Eric Bogosian
The State of Independent Film
July 31, 1997.
Thanks for checking in. I'm burrowed into my hole pretty tightly, working on rewrites of Griller with my director, Bob Falls. The play will show up at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago next year. (I did take one day off and, courtesy the producers, was flown to Montreal to see Patrick Huart in Talk Radio directed by Fernand Rainville. Great show. I am now a major fan of Patrick Huart.)
Signed a deal with Blackbird Records. So I will be recording a live concert sometime soon. After we do that I should go on tour again. I've been holding back on touring for awhile so that I can focus on writing and to recoup and rethink the new solo show. In August, Jo Bonney and I will be writing and figuring out the final stages of what has been called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.
Spent the Spring under a dark cloud. I reluctantly admit I'm sorry the film of subUrbia did not do better at the box office. I wish more people had seen it. The acting and directing was really top-notch.
Every time I make an effort, whether it be performing or writing, I'm divided in my hopes. I want it to "work", to "connect". And I want it to "be a hit." Strangely, the two are, in my case anyway, exclusive. Believe me, I like the idea of a "hit." It means fame and fortune. It means things being easier for awhile (seemingly?). It means free airplane tickets to Los Angeles. Free sushi.
I make the work I like - I try to make undiluted, unsentimental, awkward, embarrassing, new, ugly "stuff" - and these things are antithetical to winning a huge audience. Either that or I suck. I guess the fun is not knowing.
subUrbia was my fourth independently financed film. Sometimes, as in the case of Talk Radio, the film somehow "comes back" through video rentals or cable. I think that will happen for "subUrbia", because the film is very strong and features some of the most amazing young actors on the scene today directed by a great director, Rick Linklater. But sometimes, as with my concert film Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll directed by John McNaughton, Avenue Entertainment went out of business and the film was caught in a maelstrom of litigation, only to emerge years later, undistributable.
It is very hard to open a film that does not have recognizable stars in it. Certainly not a drama. That's why it was so hard to get backing for subUrbia in the first place.
A film is pushed out there with publicity and advertising when it opens. After that, it pretty much coasts on word of mouth. The more people see the film in the first place, the more, if they like it, will tell others and thus the numbers will stay firm, perhaps even increase.
The sad truth about indepedent filmmaking is that it is not independent of the realities of commercial film distribution. I come across a film almost every year that is better than most anything I've seen in the theaters but cannot find a distributor. Larry O'Neill's "Throwing Down" or Ira Sach's "Delta" are two examples. These guys don't want a lot of money, but the distributor faces the hard fact that people won't go to see a drama if they don't know who's in it. (i.e."stars") Even if the filmmaker isn't out to get rich, even if (and this is unlikely) the distributor doesn't want to make a penny, it still costs a lot to distribute the film and someone has to believe that those costs will be recouped.
The romantic ideal of making a film that expresses something deeply held and then finds a mass audience almost doesn't exist in nature. Usually it happens by accident. Most of us, certainly myself included, are not so much filmmakers but dramatists using film as a vehicle for the drama. The "pure" filmmaker, like a Fellini, is more interested in the aspects of filmmaking that are unique to filmmaking (like montage).
Which brings up a larger topic..
The bigger issue is how we as filmmakers, actors, writers fit into the mass media picture. Most of the time our personal ambitions are used to fuel a machine much larger than ourselves. We come away unsatisfied and the machine rolls on. (This is well understood in the music business.)
Take the situation with actors. Turn on the TV on any given night, channel surf, and you will see actors. Piles of them. Doing stuff. Ninety-nine percent of it is pure trash. The average actor is doing nothing more interesting than the average porn star. They are filling a space. A handsome guy or gal is needed, a villian, an old folkster. The space gets filled, and the story is told one more time.
Which is OK in one sense. People want to see these stories, they need to be acted out. But have the actors considered what they wanted to do in the first place? What is the goal here? Actors have a variety of needs and desires: to be in something expressive, to be part of something ineffable, to be seen, to make some money. Of all these things, only one can be quantified - money - and this is what gets emphasized ad nauseum.
After a few years knocking around, the more delicate ones fall away. In only the most extreme cases (like John Turturro) is there a vision of what acting could be that is so strong it informs every arena the actor enters. Usually, no matter how wonderful the actor, choices and economies lead the actor to some kind of pablum. The actor doesn't worry about the expressive part anymore. It is important to be seen, it is important to make a living. Surrounded by an agent cooing in his/her ear, bills to pay, maybe a baby is on the way, the actor becomes the servant to an "industry."
Looked at from a purely materialistic point of view, how could anyone complain? It's a good job. Once you're in SAG you're gonna get paid well every time you work. But the sad truth is, you're not always working. And so you become desperate. Ultimately you toe the line or you leave.
The end result of the collision between individuals' needs for security and attention and the corporate need for big box office leads to a situation where the most talented people are in service to run of the mill objectives.
It's the rule of the lowest common denominator: if you want your film to succeed broadly, it must have elements that a large number of people will simultaneously enjoy. These are easy to enumerate: violence, slapstick, sex, sentimentality, etc.. If you want to limit your audience, then make the work political or personal. Make it art.
Am I complaining? How can I? I've "starred" in an action film. And I would have liked nothing better than for "subUrbia" to have become a hit. In fact, sadly, on some gut level, I only understand its success in monetary terms. This is my loss.
Call it sour grapes on my part, in some way it is. But independent cinema is not independent of the usual rules of showbiz. It serves the business well as a first stepping-stone in the stream of commercial filmmaking. But don't expect more. And don't be disappointed, like I always am, when you make something heartfelt and well-crafted and it isn't met with the reward of a huge box office gross. That's something else.
I think the hard question I have to ask myself is: Would I "love" film so much if there were no money in it; if it conveyed no status? Is that a stupid question? Isn't it obvious why people gravitate toward filmmaking? I know why I make theater. I love being on stage, love being at rehearsal and love being in the audience. Film's a different game. Some people love editing rooms and soundstages. I'm not really one of those.
