Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Former Miramax exec Jack Lechner proclaims the death of the indie as we know it.
Jan 27, 2000 | From the outside, the prospects for American independent films never looked sunnier than they did in 1999. A scrappy no-budget gimmick film, "The Blair Witch Project," became a box-office smash and proved the power of online promotion. Established boutique companies such as Fox Searchlight brought massive attention to films like "Boys Don't Cry," while USA Films, an amalgam of October and Gramercy, dominated year-end awards with "Topsy-Turvy" and "Being John Malkovich." Disney released David Lynch's "The Straight Story." Warners both financed and distributed "The Matrix" and "Three Kings" -- independents in everything except scale and budget. And DreamWorks' highly touted "American Beauty," a big winner at the Golden Globes and a favorite for the Oscars, is indebted to the dysfunctional suburban-family sagas that have been a mainstay of indies for a decade. (You could say that "American Beauty" is to Todd Solondz's "Happiness" as "The Big Chill" is to "The Return of the Secaucus Seven.")
As far as the media goes, nothing has changed in 2000. Print, broadcast and Web journalists continue to blister us with coverage of Sundance. In many cities, daily papers follow hometown men and women who earn a slot at the Park City, Utah, festival as they rack up awards and distribution deals. Post-"Blair Witch," it's almost the snob-appeal version of watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."
Given the carnival-like promotion currently surrounding the high end of the indie world, you might expect a giddy atmosphere at events like the International Film Financing Conference ("IFFCON") in San Francisco, where aspiring independent filmmakers network with production executives, financiers and sales agents, and where veterans do some serious business. But the keynote address that kicked off the conference's seventh edition on Jan. 14 was actually a death knell for independent film as we know it.
The speaker was Jack Lechner, whose credits include executive stints at Columbia Pictures and at Channel Four in England, as well as a three-year term (ending in the spring of '99) as executive vice president of development and production at Miramax. "Five years ago," he said, "if you scraped together the money to make a nice little movie -- not a breakthrough in cinema history, but not a turkey either -- that movie had a future." But, said Lechner, not anymore.
To Lechner, without independent video companies and art-house cinemas starved for "smart" product, without a showcase like "American Playhouse" on PBS, the "nice little movie" has nowhere to go. In part, he said, "The independent film world is a victim of its own success." What both energized and doomed it was the arrival of "a string of films from 'sex, lies & videotape' to 'The Crying Game' to 'Hoop Dreams,' all of which proved that independent films could sometimes make a great deal of money." The result is "an institutionalized industry that funds its own mid-range movies" -- and a horde of novice moviemakers attempting to replicate its hits.
Lechner proposed that instead of imitating past phenomena -- "like 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Clerks' and 'Slacker' and 'The Full Monty' and, soon to come, 'The Blair Witch Project'" -- filmmakers and producers follow a simple rule of thumb. "When I was at Channel Four in London at the beginning of the '90s, the British film industry was in far worse shape than the American independent film industry is now. When I considered a project to fund, I would ask myself, 'If this film works, could it possibly help to save the British film industry?' If the answer was no, I rejected it. If the answer was yes, I advocated it."
Lechner hails from Arlington, Va. In an interview after his address, he told me, "My mother works in television in Washington, D.C.; in fact, her father and grandfather were movie exhibitors, so she grew up in a movie theater and I grew up going to movie theaters. And my father is in local politics in Virginia. I went to movies constantly as a teenager, studied films at college [Yale] and worked at various production companies when I got out." In 1987, David Puttnam, the producer of "Local Hero" and "The Killing Fields," hired Lechner to be part of his team when Puttnam briefly went Hollywood and took command at Columbia Pictures. Before long, the whole team was fired.
In 1991, Lechner says, "just as I was burned out on the industry," Puttnam recommended him for a position at Channel Four in London. "I spent three years there and had a wonderful time working on 'The Crying Game' and 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and some Ken Loach movies like 'Raining Stones' and 'Ladybird, Ladybird.' I can't really say I worked with Mike Leigh -- I don't think any executive can say that, since with the exception of 'Topsy-Turvy,' you don't even know what the characters are until you go to the dailies. But certainly I was around to watch Mike work on 'Naked' and on his short film 'A Sense of History,' which is the seed of 'Topsy-Turvy.'"
Homesick for the States, Lechner took a job with HBO in New York, where he shepherded BBC/HBO co-productions like "The Deadly Voyage," and then, in 1996, went to Miramax. He declined to renew his contract after three years of working on titles that included "Good Will Hunting" and the recent critical favorite "Guinevere." (The Miramax release "Down to You" was directed and written by Kris Isacsson, who had been Lechner's assistant at HBO and Miramax; it was No. 2 at the box office last weekend.)
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