Later this week, TCM is screening the 1992 indie drama Just Another Girl on the IRT. I remember very distinctly seeing this on its first run, when I was fresh faced college graduate. It’s an atypical selection for TCM, but I’m glad of it and hope you tune in. But my memories of the film have relatively little to do with its content or quality, both of which have faded in my memory in the intervening 20+ years, and more to do with its role in the then-blossoming American Indie Film scene.
At the time, I was an aspiring filmmaker myself, so I proselytized the story of Just Another Girl and its kindred indie flicks as proof that American cinema was undergoing a revolutionary moment that would throw its doors open to—me, I guess. I was foolish and follhardy on that count, and willfully ignorant of the true meaning behind the success of things like Just Another Girl. Wiser minds tried to get me to see reason, but I refused to learn the lessons until many years later. Only know, with the sober perspective of age, can I look back on that early 1990s American indie scene with objectivity and see what I refused to see back then…
In the early 1990s, there really seemed to be a tipping point where outsider artists making low-budget movies were getting significant attention and national distribution deals from outfits like Miramax and others. These films played at film festivals and then appeared at arthouse theaters before gaining a second life on home video—and were trumpeted as cultural milestones by publications like Filmmaker.
Between 1990 and 1994 there were such indie landmarks as: Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan; Richard Linklater’s Slacker; John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood; Leslie Harris’ Just Another Girl on the IRT;Robert Rodriguez’ El mariachi; Allison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging; Gregg Araki’s The Living End; Rose Troche’s Go Fish; and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
I saw these films and took from them the hope that Hollywood’s monolithic lock on distribution was loosening, and films made to different styles and tastes could now find audiences without conforming to that template. Which was true, to an extent, but I’d missed three key facts:
1. One thing all of these films had in common was a frugal budget. Now, I knew this on an intellectual level—I gleefully recounted the legends to prospective investors as I tried to convince them to back my movie. Whit Stillman sold his apartment to make his film. Richard Linklater maxed out his credit cards. Robert Rodriguez only spent $7,000.
But for some reason I never mapped this inconvenient fact onto my own tastes in movies—I had wanted to make movies ever since seeing Star Wars. Star freakin’ Wars. My favorite films were things like The General, Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, Fantasia… there was nothing low budget about any of my inspirations. If that was the kind of movie I wanted to be a part of, what made me think it could be done on a budget?
Well, I had an answer to that. In the early 1990s, Hollywood movies had been all-but hobbled by an obsession with high-paid movie stars, and budgets had blown to bloated excess without showing on the screen. Storytelling was an increasingly lost art. Basically, I felt that the kinds of movies I most enjoyed watching were almost exclusively artifacts of a bygone age. This led to two delusions: a) that making the kinds of movies I wanted to see meant working outside the system and b) of course that could be done “on a budget” since Hollywood costs were artificially inflated.
2. Another thing the movies I listed above had in common was that they introduced fresh voices and perspectives otherwise ignored by the white male-dominated Hollywood machine. An increasingly diverse American populace was generally denied the chance to share their experiences in mainstream movies, so the rise of indie cinema created new opportunities for those communities to come together. Of course they found their audiences.
But where did that leave me? I’m a white male—and while my taste in movies was not being actively catered to by mainstream Hollywood at the time, it wasn’t that I proposed bringing a novel point of view to the screen so much as re-introduce aesthetics that had already been passed over by the march of time.
3. The press attention to these indie darlings masked an unspoken truth—maxing out your credit cards to fund a quixotic dream of making movies in no way guaranteed success. Go ahead, sell all your belongings to finance your film—what are you going to do when the film fails?
Some of the people who came to prominence in the early 1990s launched successful careers—Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith for example—but Leslie Harris’ Just Another Girl on the IRT was both an introduction and a conclusion to her screen career. She did not make another film.
I saw this first hand later in the decade, when I worked with Scott King on the DVD release of his experimental drama Treasure Island. I thought it was a masterpiece, and happily gave it my full backing—and although the film won the Sundance Special Jury Prize and one of its stars, Lance Offerman, has gone on to tremendous acclaim, it marked the end of King’s promising career.
And that’s just talking about the disappointing outcomes of good movies. As head of All Day Entertainment, I got enormous numbers of unsolicited submissions from aspiring filmmakers who, unlike myself, did take the plunge and max out the credit cards or sell all their belongings or something extreme like that to fund an independent film that they thought would break them into Hollywood, like Robert Rodriguez or Kevin Smith did. But most of these submissions were just awful. Yes, they were low-budget outsider works by maverick artists, but that didn’t make them watchable.
I still admire the maverick artists who stick to their principles and make the movies they want to make, heedless of commercial forces. But I’ve come to understand that what makes them successful is that they are visionaries with great ideas, and an uncommon degree of personal focus. Which as it happens are character traits that would serve those people well navigating the shark infested waters of Hollywood studio films as well. That they are independent is an incidental detail. Succeeding outside of Hollywood is no easier than within it, and neither “Hollywood” nor “Indie” is a branding that guarantees quality.