Once again, it's time for an article from the NY Times . 
Link to original article is here.
The article is too long for one post, and is split into two... I'm sure you'll find something relevant in it.
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Link to original article is here.
The article is too long for one post, and is split into two... I'm sure you'll find something relevant in it.
_______
January 21, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The Invasion of the Midsize Movie
By A. O. SCOTT
This year's Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, smack in the middle of the Sundance Film Festival, a coincidence of the calendar that might be taken to represent a larger convergence. For three-quarters of a century the Academy Awards have been Hollywood's annual official tribute to itself while Sundance, from its humble beginnings in the early 1980's, has flourished as the official alternative to Hollywood - an annual celebration of that elusive entity called independent film.
The antagonism between the two has always been a bit overstated. The label "independent" has, like "low fat" or "all-natural," never been subject to rigorous regulation, and while low-budget, idiosyncratic movies seem to offer filmgoers a ticket out of the mainstream, they have also been, for many filmmakers, a ticket in. This has been true for at least 15 years, but more recently a new synthesis has emerged. Independent film may be dead, as so many of its partisans continually proclaim, but if it is, it has been reincarnated in the shape of another much-mourned, perpetually misunderstood movie martyr, the studio system.
If you sift through the litter of critics' top 10 lists or browse the Web sites of various award-giving organizations - or, for that matter, if you peruse the advertisements that give this section of the newspaper its awards-season bulk - you might notice the predominance of a certain kind of movie. I don't mean a genre; "House of Flying Daggers," "A Very Long Engagement," "Sideways," "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "Hotel Rwanda," to take a few prominent examples, don't have much in common when it comes to their stories or their cinematic styles. But all of them originated within what are sometimes called the specialty divisions of the major studios, an awkward name that refers to subsidiary companies - Sony Pictures Classics and Paramount Classics, Warner Independent, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight - dedicated to distributing and, increasingly, to producing movies that tend to attract equally awkward descriptions. Art films? Indies? Director-driven projects? Prestige products? Oscar-bait? Serious movies for grown-up audiences?
All of the above - at least some of the time. But perhaps it's best to think of the output of these companies as middle-size movies. In 1968, during her brief tenure as chief film critic for The New York Times, Renata Adler published an essay called "Patience for the Transition to Little Films" in which she proposed that "the days of the single, grand film for everyone are nearly gone" and suggested that an audience seeking the traditional pleasures of moviegoing would be well advised to seek them out in smaller packages. The article may not stand up as prophecy - the next decade would bring "Love Story," the first two "Godfather" pictures, "Jaws" and "Star Wars" - but Ms. Adler did identify one of the cycles that govern both the movie industry and the public taste.
Today the major studios, most of them housed within multimedia conglomerates, are most heavily invested in building entertainment franchises that can generate huge profits around the world - movies whose budgets and revenue are counted in hundreds of millions of dollars and whose appeal must be calculated on a similarly wide scale. But the appetite of a significant portion of the domestic audience for other kinds of movies - and for movies from other countries - along with the desire of actors and directors to pursue challenging and artistically satisfying work, have combined to open up a fertile middle ground, which the specialty divisions have claimed as their own. This middle ground can be defined economically - the films in question are neither extravagant would-be blockbusters nor shoestring, seat-of-the-pants productions - and culturally. The public they seek is neither the global mass audience nor a coterie of cinephiles, but rather something - ideally something profitable, as well as Oscar-worthy - in between.
The 80's Revisited
The high-quality, middle-size movie is not a new phenomenon. Nor, for that matter, is the idea of carving out a niche within larger companies in which such movies can be nurtured. Film executives (and movie fans) whose memories stretch back to the 1980's remember the specialty-division boom in that decade, and the short-lived epiphany of the 1986 Oscars, when Geraldine Page won the best actress award for "The Trip to Bountiful" and William Hurt won best actor for "Kiss of the Spider Woman," both of them distributed by the long-defunct Island Pictures.
"Back in 1982, I was in charge of marketing for Columbia's specialty division," said Mark Urman, now the head of distribution at ThinkFilm, an independent distributor. "I turned around and every company had one, and then a few years later nobody had one. It was a trend, a cycle. Part of me thinks we're seeing that all over again."
Certainly, at this point, nearly every company has one, the newest being Warner Brothers, whose Warner Independent label released its first film, Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset," last summer. The other relative newcomers are Universal's Focus, which came into existence in 2002, and Fox Searchlight, which has existed in its current form for about five years.
Of the existing specialty divisions, Sony Pictures Classics, which started in 1991 and grew out of Orion Classics, is the oldest. And then, of course, there is Miramax, which has mutated since the 1980's from an independent distributor into Disney's specialty division and then into a quasi-major studio in its own right, and whose future is currently the subject of much speculation, as its founders, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, negotiate their separation from Disney. But whatever happens on that front, the current proliferation of studio art-house divisions may be a sign that we have entered the post-Miramax era.
"Miramax has ceded their place as the Microsoft of the business," said Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent, who worked at Miramax as head of marketing and went on to run the studio's Los Angeles office, "so more movies are getting made, there's more room for them, and more diversity."
Wide Variety, Common Approach
This diversity is clear enough from a glance at the range of movies these companies - which will inevitably take turns being labeled "the next Miramax -released in 2004. They included literary adaptations (Paramount Classics' "Enduring Love," Warner's "We Don't Live Here Anymore," Focus's "Vanity Fair"), costume dramas (Sony's "Being Julia" and "House of Flying Daggers") and offbeat coming-of-age stories ("Garden State" and "Napoleon Dynamite," both from Fox Searchlight).
Each studio offers a slightly different blend of styles, genres and sensibilities. From year to year the number of movies they release varies - most hover between 8 and 12, though last year Sony Classics released more than 20 - as do the ratios of English-language to subtitled films, of movies purchased for distribution to movies produced in-house or financed with partners, and, of course, of successes to disappointments. (The biggest success story of the year just ended was probably Fox Searchlight, with the summertime hit "Napoleon Dynamite" and the critically beloved "Sideways.")
But though their approaches differ, and though they are frequently in competition for the attention of the same sectors of the audience, there seem to be certain principles that the specialty divisions hold in common. Interviews with some of the people who run them return, with remarkable consistency, to the importance of the director.
"The politique des auteurs is still political with us," said James Schamus, co-president of Focus Features, referring to the idea, popularized by postwar French critics and imported to the United States by Andrew Sarris, that the art of film resides in the creative signature of the filmmaker. Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, makes a similar point in plainer English. "I think we're becoming more and more a director-based company," he said in a recent telephone conversation. "Find an original voice, come with original material, be bold, and we'll back you."
