“Another depressing movie for the depression,” Abel Ferrara cracked, after a screening of his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday night. The screening was held to raise money for Cinema Nolita, an indie video store on the verge of having to shut down for lack of funds (they’re having another benefit tonight, a concert featuring The Virgins and a DJ set by Animal Collective). Ferrara, who lives in the neighborhood and is a regular patron of the store, turned the the post-movie Q & A into an angry but resigned meditation on the ways in which New York, indie film and the world have changed in nearly two decades, to get us from the point where someone like Ferrara could make a film on the streets of New York, to the point where someone like Ferarra may soon be unable to rent a film on the streets of New York.

“Watching this film, it’s kind of sad,” Ferrara said. “At that time, there was some kind of indie film scene going on, and we could make a film and get it distributed. Why that indie film industry isn’t there [now] is caught up in the changing times.”

Several times during the evening Ferrara grumbled over the compromises involved in getting his upcoming 50 Cent-starring Jekyl & Hyde adaptation off the ground. “We’re just trying to get the movie made, and now every movie’s being made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if it’s set in Liberia. I’ve never been to Grand Rapids, but they’re bending over to give movies cash [via tax incentives].”

“I don’t know if we could have made [Bad Lieutenant] in Grand Rapids,” Ferrara said, pausing to laugh to himself. “But in this day and age, if you get money to do a movie, you’re gonna go to Mars.”

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Let’s play that game where we compare quotes from two seemingly unrelated stories that happened to come out on the same day and thus seem to say something about the zeitgeist.

First, from an interview with District 9 producer Peter Jackson (via Scott Kirsner):

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The press release came in Friday afternoon, but I had already abandoned the computer for Tribeca screenings, so I’m just looking at it in depth now: BAMcinematek has announced the lineup for BAMcinemaFEST, the summer event that replaces what was formerly known as Sundance and BAM –– and, it would seem, builds on it substantially. A sampling of the program’s highlights:

• The New York premieres of some of the most interesting American indie festival films of the year, including Beeswax, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, Children of Invention, Humpday, Sorry, Thanks and You Won’t Miss Me.
• On July 1, “An Evening with Arnaud Desplechin,” in which the director of A Christmas Tale “presents two personal favorites: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) followed by a conversation with film critic Kent Jones; and then Desplechin will introduce the next screening, François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.” I had planned to be out of the country that night, but this sounds almost good enough to change my plans.
• A screening of Metropolis with “live performance of original score by Irish ambient rock collective 3epkano.”
• A retrospective sidebar featuring films by Visconti, Jarmusch and a special 20th anniversary screening of Do the Right Thing.
• Parties! Including the after party for opening night film Don’t Let me Drown, and an all-night movie marathon.

The festival runs from June 17 to July 2.

Newsflash: a major metropolitan newspaper known to be struggling to stay afloat has allocated resources to something not totally shameless! The Los Angeles Times has launched a weekly column on independent film, called Indie Focus, to be written by freelancer Mark Olsen. Olsen’s first Indie Focus story, on the perhaps unlikely double feature of Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed beginning on Thursday at the Silent Movie theater, is online now; it’ll appear in the print edition of Sunday’s Calendar section, which is kind of a big deal. A newspaper attempting to combat their industry’s total desperation with a gesture that says indie film reporting (or really, any kind of arts coverage that demands an audience beyond 12 year old boys) is not only important, but worthy of the highest-profile platform that they have to offer? More like this, please.

Matteo Garrone’s Italian mob film Gomorrah found the highest per-theatre-average debut of 2009 this President’s Day weekend, according to four-day estimates provided this afternoon by Rentrak. On 5 screens, the IFC release grossed $102,702 for a $20,540 average. That even topped overall box office leader Friday The 13th’s $14,56- PTA. It also set a record for the biggest opening weekend ever at the IFC Center in New York City, grossing an estimated $32,000. Gomorrah played to sold-out houses all weekend-long, with hundreds of would-be movie patrons turned away. The strong numbers for Gomorrah helped lead the IFC Center complex to its highest grossing weekend of all-time with an estimated take of $53,870, beating the previous record weekend by nearly $10,000. The previous highest grossing weekend for the IFC Center was $43,337 from January 25-27, 2008 in conjunction with the opening of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” On Sunday, February 15th, the IFC Center broke the record for its biggest one-day gross, taking in more than $20,167 in a single day.

The indie box office boom in the face of otherwise total economi despair continues.. Via indieWIRE.

6. I predict the death of mumblecore movies by 2011. Independent films will once again boast strong scripts and, as such, will reach a broader audience. This is probably as good a time as any to reiterate to critics who invoke the name of John Cassavetes in their reviews of so-called mumblecore fare: John’s only improvised film was Shadows. Suck it.

Indie film distribution stalwart-turned-director Jeff Lipsky has written a two-part, ten item list of reasons he’s “bullish on the state of indie” film for Ted Hope’s blog Truly Free Film. There’s no denying that Lipsky has seniority in this realm, even if the introduction to the piece, presumably written by Hope, strains credibility by refering toLipsky’s recent Sundance premiere Once More With Feeling as a “hit” (John Anderson’s declaration that the film “would be a natural for cable, if the execution weren’t so distractingly strange” was one of the kinder notices). But much of Lipsky’s numbered so-called optimism comes off as cranky old man-ism.

Whether he’s celebrating setbacks in digital projection via questionable cause-and-effect logic (”Fewer digital screens…will mean fewer bad digital movies”), dismissing “download, PPV, and VOD numbers” as “paltry” without offering examples or comparisons, or making broad generalizations about the production methods of emerging filmmakers, as in the quote above (we’ll presume critics of Andrew Bujalski, Barry Jenkins, and any other “mumblecore”-associated writer/director who works off a screenplay are excused from “sucking it”), the whole post is anti new-technology, anti-experimentation, pro-traditionalism. It’s as if Lipsky’s ultimate reason to be bullish is something along the lines of, “all this shit you crazy kids keep throwing at the wall ain’t sticking, and that makes me feel good personally.”

Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress.
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Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is calling it “a masterful takedown” of “the right-wing myth that Hollywood keeps making anti-war movies that flop, proving how out of touch the Liberal Elite are with the will of the peeepul.” This post from Leverage creator John Rogers may be that, but it also points to something I’ve brought up many times before: the whole “Liberal Hollywood will spend untold sums of money to make sure we lose the war in Iraq and turn your children into godless eco-communists!” hysteria only floats when buoyed by willful ignorance of the stratification of the film industry. Different kinds of films are made, distributed and marketed in different kinds of ways, thus lending their ultimate market performance different kinds of expectations. I know when infidel propaganda like Taxi to the Dark Side doesn’t quite do the same business as good ol’ entertainment like Hannah Montana Topless With the Jonas Brothers in 3D, it’s tempting to say that America hates Alex Gibney. Except that America doesn’t know who Alex Gibney is.

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Scott Macaulay asked me to contribute some year-end thoughts to the FILMMAKER Magazine blog, and I did, and they’re up now. Personally, in memorializing the year that’s about to end while getting ready for the year ahead –– which, for me and virtually everyone I know, really begins mid-month at Sundance –– I find myself optimistic regarding all the great work I’ve seen over the past year and all the new possibilities that are becoming available to filmmakers, and frustrated that things aren’t changing fast enough to make those possibilities a reality. Here’s an excerpt:

Almost ten years ago, circa Erin Brockovich, I remember lying awake one night worrying about Steven Soderbergh’s career –– once responsible for Julia Roberts’ Oscar, would he ever make something as personal and indifferent to Hollywood commercialism as sex, lies again? Now, I lie awake at night worrying if people who are making films as personal and indifferent to Hollywood commericalism as those by Gerardo Naranjo, Matthew Newton and Frank V. Ross will ever get to have a career anything like Steven Soderbergh’s –– because before we can even wonder if they’ll ever get to prove their mettle through the moderately-budgeted studio films which lead to the franchise blockbusters which result in the clout necessary to mount completely uncompromising 4.5 hour dream projects, we have to wonder if they’ll ever see success on the level of the million-dollar Sundance sale.

Check out the rest of the post here.

On Friday evening, I moderated a panel at the Denver Film Festival called DIY FIlmmaking in an Indie Apocalypse. I pitched the panel to the festival in the hopes that by talking to actual filmmakers who have recently made moderately successful films (mostly) independent of the system that the “sky is falling” fatalism insists is broken, we could start to expand this dialogue beyond doomcasting and push towards options and solutions. I’m not sure we repaired the ever-expanding crack in the firmament in one night, but certainly the six filmmakers who took the stage offered a new perspective on the supposed crisis.

You can listen to a recording of the full panel here, but if you don’t have 73 minutes to spare, after the jump I’ve isolated what I think were five major themes of the evening. Here’s more info on the filmmakers and their films:

David Pomes, director of Cook County.

Jason Goodman, director and co-star of The Eternal City.

Mike Gibisser, director/cinematographer of Finally, Lillian and Dan.

Alex Cannon, Paul Cannon and Michael Lerman, co-directors of Natural Causes.

Darren Dean, producer and co-writer of Prince of Broadway.

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In the song “Range Life,” from their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus sang about the frustrations of being a touring indie band on the summer festival circuit, settling for cred (”Hey, you’ve got to pay your dues before you pay your rent” ), while much more famous but arguably less talented artists sucked up the spotlight. Stuck on the disenfranchised end of this binary opposition, Malkmus brattily goads the behemoth bands reaping its spoils: “Stone Temple Pilots, they’re elegant bachelors…I will agree they deserve absolutely nothin’, nothin’ more than me.” In the chorus, Malkmus longs to be rid of the touring hassle: “If I could settle down, then I would settle down.”

When Todd Sklar named his indie film roadshow venture Range Life, the Pavement reference wasn’t coincidental. The same kind of imbalance cited by Malkmus in the middle of the so-called alternative music revolution has arguably gone on to infect the indie film world: the movies which least need the film festival as a platform benefit from it the most, but the little guys continue to play along (if they’re even invited to) because it’s the only game in town. You could say that Sklar’s Range Life, which is shepherding four truly independent films to 20+ cities in North America, is an attempt to shake up that model’s monopoly. But for Sklar, the Pavement reference goes deeper.

“The other thing that really struck a chord is that sarcastic chorus, talking about ’settling down,’” Sklar said this week. “That really connected with hopping in a van and taking the film on the road rather than having it showcased to the same crowd every month while we get free cheese and crackers and fruit leather in the filmmaker lounge. Don’t get me wrong, I do LOVE filmmaker lounges (and fruit leather in specific), but I truly think, and more so now than ever, filmmakers shouldn’t be settling down when they’ve finished their film. That should be when you’re most excited and most involved in the work.”

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Last week after California passed the gay marriage ban Proposition 8, gay rights advocate and blogger John Aravosis called for a boycott of Utah businesses, specifically the Sundance Film Festival, which is headquartered at the Park City Marriott, which is owned by pro-Prop 8 donor Brent Andrus. Aravosis’ logic was that if the Mormon church was going to pump money into supporting a law that would impact Hollywood liberals, Hollywood liberals should enact their revenge by refusing to pump money into Mormon businesses.

I didn’t hop on this story when I first heard about it over the weekend, because it seemed so obviously crazy that I thought it would never stick. With Prop 8 now in the hands of the appellate courts, why waste energy on a revenge gambit that would inflict major collateral damage on innocent bystanders? And in fact, by Monday the indie film community at large began speaking out against the proposed boycott. …Read more

The Two Boots Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which opened in February 2000, quickly developed a track record of supporting niche interests. It’s where the Donnie Darko cult was born, via midnight screenings that began four months after Richard Kelly’s film had opened in mainstream theaters and lasted for 28 consecutive months. It’s also where a number of recent indies we’ve supported at Spout had their first and/or only New York engagements, including Dance Party USA, LOL, Jones and Kamp Katrina. And now it’s gone, the victim of a rent increase and general economic fatigue.

The theater had its last screening on Halloween night (of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, natch) — but with no direct competition in the area (we love Anthology Film Archives, but while they are a reliable home for spelunked jems past and present, they don’t roll with the lowbrow very often), it won’t be easily forgotten. So if you’re in the neighborhood tonight or can easily be, come out to the Pioneer’s going away party. It starts at 6pm, and the theater’s website (which you should check out regardless of whether you’re looking to attend the party, to see testimonials/triubutes to  the theater from the likes of Bingham Ray and  In The Soup director Alexandre Rockwell) promises “free movies, popcorn and reminiscences.” I’m going to try to stop by a little later in the evening — hopefully right when the reminiscences are starting to get smutty and incriminating — so if you see me, come say hi.

“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

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