Indie Industry slides.pdf
Transcript of Indie Industry slides.pdf
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