Week 8 [Reading Notes] - Independent Cinema

Reading 1:
Balio, Tino (2013) Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: BFI. pp.114-148. (Chapter 6: “Independents: ‘To the Rear of the Back End’”)

During the 1950s and 60s, it designated mainstream films financed by a major studio and made by outside producers, be they former studio directors and stars, creative producers or talent agents. During the same period, the term was also used to describe the works of avant-garde filmmakers whose films played mainly in museums and film festivals. And from the start, an independent film meant a self-financed film without any support from a distribution company.
p. 114

The independent film scene had changed in fundamental ways, which led to closing of the speciality divisions of the majors and the demise of scores of indie outfits. The indie films that found distribution confronted escalating advertising costs, competition for theatre space from the tentpoles of the majors, and a foreign audience indifferent to most American indie films.
p. 115

The growth of new television technologies generated a huge demand for con- tent, which a new generation of film-makers was ready to fill. Independents entered the business knowing that even a modest picture could recoup most of its costs from the pre-sale of distribution rights to the burgeoning pay-cable and home video markets... The sale of pay TV rights yielded anywhere from a few hundred thou- sand dollars to a million and more. Although these sums were insignificant compared to what a Hollywood blockbuster could fetch, such ancillary income for a low-budget picture might make the difference between profit and loss.
p. 115

Miramax

Miramax, the most famous company of the group, was founded in 1979 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Adopting a straight acquisition policy from the start, Miramax 'nurtured new talent, helped introduce American indie films to a broader audience and brought European and Asian filmmakers to US viewers' (Graser and McNary, 2010). Miramax emerged from the fringes ofindependent film distribution in 1989 when it released three big hits, Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot, which starred a then relatively unknown Daniel Day-Lewis; Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, andvideotape, which garnered writer-director Soderbergh the Palme d'Or at Cannes; and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
p. 117

Arguably the com- pany's most creative efforts were devoted to the marketing campaign for The Crying Game. Miramax succeeded in making people want to see the film with- out knowing why. A British release with no major stars about the British-IRA conflict made the picture seemingly a hard sell to Americans. But it did have an unusual plot twist, involving the trans-sexual identity of a lead character, which Miramax exploited to create a cause celebre that rivalled the famous publicity campaign for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). The Crying Game became a crossover hit. It also became a great critical success, receiving six Academy
Award nominations, including best picture, and winning the Oscar for best screenplay for the writer and director, Neil Jordan. 'The industry was staggered by the response,' reported Variety (Fleming and Klady, 1993). 
p. 117