Its Time to Blow the Whole Thing Up

Recent comparisons to the 70's Golden Age of American movies and today's new, digital era in indie cinema are becoming more and more common. Most have found parallels in the former's crumbling system, and today's lack of a usable structure as it relates to indie distribution. In other words, at some point, "they" (the current infrastructure) didn't know what to do then, and once again, they aren't quite sure what to do now. One cannot help but find this incredibly encouraging, including this writer, as the limits that the current system force on us indies, are also catalysts for the ultimate creative, as well as financial freedoms. If indie producers keep costs low and expectations in check, we could soon be actually reliving the single greatest era in cinema.

Manohla Dargis details why in a recent NY Times article on the DIY Revolution. Here is some of it below, after the jump:



“'IT is time to blow the whole thing up.' In September 1960, when those words were lobbed at the world by a New York-centric, off-Hollywood circle of malcontents called the New American Cinema Group, there was no mistaking their radical urgency. Given the cold war times — one of the first large ban-the-bomb rallies had been held in Madison Square Garden some months earlier — this call to annihilation might have seemed tasteless. But for this group, whose numbers included the film critic, later filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the not-yet-director Peter Bogdanovich, the time for a free American cinema, one rooted in personal vision and liberated from censorship and the distribution and exhibition strangleholds, was now.

The time may have come once more. In the last few years American independent cinema has been rocked by seismic changes — including downsized companies and emerging technologies — that have altered this world more profoundly since 1993, the year that the Walt Disney Company bought Miramax Films. In the ensuing years the other major studios followed suit (Sony already had a boutique with Sony Pictures Classics), building specialty divisions, snapping up talent and writing bigger and bigger checks. It was an industry shift that soon resulted in a studio-indie infrastructure that had its own auteurs as well as its own producers, agents, lawyers, managers, publicists, festival programmers and journalists. Together this world gave indie movies “buzz” and minted new stars, some of whom hit it big, going from Sundance to Scorsese."

Read the full piece HERE.