each plugged into larger moviemaking networks via the Internet yet unaware of the other's existence.

So the self-publishing revolution that gave us zines and home-brewed CDs is now producing movies as well, and the number of D.I.Y. filmmakers is big enough for a major computer company to view them as a mass market worth pursuing. Yet these micro-auteurs have virtually no presence at the cineplex (except, sometimes, as an influence--witness The Blair Witch Project). Hollywood itself is becoming subtly indie-fled: The mammoth studios still rule the industry, but much of the work is now subcontracted to tiny, independently owned high-tech workshops, some of which have themselves become part-time mini-studios. Yet movie distribution has grown tighter, more centralized, and less open to outsiders.

Many articles have been written about one sort of indie-film success story: the "young," "scrappy" "maverick" whose Internet short or ultra-low-budget tape gets viewed by the right Hollywood exec, allowing the fresh-faced filmmaker to vault over those barriers and land a job assembling dream-widgets. This is not such a piece. This is about the moviemakers who don't want Hollywood jobs, or at least don't want them on Hollywood terms--about people trying to find ways around the distribution bottleneck, and the audiences that are tentatively coalescing around them.

Outside the blockbuster-oriented popmusic mainstream, there are musical subcultures devoted to bluegrass, techno, classical, punk, hip hop, folk, and jazz--smaller worlds where one can be a success without even grazing the top 40. One day, perhaps, the same will be true of film.

Movies in Cyberspace

If you're interested in self-publishing, in subcultures, or in people trying to make an end-run around traditional distribution channels, the first place you'll probably think to look is the Internet. And indeed, the Net contains a vibrant virtual community of filmmakers and a horde of online movies, though not all of the latter have adjusted to the medium's demands.

The most popular online moviemakers are the pornographers. Indeed, if you're looking for a self-sustaining film community comparable to the punk or bluegrass scenes, you needn't look further than the "adult" world, an economy with its own network of business giants and big-name stars, a market where entry is easy (stop snickering) and brand names are valuable, where amateurs and entrepreneurs alike can find audiences. Porn has taken full advantage of both home video and the Internet, and by serving as an early adopter of new technologies and an early experimenter with new business models, it has made things a lot easier for other sorts of filmmakers.

But if alternative cinema consisted only of porn, it wouldn't be worth writing about. So what else is online? A little bit of everything, from old features that have slipped into the public domain to "websodics," the cyberspace equivalent of a TV series, some of which star well-known actors or are helmed by well-known directors. (Tim Burton, for example, has made a series of online animated shorts called Stainboy.) The Webplex is in a state of constant flux, with older films disappearing and new ones constantly being made. But the sheer variety available never seems to diminish.

Film school students have started to put their...