Indiewood (also known as "specialty", "alternative", "indie", or "quality")[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] films are made outside of the Hollywood studio system or traditional arthouse/independent filmmaking system yet managed to be produced, financed and distributed by the two with varying degrees of success and/or failure.
[8] The American independent film, prior to the 1980s and first half of the 1990s,[9][10][11] was previously associated with b movies, exploitation films, avant-garde underground cinema (when it was known as the New American Cinema[12]), social and political documentaries, experimental animated shorts (since the mid-1930s featuring works by pioneer animators Mary Ellen Bute and Oskar Fischinger) and social realist dramas.
[21][22][23][24][25][4] Indiewood divisions gain from expert experience of the niche industry by hiring leading independent personalities such as Harvey Weinstein[26] from the Disney fold after the exit of the Weinsteins,[27][28] and James Schamus, former joint head of Good Machine, at Focus Features.
In Hollywood, the film then goes on to show in focus group screenings on the studio lot.
They also bear striking similarities to as well as were influenced by the "proto-indies" of the 1960s such as Robert Downey Sr's still image film Chafed Elbows (1966), John Cassavetes's Academy Award-nominated Faces and Brian de Palma's Greetings (each from 1968) which in turn were influenced by the culture of the Beat Generation, the polar opposite to the conformist, gray-flannel conformity of 1950s America.