If you’ve never watched the Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony that traditionally precedes the Oscars, things like this happen there:
It’s a very casual, highly irreverent program. Generally, there’s alcohol involved. Although no one can be sure precisely how much.
The point of it is to celebrate the work associated with bringing a film to life outside of the major studio system. It typically features stars of varying luminance, but it’s always an occasion to honor the boot-strappers, the garage filmmakers and the people who accumulated massive personal credit card debt (or turned to Kickstarter) to finance their passion projects.
Independent filmmaking is not a homogenous endeavor. There are the people whose films slide eagerly into the crappy daytime slots at tiny film festivals in places very, very far from Hollywood and Highland. There are the people whose completed films are tagged “Independent” so they can be buried somewhere on Netflix Instant. And there are the people whose films run for two or three months at indie cinemas in the top 50 US markets before being sold for all of the non-NATO media platforms.
At this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony, host Andy Samberg included a gag in his opening monologue acknowledging the class of people who are free to choose the indie path:
As much as the Spirit Awards may want to position itself as a kitchen-sink collection of noble yeomen who lack the power, glamour and prestige of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people who move in the indie world are not so motley. Not the most successful ones, anyway. And if you hope to have a career as a performer in or maker of any kind of films, there is a game to be played. The same game played in other industries. Mostly by start-ups.
When Dennis Quaid took the stage to announce the winner of Best Feature at the 2013 Film Independent Spirit Awards, he began with a line that went like this:
“In a world where Big Box Marts are popping up everywhere, I think we all understand the value of mom and pop stores.”
What Quaid suggests sounds very anachronistic. It’s a small grocery. It’s a rusty hardware store. Only one family has ever owned and operated the place. It receives mail somewhere on Main Street. It’s a dreamy concept of Americana. But it’s not really how we do things.
What we really do lines up more closely with “start-up” than “mom and pop.” And what “start-up” implies is that we want to prove the concept for our business idea so we can seduce a larger, established company to acquire the company we’re running out of our garage. Or maybe we want to cash out via an IPO. Either way, it’s all business. Even if it starts, in part, as a labor of love.
Show business is no different. The big winners at the Film Independent Spirt Awards have partnerships with companies like Warner Brothers, Fox Searchlight, The Weinstein Company, Focus Features and even PBS. Most of those arrangements are about distribution and were initiated after the films were finished being made. A bit like the arrangements people in other industries pursue after their idea is proven as a manufacturable product. None of these things are necessarily bad. It’s just how things get done.
All of which, I suppose, is to say that the casual, irreverent awards show with the name that fills a mouth, the Film Independent Spirit Awards, is very aptly named. You can celebrate independent filmmaking in spirit. But you just can’t separate it completely from the dirty, shiny dealings of show business.
