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.”
