It’s Suddenly So Last Year, That Once Bold New Guard

By A. O. SCOTT

A LITTLE more than six months ago the Academy Awards seemed to confirm the existence of a new status quo. The proceedings were dominated by a certain type of movie, the type customarily, if misleadingly, described as independent.

To some degree the habit of grouping films as different as “There Will Be Blood,” “Juno” and “No Country for Old Men” under the faded, stretched-out indie banner is a way of indicating a vague, shared artistic pedigree. Directors like Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh and Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of “No Country,” were the young, scrappy and iconoclastic breed back in the 1980s. Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed “Blood,” was one of those prototypes in the 1990s. As for “Juno,” even though it never played at Sundance, its quirks and edges made it seem as if it should have. And the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, wore tattoos and bangs and a cool vintage-looking dress to the Oscars.

But the most salient thing these three best picture nominees had in common — which they shared with “Atonement,” another best picture contender, and with most of the other nominees in the important, nontechnical categories — was that none had been released by a major studio. Or to be more precise, none was brought out by a corporate entity, housed within a multimedia conglomerate, bearing a name rich with the heritage of Old Hollywood. All of them were distributed by smaller subsidiaries of those same conglomerates, specialty divisions like Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, Miramax and Paramount Vantage.

The purpose of these companies has been to acquire, produce and distribute movies with lower budgets and loftier artistic ambitions than the mass-market, globally accessible commercial fare that fills out the bottom lines of their parent studios. And their recent domination of the Academy Awards — not just last year but for most of the past decade — has seemed to be the most visible indicator that this business model is working. The specialty divisions, along with some of the larger independent distributors, have kept alive, and to some extent rejuvenated, the venerable Hollywood tradition of prestige filmmaking, albeit on a more modest scale. The literary adaptations, the serious dramas, the bravura acting and audacious direction — quality movies, movies for grown-ups, movies that depend on good reviews in The New York Times — these make their way into the multiplexes, branded not as middlebrow popular art but rather as art-house fare.

On Oscar night, the idea that indie was the new mainstream was confirmed, once again, as conventional wisdom. Even the big-studio offering that crashed the party — Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” — was more of a middle-sized movie than a would-be blockbuster. And the evening belonged, of course, to “Juno” and the Coens and Daniel Day-Lewis. But by the time the Cannes Film Festival rolled around three months later, a new and diametrically opposite conventional wisdom was emerging. Indie film is dead!

Again! Still! For real this time! What began as a trickle of discouraging news — Warner Brothers shutting its art-house divisions; sluggish sales on the Riviera — swelled over the summer into a flood of gloomy assessments and “I told you so.” Paramount Vantage, the newest and one of the most ambitious specialty labels (distributor of “There Will be Blood” and “Babel,” among others), has disappeared into its corporate parent. At the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Mark Gill, a former Miramax and Warner Independent executive, gave a talk called “Yes, the Sky Is Really Falling,” which stopped short of predicting utter apocalypse but suggested that for those who manage to stay in the business: “It will feel like we survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.”

So we arrive at autumn, traditionally a time of renewal for devotees of the serious and the sophisticated, to find the smell of death hanging in the air. What happened? Last year at this time we were surveying an almost incredible bounty, a bumper crop of middle-size movies that threatened to overflow the calendar and overwhelm anyone who tried, out of love or professional duty or some combination of the two, to keep track of them all.

Remember? Week after week they arrived — “In the Valley of Elah,” “Eastern Promises,” “Into the Wild,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Savages,” “I’m Not There” and on and on — not all great works, but most worthy of debate and consideration. Some of us complained that there were too many, but that seemed like the kind of grousing that only critics could be perverse enough to indulge in. Too many interesting movies to write about. Poor us.

But that embarrassment of riches is a direct cause of the present desolation. Those movies were sent out into a brutally competitive marketplace, a Hobbesian battlefield of each against all. Competition may be healthy, but in this case the odds of winning seemed to grow increasingly long as the victories became pyrrhic. In principle, the middle-sized movie is a way to minimize financial risk. With some notable exceptions, like Miramax at the end of the Weinstein era, the specialty divisions have advertised their thrift and moderation, often capping production costs at $10 million or $15 million or $20 million.

Compared with the $100 million that the big studios now routinely spend on their franchise movies, that’s not a lot. But the effort to make good on even a modest investment frequently becomes an exercise in throwing bad money after good. Building an audience for a movie that doesn’t capitalize on the mass appeal of a pre-existing pop cultural brand is an expensive proposition, and a huge gamble.

Pretend — why not? — that you’re the chief of a specialty division. You have a lovely movie, based on a prizewinning novel, with an esteemed director and a prodigiously talented actor with enough of a name to attract the interest of the cognoscenti. You open your movie on a fine October Friday in New York and Los Angeles, to good reviews and sold-out shows in a handful of theaters. Now, to turn that initial enthusiasm into wider success, you expand into more theaters in more cities, buying big ads with rapturous quotes from the critics.

Your goal at this point is to generate enough momentum to stay in the game until the awards season, when a strong showing might help your little movie cross over into big money. But those coveted nominations are not only a platform for economic success; they are also an affirmation of it. Losers don’t get invited to the dance, so you spend yourself into the red trying to look like a winner. And if you have two or more movies in possible contention, at a point you have to make a cruel choice.

Even so, you are most likely doubling your bets in the hope of breaking even. And even if the campaigns bring in some Oscar gold, that glory will not necessarily cover the cost of collecting it. And all you will have to console yourself with is the knowledge that you released a good movie at a time when there were already too many good movies.

Will there now be fewer? Would that be a bad thing? Will fewer mean better, or just more of the same? These questions have ultimately less to do with the movie business — which always changes and always stays the same — than with the state of the audience. All of these strategies of marketing, branding, campaigning and publicizing amount to a strenuous, sloppy effort to intuit the desire and influence the behavior of moviegoers. And the problem may be not that there are too many movies, but that there are too few of us.