Line up last march’s nominees for the Best Picture Oscar and you might think you’re in indie heaven. From Paul Haggis’ complex Crash and Bennett Miller’s perceptive Capote to Ang Lee’s gay-friendly Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney’s media-savvy Good Night, and Good Luck, it’s a thrilling list for moviegoers fed up with sequels, spin-offs and Hollywood studio-think in general.

Independent voices are nothing new, of course, and they’ve had more than one glory period in the past. Among those credited with jumpstarting the phenomenon are John Cassavetes with Shadows in 1959, John Sayles with Return of the Secaucus 7 in 1980 and Jim Jarmusch with Stranger Than Paradise in 1984.

Terry Zwigoff directs Art School Confidential (2006).

But many feel indies are reaching a new pinnacle. While movies like Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge had production and distribution money from giants like Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox, their stories and styles reflect the distinctive touches of the independent spirits who brought them from initial concept to Oscar nominated fame. Movies with minimal studio input are also rising in importance—look at Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, for instance. Every major studio now has an indie or “classics” branch to serve the growing number of moviegoers frustrated by the sameness of big-money tentpole pictures.

Not that anyone expects lavish budgets and star-studded casts to vanish any time soon. “I like to think audiences are losing their patience with the drek the studios are giving them,” says director Terry Zwigoff, whose boldly independent career stretches from Crumb to Art School Confidential. “But those corporate marketing machines are sophisticated adversaries, and even I find it difficult to resist the big marketing blitz that makes you think you’re going to miss out on some huge event.”

How should independent directors strike back? Zwigoff ’s recommendation is to make movies that don’t go out of fashion the way blockbusters do. “In a couple of years nobody wants to see those overhyped films again,” he argues, likening the average studio production to a pile of fast food hamburgers. “The public has to be weaned away from them. People know what to expect, and on some level they like that familiarity. But they drive away thinking, ‘I don’t feel so good!’”

Buzzed-about indies like Brokeback Mountain and Capote aside, not everyone thinks the independent scene is at a high point now. “It was much easier 10 years ago to work with low budgets and non-Hollywood actors,” says writer-director Mary Harron, whose career stretches from I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho to this year’s The Notorious Bettie Page.

Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman in Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005).

“It’s true that movies like Capote and The Squid and the Whale show a real break with Hollywood storytelling,” Harron continues, “and it’s really exciting when visionary directors like David Cronenberg and David Lynch make experimental films that get into the mainstream. Yet even a movie like Crash, which has some tough subject matter, has almost a Hollywood cast and ends up being somehow uplifting, since that’s what audiences embrace. Financing an independent production can be easier now—there are more places to go because the studios have indie-film operations—but casting can be more difficult since everyone is trying to get the same actors. There’s always pressure to repeat what has succeeded before.”

While the independent scene and Hollywood may overlap in seeking noteworthy stars and audience-soothing stories, the relative size of production budgets is likely to remain decisive in defining the indie spirit. This doesn’t mean indie films require bottom-range budgets to stake out their difference from mainstream fare, however.

“Hollywood has a corner on high budgets,” says Baltimore Sun critic Michael Sragow, “and being dirt cheap used to be a hallmark of many independent films. But some good directors I’m talking to now are interested in $15 to $17 million movies. We could be seeing a return to the mid-range movie, which has become almost a vacuum in the past 10 or 15 years.”

A different view comes from Gary Meyer, owner of the Balboa Theater in San Francisco and a Telluride Film Festival programmer. He feels the most important trend right now is the explosion of ancillary markets, which tend to level the field between independent releases and all but the biggest studio productions.

George Clooney and David Strathairn in Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Paul Haggis directs Don Cheadle in Crash (2005)

“DVD and other ancillary distractions are changing the entire industry,” Meyer says. “When you spend thousands of dollars building a home theater, you have to use it a lot to justify the investment! So people are deciding there are only a few movies a year they need to see in theaters, and I predict that theatrical screens could shrink from about 37,000 now to less than 10,000 within the next decade. Movies with lowend budgets will be hit hardest, and midrange movies will have a tougher time than ever. Lots of people are happy to skip The Da Vinci Code theatrically when they know Netflix will have it in a few weeks.”

That said, observers generally agree that the indie scene’s increasingly high profile is encouraging more frequent investments in original, offbeat projects.

“As the studios find themselves bereft of ideas,” says David D’Arcy, a widely published film journalist and critic, “they go to the ‘minor leagues’ and give higher budgets to less-known people with fresh material. It’s a hit-or-miss process, and the people who hit—Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee—may percolate up and become part of the establishment. Even when their budgets rise and their platforms get grander, the best of them keep introducing themes far more challenging than the industry, with its amazing stupidity and stultification, is normally willing to accommodate. Look at Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh… The list goes on.”

Not everyone feels independent production is sparking a sea change in American film. One doubter is indie director Alan Berliner, whose latest documentary, Wide Awake, takes a personal look at insomnia. While some saw last spring’s Oscar show as a celebration of the indie spirit, Berliner feels it represented little more than an off year for the studios.

“Several of the big-name presenters seemed bored,” he says. “That’s because Hollywood needs to feed off its own mythos of hype and glamour, keeping Emerald City bright and polished in order to sustain the pumped-up illusions… of the dream machine that is America’s most important export.

Paul Haggis directs Don Cheadle in Crash (2005)

“The industry is not becoming more independent,” Berliner continues. “And even if it were, a counterculture always gets [engulfed] by the spoils and splendor of the powers that surround it, becoming an establishment in its own right—prickly, ugly and ripe for revolution.” Similar views come from longtime film critic Judy Stone, whose latest book is Not Quite a Memoir: Of Film, Books, the World. “Movies like Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck were all made with studio cooperation,” she asserts, “and on certain levels they’re not independent films at all. Of course Brokeback Mountain has a gay theme and was probably hard to finance, but truly independent visions have an even more difficult time getting funded through Hollywood channels.”

Noting that movie reviews are another key factor in the indie versus studio equation, Stone asserts that mainstream periodicals are swayed more by the money of big advertisers than by the adventurousness of independent artistry. “When a critic gives a rave review to a [small] movie it’s likely to get printed below the fold or even in the restaurant section,” she says, “while the review of a blockbuster runs at the top of the page—even if it’s negative! The publishers are dumbing things down.”

Jarret Reid as Green Paint Guy in Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (2006).

Skeptics like Stone and Berliner see no easy exit from the constraints on funding, distributing and marketing that have always put independents at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Hollywood’s low-risk, made-by-committee fare. Yet the steady growth of classics studio branches, coupled with the surprise success of indies as different as Lost in Translation and Finding Neverland, leads some observers to a more optimistic view.

“The studios win when their independent film branches get award nominations and respectable grosses,” says Meyer. “This opens up avenues for filmmakers at all points on the spectrum, and I’d argue that even Munich shows a bit of the independent spirit—it’s structurally interesting, it takes risky positions, it doesn’t have huge stars. It wasn’t a huge box-office success, either, and it might have done better if an indie [studio] wing had been allowed to handle it. The independent wings are good at acquiring, producing and marketing [offbeat] films with the special care they need. Studios will benefit on the bottom line if the big guys let the indie guys do what they do best.”

Audiences can benefit as well. “American independents have exerted a growing influence on both the filmmaking industry and the filmgoing public,” says Graham Leggat, the San Francisco Film Society’s executive director. “And this influence is now pervasive and significant as an alternative and antidote to the overwhelmingly mediocre Hollywood product that fills most screens. I only hope it continues.” MM