By Geoff Pevere
If you’re an independent filmmaker with hopes of global conquest, this
would be a good year to dream. It’s the calendar that tells us: ‘9’ is the magic number.
Fifty years ago, an intense young New York actor of Greek lineage picked
up one of those newfangled lightweight 16mm cameras and enlisted some of his fellow starving artists, downtown boho-types to participate in a largely
improvised, intensely personal home-made movie project that was eventally released as Shadows. His name was John Cassavetes, and he might be to independent movie making what Charlie Parker was to jazz: a guy who reinvented a medium by reducing it to pure ecstatic impulse.
It was around forty years ago that Dennis Hopper convinced his buddy
Peter Fonda to co-star with him in a movie about two morally disreputable,
drug-dealing biker-hippies who cross the mythic landscape of the Ameri-
can southwest with a chopper’s tank full of dope. Good thing Fonda agreed,
because no studio would touch the project with rubber gloves and a ten foot
pole. The result was called Easy Rider.
Ten years on, another maverick took to the frontier to make a movie
about motor-cyclical regeneration. Only this time the frontier was Australia
and the landscape was burned clean of any remnants of lovey-dovey ideal-
ism. George Miller’s Mad Max was a high-octane, microbudget road movie
that traded in speed, style and nihilistic survivalism. Lesson: All you need is
some open road and a crew willing to work for gas money.
Alabama-born and Lousiana-bred, Steven Soderberg was just 25 when
he sat down and wrote in eight days the script for what would become Sex,
Lies and Videotape. He was interested in two things: First, in the way
that technology was compromising the morality and sexuality of his
generation, and second, in making a movie that was free to say what it
wanted because it was cheap to make. The result, released in 1989, kicked
off the so-called ‘indie movement’ as we now know it.
1999. The millenium's end saw a veritable cauldron of indie-esque activ-
ity bubble up and boil over: Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Magnolia,
Election, The Blair Witch Project — as different as they were individually, all
of these were movies infused with the essential 'indie' spirit of back-to-ba-
sics, make-your-own rules maverickism. They looked to the medium and saw not rules and formulas – which is to say, not Hollywood — but freedom and possibility, a frontier that remains open as long as you know how to travel light and live adventurously.
In 2009 that frontier remains open to those who can see their way across
it. That's perhaps the most inspiring way to look at so-called ‘independent’
filmmaking: As a revolution that’s constantly waiting to happen.
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