American Independent Film

Industry II

 

4pm Monday 7th October LT7

Dr Yannis Tzioumakis, 'The end of Indiewood or its further integration with

Hollywood?: “The Great Studio Pullback” of the late 2000s and its impact on

American independent film.'

 

‘…the period from the 1990s onwards represents a distinct phase

in contemporary American independent cinema; one that has

been marked by the domination of the studio divisions and their

increasing emphasis on film production. As subsidiaries of global

entertainment conglomerates, these divisions are by definition

integrated into the structures of global media and finance and

therefore are fully equipped to play ‘the independent film game’

better than the traditional stand-alone distributors, whose levels

of integration into global finance are much less deep.’ 

Yannis Tzioumakis, ‘’Independent,’ ‘Indie’ and ‘Indiewood’, p.37 

 

‘According to Naomi Klein, brand culture in the 1990s saw a ‘strange combination

of a sea of product coupled with losses of real choice.’ This describes a situation

where a shrinking number of corporate media owners are responsible for a

specious number of branded commodities that, for all the appearance of

difference, herald an untold market uniformity serving the interests of those in

power.’ 

Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood, p.145.

Brand Culture

 

‘If studio executives made only films that maximized the

amount of money in their clearinghouses, they would do so

at the serious risk of losing their standing in that community

and, with it, their connection to the people, events, honors,

and opportunities that brought them to Hollywood in the

first place’

Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture, Money and

Power in Hollywood , p.131.

‘It is in this respect that studios acquired ‘independent’ arms

and speciality units in the 1990s  – Miramax, New Line, Sony

Classics, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics, Warner

Independent Pictures – not least to give them ‘awards,

media recognition, artistic bragging rights, and other

noneconomic rewards.’ (Epstein, 342),

Grainge, Brand Hollywood , p.146.

‘Figures such as the heads and leading executives

of Indiewood divisions tend to present

themselves as enthusiasts for the films they

handle, lending their skills in business or

marketing to the support of a creative enterprise,

rather than as more detached and purely

commercially minded. They situate themselves

within the habitus, as sharers of the values

considered to be embodied in the films produced

or distributed, rather than as external figures

seeking to exploit a particular market, even while

conscious of using individual skills to do exactly

that.’ 

Geoff King, Indiewood , p.30.

 

‘The Indiewood sector...[is] part of tendency of

mainstream industry (not just the marginal) to buy into

and exploit aspects of what is understood to be the

‘cool’, ‘hip’, and ‘alternative’. What is involved here for

viewers, and that is sought to be commodified, can be a

mix of cultural and sub-cultural capital.’ 

Geoff King, Indiewood, p.15

‘Part of a wider system in which the consumption of

goods can be understood not just in material terms but

as a dimension of the social mechanism by which

distinct senses of self – and group identity are

constructed and asserted…consumption is understood

as a way of establishing differences.’ (King, p.13) 

Individuals ‘distinguish ourselves by the distinctions [we]

make…Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’ 

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the

 judgment of taste, p.6.

http://performingtext.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2010/08/B

ourdieu.pdf

 

‘Cultural goods can be appropriated both materially – which

presupposes economic capital – and symbolically – which

presupposes cultural capital.’

Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital ., p.242.

“To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within

each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a

social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to

function as markers of ‘class’.” (Bourdieu, Distinction 1-2)

Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied

state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the

mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of

cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments,

machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories

or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the

institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must

be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of

educational qualifications, it confers entirely original

properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to

guarantee. Bourdieu, The forms of capital ., p.242.

 

‘Club cultures are riddled with cultural hierarchies…the

‘authentic’ versus the ‘phoney’, the ‘hip’ versus the

‘mainstream’, and the ‘underground’ versus ‘the media’.

Each distinction opens up a world of meaning and values.’ 

Thornton, pp.3-4.

‘In thinking through Bourdieu’s theories in relation to the

terrain of youth culture, I’ve come to conceive of ‘hipness’

as a form of subcultural capital .’ 

Thornton, p.11.

‘Just as cultural capital is personified in ‘good’ manners and urbane

conversation, so subcultural capital is embodied in the form of being

‘in the know.’…nothing depletes capital more than the sight of

someone trying too hard.’ (p.11)

A critical difference between subcultural capital (as I explore it) and

cultural capital (as Bourdieu develops it) is that the media are a

primary factor governing the circulation of the former.’ ‘The persistent

value of authenticity, the useful myth of the mainstream’ (p.13) 

 

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/g

arden-state/trailer

Garden State (2004)

Written and directed by Zach Braff (Scrubs)

Starring Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm

$2.5m budget.

Premiered Sundance.

Fox Searchlight Pictures/Miramax – pickup

Box office $36m

Grammy Award (2005) for Best Compilation Soundtrack

Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual

Media.

 

‘Zach Braff’s directorial debut Garden State is such a sincere, sweet-

natured picture that you almost feel guilty for disliking it. It seems

insensitive and cynical to call such a seemingly harmless movie crass 

and formulaic. Screened in competition at this year’s Sundance Film

Festival and picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight and

Miramax, Garden State carries the cinematic equivalent of the Good

Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Indiewood movies with this prefab

Sundance buzz hearken back to the glory days of Miramax before it

mostly started releasing desperate, extravagant Oscar bait. Braff’s

movie, of little substance and much appeal to the bourgeoisie of

cinephilia, fails despite its good intentions, an edgy movie with no

edges and, therefore, inoffensive to the middlebrow culture that

fuels the demand for indie movies from quasi-Hollywood

distribution companies. As it’s come to pass, independent cinema is

the last place you would look to in this cultural climate for radical

commentary.’ 

Kevin Curtis, ‘Packaged Goods: Garden State’

http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/autumn04/gardens

  tate.html

 

‘There is a tension at the heart of indie cinema and culture between competing ideals

and realities: on one hand, an oppositional formation of outsiders that sees itself as the

solution to an excessively homogenized, commercialized media, and on the other hand

a form of expression that is itself commercial and that also serves to promote the

interests of a class of sophisticated consumers. In other words, indie cinema is a cultural

form opposing dominant structures at the same time that it is a source of distinction

that serves the interests of a privileged group within those structures’.

Michael Z. Newman, ‘Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic

Autonomous Alternative,’ in Cinema Journal , 48, Number 3, Spring 2009,

p.17.

‘The Authentic Autonomous Alternative.’ 

‘I do not mean to point out that indie culture has been co-opted or that it has

sold out, but that the mainstream culture has to some extent bought in, and

that the indie culture may be no less credible as a result because that

culture’s participants—not critics who pronounce from on high—ultimately

are the ones empowered to determine what is and is not credible within the

context of their experience... key notions of autonomy and authenticity are

hardly absolutes. They are mobilized when expedient by producers and

consumers eager to distinguish their culture from the Other of the

mainstream.’ (Newman, p.33). 

 

‘The crucial point is that (contrary to rumour) the hippies did not sell

out. Hippie ideology and yuppie ideology are one and the same. There

simply never was any tension between the countercultural ideas that

informed the ‘60s rebellion and the ideological requirements of the

capitalist system. While there is no doubt that a cultural conflict

developed between the members of the counterculture and the

defenders of the establishment, there never was any tension between

the values of the counterculture and the functional requirements of

the capitalist economic system. The counterculture was, from its very

inception, intensely entrepreneurial.’ 

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell (Toronto: Harper

Collins, 2005), p.5

 

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996)

Dir. Todd Solondz (Happiness, Pallindromes, Storytelling)

$800,000 budget

Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at the 1996

Sundance Film Festival.

Picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics

$4.5m US box office

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

$8m budget

Premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival

Bought there by Fox Searchlight Pictures for $10.5m

Platform release - 10 theatres –then wide to 1500

$60m U.S box office ($40m international)

4 Oscar noms ( wins for screenplay and supporting actor  – 

Arkin)

 

The ‘Dysfunctional’ Middleclass Family