OK, I exaggerate, but not by much. Ryan Werner, the vice president for marketing at IFC Films, put it this way: "It was a very tough year, even though there were a lot of success stories." The success stories were largely unpredictable, and so were the failures. Who'd have guessed that a no-budget documentary about a mangy parrot flock in San Francisco, and the aging hippie who watched over them, would more than double the box-office return of "Thumbsucker," an indie drama loaded with stars and enthusiastically backed by a big studio? (Old showbiz maxim: Never share the stage with children or animals.)

With the cost of film production continuing to drop and new small-scale distributors entering the market, there seemed to be more independent and foreign films in 2005 than ever before. In some weeks, New York and Los Angeles saw 12 to 15 films opening on Friday, leading to what Berman calls a "lose-lose proposition" and Bowles calls "the tower of Babel." Interesting, risky, worthwhile movies from all over the world were fighting each other tooth and nail for reviews, advertising space and a tiny piece of filmgoer consciousness.

In most cases, these little movies hit a handful of theaters for a couple of weeks and then vanish entirely. A few venture away from the big coastal cities into "secondary markets," and a tiny handful become modest hits, à la "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" or "The Squid and the Whale" or "Junebug" or "Grizzly Man." ("March of the Penguins" belongs to another category entirely, that of the indie film turned fluke monster hit, in the vein of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or "Bend It Like Beckham.")

"There are very few opportunities for an independent film to sit in a theater for a while until it builds an audience," says Nancy Gerstman, co-president of Zeitgeist Films, which currently has the documentaries "Ballets Russes" and "Zizek!" in theaters. And the days when distributors could get a broad "semi-theatrical" release by sending films to university film societies across the country, she says, "now seem like ancient history."

While some distributors, including Zeitgeist (says Gerstman), remain committed to theatrical release as the core of their business, and the moviegoing experience isn't going to disappear this year or next, the way movies get delivered to eyeballs is clearly changing, and changing fast. "There's no distribution company in the business that's making money off theatrical release," says IFC's Werner. "It's all publicity for the DVD."

Sasha Berman echoes him, saying, "You use theatrical release as a platform, and just write it off as marketing dollars for the DVD release. You need those [review] quotes and some word of mouth, some awareness of the title." Releasing a movie straight to DVD, without the review quotes or the New York/L.A. word of mouth, she adds, is "throwing your money away." But over the long haul (possibly as long as seven to 10 years), the DVD release gives independent distributors a fighting chance to turn a hit into a cult phenomenon, and a flop into a break-even proposition.

For the last year or so, people at all levels of the film business have been buzzing over a heretical new idea: Does it really make sense to release movies in a few big-city theaters, laboriously milk them across the country, and then spit them out on DVD months later, after whatever hype they've generated has long ago died down? Why shouldn't a retiree in Fargo, N.D., who wants to see Iranian art films or raunchy gay comedies be able to see them at the same time as a sideburned hipster in downtown Manhattan?

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