THB #381: Is Indie Dead?

I keep running into this notion that indie film - whatever that means - is dead.

Indie is Burning

I guess it helps to have been a part of the community when indie film was born and to have lived through its many incarnations. If you have done so, aside from bar room hyperbole, you know that indie has made more conceptual changes than Madonna.

My first Sundance was 1991. I like to imagine that it was 1989 and I was there for the launch of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but I can remember the rooms I saw movies in at the 1991 festival and have no such memories of 1989, so I will stop deluding myself. But 1991 wasn’t that late to the party.

Anyway…

One of the big mistakes made when people think about the rise of indie is the notion that Harvey Weinstein made the movies that made Harvey Weinstein. In the decade between Sex, Lies, & Videotape (his first grosser over $20 million, picked up) and Shakespeare in Love, he would. But he came up as a salesman… a marketing genius, picking up films and positioning them more aggressively than anyone had.

In 1988, the year before Harvey took Sex, Lies where he would, Orion had Bull Durham doing $51 million domestic and Colors doing $46 million and Mississippi Burning doing $35 million. Orion had won Best Picture with Amadeus and Platoon, and a couple years later, Dances With Wolves.

There were also films released independent of the majors by United Artists and Lorimar and The Samuel Goldwyn Company and New World and Cannon and Orion Classics and Vestron and Atlantic and Island and Trans World and Avenue and Hemdale… only 1 of which still exists in a real way.

Vestron was able to push out the #11 box office release of 1987, Dirty Dancing ($65 million), and no other film of their 23 total theatrical releases cracked $8 million.

Getting back to Orion, why aren’t Krim, Pleskow, Medavoy, Bernstein, and Benjamin seen as Harvey before Harvey? Because the bosses were industry establishment and they made “real” movies from the start (Time After Time, A Little Romance, 10, Caddyshack… all in 1979 and 1980). They were not propelled by the idea of indie. But they were no less indie than Harvey or Bob Shaye. They just didn’t grow legs, from tadpoles to frogs. They started as frogs… smart, passionate frogs.

In just a few years from that fateful Sundance of 1989, the idea of Indie left stars and dollar signs in the eyes of people on every level of the film industry.

Sony Classics was launched by 2 of Orion Classics’ toppers in 1992. Disney consumed Miramax in 1993. Searchlight was birthed at Fox in 1994. Focus was a combination of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, October Films, Good Machine, and Gramercy Pictures and eventually sucked up USA Films, Universal Focus, and FilmDistrict. Paramount Classics was put together in 1998 and was converted into a differently-focused Paramount Vantage in 2006. The Bingham Ray revival of United Artists lasted from 2001 to 2004. Warner Independent (RIP) was ramped up in 2003.

Most of the decade of 2000-2010 was significantly influenced by DVD sales, which were mammoth in the middle of the decade… and fading fast by the end. So theatrical success was nice, but the money from DVD really created the urge of big distributors to thicken their new library adds each year. That doesn’t mean the people running these divisions were any less passionate than when it was by the scruff of the neck.

If you look at “indie” in 2011, it’s already split into 3 distinct groups. (stats are from titles that grossed $1.5m or more)

The true indie distributors who were in the wide release business were CBS Films, Film District, Lionsgate, Open Road, Relativity, Summit, and The Weinstein Company. (2 have survived)

This group released 32 films wide in 2011 and 8 more that never reached the 1000 screen landmark. The analysis is bent a bit by the #1 grosser of the group, Summit’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, which represents $281 million of the $1.25 billion total. Six additional films grossed over $50m - $84m domestic in this group. The average in the group (inc Twilight) was $39 million domestic.

None of these were Sundance pick-ups or really even what one might consider “indie films” these days.

The second group is what I call The Dependents, distributors under the business shell of a major studio distributor. In 2011, it was Screen Gems and Sony Classics at Sony, Searchlight at Fox, Focus at Universal, and Paramount Vantage, already at the end of its existence (only 3 films were released after Like Crazy that year). The group released 29 films, grossed $495 million domestic and averaged $17.7 million per film.

The third group is true indies with releases under 1000 screens domestically. There are 39 of these. Only 2 of the films - My Week With Marilyn ($14.6m), The Conspirator ($11.5m) - grossed over $10 million. Total gross, $135.5 million. Average, $3.5 million.

So… which business are you sweating about?