Beyond the Multiplex

Was 2007 the year indie cinema started to leave theaters behind? Wherever the biz is going -- can you say "video on demand"? -- big changes lie ahead.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Dec. 20, 2007 | What kind of year was it for independent film? To paraphrase the well-known husband of our prospective first female president, it depends what the meaning of "was" is. And also the meaning of "independent" and "film." New York publicist Jeremy Walker, who helped nurse John Turturro's eccentric musical "Romance & Cigarettes" from the edge of the straight-to-video graveyard and turned it into a modest sleeper hit, approaches the question cagily (as publicists will). "I've been encouraged by the audiences, as distinct from the films," he says, "and the films, as distinct from their delivery systems."

Jonathan Sehring, the indie pioneer who helped launch the Independent Film Channel in 1994 and is now president of IFC Entertainment, says roughly the same thing, in less coded language. "It was not a great year," he tells me. "A lot of it has to do with how fast this industry is changing." In the midst of tremendous confusion over "what's independent and what isn't," he goes on, films not produced or distributed by the major studios' specialty divisions -- meaning Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics and so on -- "are barely getting any distribution at all."

Another veteran of the indie battlefield, producer Christine Vachon, whose recent projects include Todd Haynes' acclaimed Dylanology experiment, "I'm Not There," and Tom Kalin's forthcoming tale of sexual depravity, "Savage Grace," sees a rosier if still complicated picture. "It's been a notoriously intense fall, and there's a lot dividing moviegoers' attention," she says. "But actually, I feel like this has been a pretty impressive year for movies."

Vachon declines to be drawn into the what's-independent-and-what-isn't debate. "It's so hard to quantify exactly, and it feels so reductive," she says. She even rejects the standard industry definition of the term, which means following a film's financing back to its original source. "For me, ultimately you divorce it from the question of financing," she says. "Being independent is about the integrity of the vision. If a movie's great, I don't think it matters whether it was produced by 20th Century Fox or by Fox Searchlight, or was a film-festival acquisition."

Hardly anyone would disagree with that on a philosophical level. But over the three years I've been conducting a year-end survey of the indie biz, one grand theme has emerged. You could almost call it a gigantic free-floating anxiety, rather than a theme: Nobody has a clue how audiences will be watching adventurous, modestly scaled, sub-Hollywood films in five or eight or 12 years, but everybody's pretty sure they won't be watching them the way they are right now.

What Walker calls the "hardtop experience" -- using the ultimate business insider's term for, you know, paying your money and going into a dark room that smells like popcorn to watch images projected on the wall -- is not dead or dying or on life support, or subject to any other medical clichés you can come up with. As Walker says, "The 90-minute to two-hour moving picture still seems to be a standard cultural entity."

Yes, moviegoing is still here and still the centerpiece of the business, although everyone in Indiewood talks about it the way you'd talk about an aging relative who's bound to buy the farm sooner rather than later. Maybe it's not dying, but it's being closely monitored by the doctors for signs of a fast-spreading tumor or a compromised immune system.

There were the customary out-of-nowhere hits in the indie economy this year: Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" is the clear winner of 2007's Napoleon Sunshine award, piling up almost $20 million as a feel-good hit despite the not-so-feel-good fact that its director was unavailable to charm journalists with stories of the little film that could (because she had been murdered in her New York office in November 2006, shortly after "Waitress" was accepted at Sundance). Far more surprisingly, John Carney's winsome Irish musical "Once," another Sundance talking point, made more than $9 million, which comes under the heading of Touched by a Showbiz Angel.

Olivier Dahan's Edith Piaf biopic "La Vie en Rose," with its Oscar-plausible star turn from Marion Cotillard, grossed more than $10 million, an outstanding number for a foreign-language film about a cultural figure with little American profile. Julie Delpy's Woody Allen-esque comedy "2 Days in Paris" made a highly respectable $4.4 million, and another Oscar hopeful, Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," grossed $1.4 million, which is a "Star Wars"-scale number for a serious documentary about recent history in that country that starts with "I" and ends with "q." I'm still startled by the fact that "Into Great Silence," a nearly wordless three-hour documentary shot at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, made $800,000. Monk movies! I'm tellin' you, they're hot, hot, hot! Harvey and Quentin are getting one cranked up right now!

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