Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

FILM

FILM; The Oscars Upstaged (Almost)

FILM; The Oscars Upstaged (Almost)
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
March 19, 1995, Section 2, Page 15Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

IF 1994 WERE A MOVIE, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN called "Revenge of the Little Ones." Thirty-three Academy Award nominations this year -- including two for best picture, two for best actor, all five nominations for best supporting actress and all five for original screenplay -- went to films that were not made by the major studios. And that's not counting all five nominees for best foreign-language film. Paramount Pictures, a major studio with 17 nominations, had to settle for second to scrappy Miramax, an independent that had 22.

Those nominations and the box-office success of movies like Miramax's "Pulp Fiction" and Gramercy's "Four Weddings and a Funeral" have pushed independent films, not for the first time, into the spotlight. Paradoxically, this has happened when the line separating studio and independent has become blurred.

Miramax, the feistiest and most successful of the independent companies, was purchased a year ago by Disney. New Line has been bought by Ted Turner. Universal is a co-owner of Gramercy. And 20th Century Fox has just created Searchlight Pictures, which will make movies aimed at sophisticated adults.

When the nominating committee for the independent film world's top prizes -- the Independent Spirit Awards -- met last December, its toughest decision was not which movies to nominate but which movies to make eligible. "Because of the murkier origins of films today, the board looked for solutions that didn't cut off one's nose to spite one's face," says Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, who was the chairman of the Spirit Awards nominating committee.

One solution was to throw out the standard definition of an independent film: that it was not financed by a major studio. Instead, the new regulations allowed the committee to consider "percentage of financing from non-studio sources," along with "uniqueness of vision," "economy of means" and "original, provocative subject matter." Among the movies declared eligible were New Line's "Dumb and Dumber," Woody Allen's $19 million "Bullets Over Broadway" and "I Like It Like That," a low-budget first feature that was made by a major studio, Columbia Pictures.

The Independent Spirit Awards (which are administered by the Independent Feature Project/West) are handed out two days before the Oscars, an act of self-promotion that may be unnecessary this year. The ceremony on Saturday, to be held in a tent on the Santa Monica beach, sold out its $10,000 tables and $125 tickets immediately.

"Ten years ago, the I.F.P. director used to pop her own popcorn and take it to our screenings in an effort to get people to come see independent films," says Dawn Hudson, director of the Independent Feature Project (I.F.P.)/West. "The Spirit Awards used to be 200 people crammed into a restaurant. Now we've sold all 1,100 tickets and have a waiting list." The event is sponsored this year by the Independent Film Channel, Bravo, Entertainment Weekly magazine and Panavision.

Portions of the event will be broadcast on March 27 on the Bravo cable channel, during commercial breaks in the Academy Award telecast. Among the actors who will present Spirit Awards this year are Bridget Fonda and Linda Fiorentino.

After 10 years of handing out awards, however, the Independent Spirit can hardly be mistaken for the Oscars. Although Oscar nominees like "Bullets Over Broadway" got four Spirit nominations and "Pulp Fiction" got five, "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," which also got five, was nominated as best picture by the Spirit Awards, and shut out by the Academy. "Eat Drink Man Woman," which got only one Academy nomination, for best foreign-language film, led the Spirit nominations with six, including best picture. And the fifth film nominated for a Spirit Award for best feature, "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," would never have crossed the collective mind of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

First-time film makers are not required to compete against Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino at the Spirit Awards, which hand out prizes for best first film, screenplay, director and performance. Nominees include "Clerks," which Kevin Smith made for $27,000. Mr. Smith is now shooting his second movie, the $10 million "Mall Rats," for Gramercy Pictures. The movie will star Shannen Doherty.

"The purpose of the I.F.P. was -- working within the belly of the beast -- to foster the kind of film making that was outside the studio system, that worked forward from a passion rather than backward from a deal memo," says Howard Rodman, a screenwriter and former I.F.P./West board member. "Now, at festivals like Sundance, the studios view independent film makers as a farm team. The industry is always looking for people who make inexpensive, interesting films so they can offer them employment on films that are neither."

The blurring of the line between independent films and studio movies is exhilarating to Harvey Keitel, an actor who has usually chosen the lower salaries and more complex characters that are the bailiwick of independent films. "The idea is to synthesize the spirit of the independent with what the majors have to offer," says Mr. Keitel, who will be seen next summer in Miramax's low-budget "Smoke" and in Universal's not-so-low-budget "Clockers," directed by Spike Lee. "Don't forget that Tom Pollock of Universal made 'The Last Temptation of Christ' six years ago when nobody else would."

That same blurring of the line disturbs Haskell Wexler, a two-time winner of the Oscar for cinematography who shot John Sayles's new independent film, "The Secret of Roan Inish." "Studio films are filtered through marketing, bankers and completion bond people. They're made the way a product is made, not unlike what you'd find in a grocery store. In 'The Secret of Roan Inish,' John and I talked about the transformation of the seal into a woman and decided we'd do it without any digitalizing or effects. That was a crucial decision, but there were no cables back to Hollywood and no tests we had to run for anyone."

Is the rise of the independents something new, or is it part of a cycle? In Hollywood, ideas are constantly being raised up, only to be cast down again. Westerns fall out of favor, and then they're hot. Science fiction nearly disappears and then becomes trendy again. Twelve years ago, the major studios formed classics divisions to make and distribute smaller, artier films. Within two years, all but one of those art-film wings had failed.

"IT'S TOTALLY DIFFERENT now," says Tom Rothman, who was wooed away from the Samuel Goldwyn Company to create Searchlight Films for Fox. "Because the baby boomers are getting older, the audience for these films has expanded substantially. 'Much Ado About Nothing' did $25 million in America and $50 million worldwide. 'Four Weddings,' a $4 million British picture, is going to do over $250 million worldwide. It's not a fad. It's a change."

Other factors cited by Peter Chernin, chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, include the growth of video and cable television and the building of new movie theaters in Great Britain and elsewhere, which are attracting "older, better educated and more sophisticated audiences" bored with studio fare.

Hollywood films often fall victim to a pedestrian repetitiveness -- what Mr. Wexler calls "vacuity" -- because they are based on high concepts and stale formulas. In 1989, three independent films excited Hollywood: Steven Soderbergh's "Sex, Lies and Videotape," which became a commercial success, and Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy" and Michael Lehmann's "Heathers," which did not. Over the next few years, the quality of such Spirit Award winners as "The Grifters," "Rambling Rose" and "The Player" made mainstream studios hungrier for smarter movies -- as long as they could be made and marketed cheaply enough to insure a profit.

"The independents are usually out there forging into new territory, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon if they think they can make a buck," says Victoria Wozniak, a founder of the I.F.P./West and the director of "Purple Haze," which won the grand prize at Sundance in 1983. Ms. Wozniak and Greg Nava (who directed "El Norte") had already founded the I.F.P./West a year earlier so that maverick film makers could share information. "If one person could figure out where to get the money, how to sell their movie, it would be cool," says Ms. Wozniak.

Martha Coolidge, the director of "Rambling Rose," says the difference between then and now is apparent in the fact that she is currently finishing a $30 million movie, "Three Wishes," which stars Patrick Swayze and will be distributed by an independent, Savoy. That sum is about average for studio-made films.

"If the small movie were to become the purview of the studios and they start dictating everything from casting to hair styles, the diversity of film making would be severely limited," she says. "But if the studios buy small companies and keep them entities with artistic autonomy, it's not a bad thing."

Ms. Coolidge pauses, then adds, "So long as it's not a mass group grope that messes up the movie."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 2, Page 15 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; The Oscars Upstaged (Almost). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT