It started with John McNaughton and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. It continued with Quentin Tarantino and RESERVOIR DOGS. The language came from FILM THREAT magazine, the stance from the "underground" film festivals.

It is the independent film movement. And it has been a total failure.

FILM THREAT, the magazine, folded. Only one true independent film has made a splash in several years (THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT), while hundreds of college film grads have rushed out to spend tens of thousands of dollars on short films that will be shown at one or two festivals and then languish on their creators’ storage shelves. If they ever get shown at all.

To figure out what went wrong with the movement, let’s go back several years. Or more.

Underground film first appeared in the 1920’s with creators like Watson and Weber (FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER) , Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (THE ANDALUSIAN DOG), creating short films often so outrageous that audiences didn’t just walk out - they attacked the screen! That was subversive cinema.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s Kenneth Anger (FIREWORKS), Maya Deren (MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON), and many others began making short films that found an audience with the coffeehouse and poetry crowds. The police would watch the showings, and sometimes make a bust.

By the late 1960’s there were theaters that showed the films of Warhol, Brakhage, and many, many more. And there were often more arrests.

Now that was subversive cinema. Often the aboveground would copy from the underground (Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING would beget EASY RIDER, for example), but no one in the underground had illusions of working Hollywood-style. That wasn’t why they made film. They did film because they loved it. When I lived in Atlanta I often went to the FESTIVAL CINEMA to see the "underground" films being made, and sat with stoned hippies watching them.

By the early 1980’s, a death blow would arrive to the scene with the deconstructionist movement. Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH was footage from a camera of a camera swinging from side to side. Audiences weren’t needed by the filmmakers, so they said, and the audiences got bored and avoided underground films like the plague. Primitive video began to replace 16mm film.

Boredom is not the same as subversion. The movement died.

By the 1990’s, college-kid Hollywood wannabes heard stories of films made on credit cards and with parents’ money, and they rushed in to become "discovered". However, college has always been a place where white kids can experiment with subversive ideas, when there are any. They experiment with drugs and alternative lifestyles ("college queer" is the phrase that describes women and men who go gay at school, and become hetero as soon as they leave). FILM THREAT magazine postured subversion and a we-hate-Hollywood spirit, while at the same time catering to wannabes who desperately wanted to break into Hollywood. The first films were filled with strippers and monsters, with laughable scripts. As time went on, no one seriously broke with Hollywood genres; in fact, they wallowed in Hollywood genres from horror to gross-out humor a la John Waters. All accepted by the mainstream. But the language was always that they didn’t care what Hollywood thought. While earlier short filmmakers went so far as to even reject narrative in film, the new independents were careful to stay within Hollywood’s accepted formulas.

When SUNDANCE ignored low-budget films, film festivals popped up all over the country to show the films SUNDANCE wouldn’t. I was an advisor at the first two CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVALS and even spoke on film censorship at one of them. I provided the guests one year, Kenneth Anger and Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius, in an attempt to remind the so-called new subversives of their film history. It was all in vain. The new language spoken by filmmakers was "I don’t care what Hollywood does. But man, Tarantino got signed!".

The CUFF meetings were several nights a week, all year round. As far as I know I was the only person who had actually produced, marketed and distributed a video documentary (THE BETTY PAGE STORY parts one and two) and who had several student films in art museums around the country. Everyone else had no filmmaking experience and were, in effect, video store clerks, rock groupies and hangers-on acting as critics.

In all this time, not one CUFF award winner has gone on to do ANYTHING. They can only dream of selling as many copies of BETTY PAGE as I did. They remain unsigned by the majors, the short films go unseen.

SUNDANCE, by showing THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, clearly has established itself as ahead of all the other independent festivals. That film was sold to a major. But it will also unleash thousands of kids with their parents’ money who don’t realize you need an idea, a script, and a knowledge of life before you can create a film. Throwing in a bit of porno is hardly subversive today.

So how does a budding film student break into Hollywood or the movie business? Well, you could GET A JOB. In Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, all over, there are film houses which have editors, cameramen, grips, go-fers, writers, etc. who are doing rock videos, commercials, industrials, educational films and more. Try to get in as an intern. Know your damn role and build your reel. Nobody wants to sit through your unfocused, underwritten money-down-the-toilet short films. And they won’t. It is that simple. You have to do the work.

The reader of this might get mad and say "Hey, when I show my films my friends, the actors and their friends come and we fill up bars." OK. How many copies do you sell? Who comes to your showing FROM THE INDUSTRY?

And that is where the FILM THREAT lingo comes in. "Oh, I don’t want to sell out. I’m a subversive filmmaker." Then why did you spend tens of thousands of dollars of your parents’ and friends’ money on a movie you knew would never have a hope in hell of breaking even? Or being seen?

Today in Chicago, a group of filmmakers are busy raising over $300,000 (!) to do a short (!) documentary on the cult band, the MC5. A band that never saw that much money in their entire career. An article appeared in Chicago about a filmmaker who has spent the last two years trying to raise $50,000 for his short film. One that has already eaten up $20,000. This is clearly out of control.

Actors appear in short films and never get promised copies of their work, or have to pay for them.

No one thinks WHO IS THE AUDIENCE FOR MY FILM or HOW DO I MARKET MY MOVIE. They are the proverbial tree falling in the forest when no one is around. If you don’t know who your market is, why are you making any film?

A year ago in Salem, a couple of guys with a $25,000 budget put flyers up about missing filmmakers investigating the legend of the Blair Witch in stores and telephone poles. They knew before they were signed to a major that they had to market their film. And they did. A good idea, a marketing strategy and the willingness to do the work will always work. If you are missing any one of these concepts, don’t even bother. Spare us.

Cheers,
Michael Flores