Beyond the Multiplex

Then there are the kinda-sorta-independent major fall releases that have been carefully nurtured and packaged for the awards season, most of which are doing just fine. On one end of the spectrum you have "No Country for Old Men," clearly an indie by the industry's prevailing definition, but also a massively hyped motion-picture experience cum cultural moment that's bound for Oscar glory and a domestic box office somewhere north of $60 million. (Those are predictions, not facts.) Jason Reitman's pregnant-teen comedy, "Juno," looks like the winter's irrepressible breakout hit; Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages" are being caressed along carefully in limited release, en route to multiple Oscar nominations and the ensuing payoff.

That doesn't sound much like a dying business model, does it? Well, no, and also yes. You see, almost all the movies I've just mentioned -- and all of them with actual or likely box-office returns above $5 million -- fall on one side of the great indie-film caste divide mentioned above by Jonathan Sehring. Nobody disputes that the Hollywood studios' boutique wings produce, acquire and distribute lots of worthwhile films, but they're simply not playing in the same stadium as genuine independents like IFC or Magnolia or THINKFilm or Samuel Goldwyn, not to mention the many smaller companies clinging to the fringe of the business. As First Run Features vice president Marc Mauceri told me last year, the mini-majors and their upscale, awards-ready product should be understood as "a side strategy of the Hollywood conglomerates."

Milos Stehlik, director of the Chicago-based video distributor and art-house proprietor Facets Multi-Media (which occasionally dabbles in theatrical distribution as well), has been observing the transformation of the indie-film niche for many years. The studio specialty divisions, he says, "release a lot of good movies, and that's terrific. But they are the big gorillas in this little pond, and the way they can play the economics is very different. If something doesn't work, they can absorb the loss. When something does work, they can maximize it and reap the payoff. Their business model is very different from anything a true independent with meager resources can muster."

So the mini-major studios are implacably shoving the genuine indie distributors out of the marketplace they created; isn't that just capitalism at work? Beyond empathizing with a few people's bruised egos and disordered career paths, why should you care about this? That's an open question, but my own hunch is that, "Into Great Silence" aside, certain kinds of unconventional and demanding films, the ones the specialty divisions don't know how to package and present as spiritually beneficial holiday fare, will get driven even further under the radar than they are already. In my conversation with Stehlik, we began wondering whether filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski (not that they were ever so wildly popular) would even get noticed if they were working today.

"When you see exciting and terrific films that come with all this festival imprimatur, with rave reviews from all the critics, and they become barely a blink on the box-office scene, it's depressing," says Stehlik. "It's probably a harbinger of very bad things to come." (He's specifically talking about "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," one of the best-reviewed films of 2006, which made less than $80,000 in U.S. release.) But Stehlik's answer to Lenin's perennial question for would-be revolutionaries ("What Is to Be Done?") is pretty much the same as everyone else's in the business: Like it or not, sooner or later we've got to leave the damn movie theaters behind.

Facets has moved almost entirely away from theatrical release, and Stehlik notes that the old-school art-film audience has already retreated to their home entertainment systems. "In a very small way, DVD is keeping that art-house scene alive. I almost feel like independent film is going back underground, like it was in the 1950s and '60s. I mean, the cultural landscape is very different, and the technology is very different. I'm not sure the fundamental economics are very different." (His company's all-time best-selling DVD set, for example, is Kieslowski's 10-part series "The Decalogue.")

Sehring's company, IFC, is also gradually decoupling itself from the hazards of theatrical release, but in a different direction. Over the past year or so, IFC has committed to a refined version of the controversial "day-and-date" release strategy, whereby films are released in a handful of theaters and simultaneously become available via video-on-demand (VOD), or pay-per-view, to cable TV customers. This has yet to produce a breakthrough hit, but Sehring says that Ken Loach's Palme d'Or winner "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and Shane Meadows' acclaimed skinhead saga "This Is England" both did about as well on TV as they did in theaters, and that Jeff Garlin's low-key comedy "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With," while almost unnoticed on the big screen, did "unbelievable business" in VOD.

Next page: "We're trying to shift with the times"