Indie blues

In Hollywood, more is less

It's positively Frankensteinian, like the multiplying brooms confronting Mickey's Sorcerer's Apprentice. I'm referring to the once monthly, then weekly, now daily bursting-forth from the laboratory of spanking- new American independent films. We're talking two or three features born every twenty-four hours.

Six hundred of these newly birthed were submitted to this year's Sundance Film Festival. Weary selectors picked 60 for showing. The remaining 540 were orphaned, cast to the wind.

"Nine hundred films were made in the last 12 months," estimates John Pierson, author of the indie semi-bible Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes. "I know, because half of those films were sent on tape to me."

Pierson was part of an important seminar panel at the recent 14th Miami Film Festival, a pow-wow to discuss this hardly acknowledged crisis situation for American independents. Others on the panel: New York publicist for specialty films Reid Rosefelt, and Miramax and Sony Classics executives Mark Gill and Michael Barker.

Here's the rub: though far more American indies than ever are being produced, their prospects for distribution are going down, down. Small companies are vanishing, and the bankrolled distributors that remain solvent -- Miramax, Sony Classics, Orion Classics, October Films -- are all cutting back on independent acquisitions.

"We've been notorious for overbuying," acknowledged Miramax's Gill. "But now we'll leave less and less to luck." A first-time film that Miramax might have acquired will be looked at instead as a showcase for directorial talent. "It's an expensive résumé," Gill said, "but everyone is downsizing."

For all that indies are being hyped in the media, their box-office performance is actually dwindling. "Though hundreds of indie features are made, these don't seem to be reaching audiences," publicist Rosefelt noted. "Of the Sundance 600, only about six aren't total catastrophes in the theaters."

John Sayles's Lone Star did quite well for Sony Classics. But Citizen Ruth, Walking and Talking, and Manny & Lo proved disasters in 1996 for Miramax. The biggest arthouse hits in the USA weren't American indies. They were British pics like Emma, The English Patient, and Secrets & Lies. According to the February 3 Variety, "Specialized films accounted for just four percent of the domestic theatrical market last year." That was down from the all-time high of six percent in 1994. And the top 20 studio films constituted in 1996 a higher percentage of the box office than ever in history.

Said Gill: "Three screens now show Mel Gibson's Ransom where three different films had been. The megastars are squeezing us out. There were 26 wide Hollywood releases last year, and there will be 34 this year. There are far too many studio films released." And far too many indies in distribution desperately seeking an audience.

Whose fault is the box-office failure? Is it the lack of any sense of filmic adventure in what Tom Wolfe called "the fly-over people" -- Americans not in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or LA?

Miamians, for example?

"Miami is a pretty tough town for us," Gill told the gathered Floridians, who were hoping for strokes. "Only Woody Allen movies always work. You are clearly outgrossed by Cleveland and cities of less sophistication."

"In Miami, Catherine Deneuve is as good as gold, but don't ask me why," said Sony Classics' Michael Barker. "In Cleveland, any movie that has anything to do with classical music does really well. It was our number one city for Carmen, though Cyrano de Bergerac bombed. Different parts of America are truly different. French comedies always work in Houston but not in Dallas. Don't ask me why. I don't have a friggin' clue."

And which city out there wants to see more and more American indies? Like the two or three popping out today?

THE ACADEMY DOES what it always does, snubs the great comedians for Best Actor. No nominations for the stupendous performances of Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor and The Cable Guy's Jim Carrey. I'm happy to report that Carrey is completely unrepentant about The Cable Guy's going edgy and scary. "I wanted it to go worse. I wanted it darker," he says in this month's Premiere.

"I had parents come up to me and say that their kids were crying when they left," Carrey continues. "I thought, I don't want your kid to be upset, but you know what? It's not going to hurt him to be upset. The trouble is this Stepford mentality that life has to be completely happy all the time."

TWO OF 1996's best films, It's My Party and Citizen Ruth, were among the year's abysmal flops. What they had in common: directors who refused to speak up about the sexual politics of their movies. It's My Party's Randal Kleiser kept quiet about how the lead gay character was autobiographical. Citizen Ruth's Alexander Payne dodged all questions that required him to take a personal stand on the abortion issue.