Independent film
Because of this, a number of filmmakers responded by building their own cameras and moving their operations to Hollywood, California, where the distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents.
In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of performers Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others.
[5] The idea for the venture originated with Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and cowboy star William S. Hart a year earlier as they were traveling around the U.S. selling Liberty bonds to help the World War I effort.
The four partners, with advice from McAdoo (son-in-law and former Treasury Secretary of then-President Woodrow Wilson), formed their distribution company, with Hiram Abrams as its first managing director.
In 1941, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Alexander Korda, and Walter Wanger—many of the same people who were members of United Artists—founded the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.
In 1948, the United States Supreme Court Paramount Decision ordered the Hollywood movie studios to sell their theater chains and to eliminate certain anti-competitive practices.
These circumstances soon resulted in a number of critically acclaimed and highly influential works, including Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943, Kenneth Anger's Fireworks in 1947, and Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Abrashkin's Little Fugitive in 1953.
Based upon a common belief that the "official cinema" was "running out of breath" and had become "morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, [and] temperamentally boring",[11] this new crop of independents formed The Film-Makers' Cooperative, an artist-run, non-profit organization which they would use to distribute their films through a centralized archive.
Founded in 1962 by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, and others, the Cooperative provided an important outlet for many of cinema's creative luminaries in the 1960s, including Jack Smith and Andy Warhol.
Corman's example (and that of others like him) would help start a boom in independent B-movies in the 1960s, the principal aim of which was to bring in the youth market which the major studios had lost touch with.
By promising sex, wanton violence, drug use, and nudity, these films hoped to draw audiences to independent theaters by offering to show them what the major studios could not.
In 1968, a young filmmaker named George A. Romero shocked audiences with Night of the Living Dead, a new kind of intense and unforgiving independent horror film.
With the production code abandoned and violent and disturbing films like Romero's gaining popularity, Hollywood opted to placate the uneasy filmgoing public with the MPAA ratings system, which would place restrictions on ticket sales to young people.
Unlike the production code, this rating system posed a threat to independent films in that it would affect the number of tickets they could sell and cut into the grindhouse theaters' share of the youth market.
Easy Rider debuted at Cannes and garnered the "First Film Award" (French: Prix de la premiere oeuvre) after which it received two Oscar nominations, one for best original screenplay and one for Corman-alum Jack Nicholson's breakthrough performance in the supporting role of George Hanson, an alcoholic lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Midnight Cowboy also held the distinction of featuring cameo roles by many of the top Warhol superstars, who had already become symbols of the militantly anti-Hollywood climate of NYC's independent film community.
By the following year, two New Hollywood directors had become sufficiently established for Coppola to be offered oversight of Paramount's The Godfather (1972) and Lucas had obtained studio funding for American Graffiti (1973) from Universal.
In the mid-1970s, the major Hollywood studios continued to tap these new filmmakers for both ideas and personnel, producing films such as Paper Moon (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), all of which met with critical and commercial success.
With their unprecedented box-office successes, these movies jump-started Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, giving studios a new paradigm as to how to make money in this changing commercial landscape.
The focus on high-concept premises, with greater concentration on tie-in merchandise (such as toys), spin-offs into other media (such as soundtracks), and the use of sequels (which had been made more respectable by Coppola's The Godfather Part II), all showed the studios how to make money in the new environment.
[15] She also pointed out in her New York Times article that enthusiasts insisted this era was "when American movies grew up (or at least starred underdressed actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio's dime).
Directors who wished to reach mainstream audiences of Old Hollywood quickly learned to stylize these themes to make their films appealing and attractive rather than repulsive or obscene.
Influenced by foreign and art house directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, exploitation shockers (i.e. Joseph P. Mawra, Michael Findlay, and Henri Pachard) and avant-garde cinema, (Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Bruce Conner[17][18]) a number of young film makers began to experiment with transgression not as a box-office draw, but as an artistic act.
The jury of the 1978 festival was headed by Gary Allison, and included Verna Fields, Linwood Gale Dunn, Katherine Ross, Charles E. Sellier Jr., Mark Rydell, and Anthea Sylbert.
In 1981, the same year that United Artists, bought out by MGM after the financial failure of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980),[23] ceased to exist as a venue for independent filmmakers, Sterling Van Wagenen left the film festival to help found the Sundance Institute with Robert Redford.
Such notable figures as Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, James Wan, Hal Hartley, Joel and Ethan Coen and Jim Jarmusch garnered resounding critical acclaim and unprecedented box office sales.
[26] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990 from New Line Cinema grossed over $100 million in the United States making it the most successful indie film in box-office history to that point.
Aspiring filmmakers can range from those simply with access to a smartphone or digital camera, to those who write "spec" scripts (to pitch to studios), actively network, and use crowdsourcing and other financing to get their films professionally produced.
Oftentimes, aspiring filmmakers have other day-jobs to support themselves financially while they pitch their scripts and ideas to independent film production companies, talent agents, and wealthy investors.
The personal computer and non-linear editing system have taken away the use of editing stands such as the KEM, dramatically reducing the costs of post-production, while technologies such as DVD, Blu-ray Disc and online video services have simplified distribution; video streaming services have made it possible to distribute a digital version of a film to an entire country or even the world, without involving shipping or warehousing of physical DVDs or film reels.
