Why Aren't We Winning the Indie Movie Race?

Several years ago, Spike Lee invited me to a private screening of an independent film he was exec-producing. The film featured a serious amount of drugs and guns and gold and car chases, and when it was over I turned to Spike and said something like, "Is that really the image of black America you want to contribute to this whole indie deal?"

He shrugged his shoulders, accentuating the action, or inaction, with his trademark-baiting smirk, and that was the end of that conversation.

Certainly Spike has paved the way for many black filmmakers and actors, but I assumed at the time, albeit naively, that his power engendered in him a sense of obligation to make the world a better place through movies -- a more integrated, inclusive and nuanced place.

Back then, the "indie deal" I was referring to was still vibing off She's Gotta Have It, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction. Beast of indie beauties Harvey Weinstein and his Miramax studio had only just started to become known for making the small independent and foreign films that studios refused to finance. There was still time. The possibility still existed for the whole "indie deal" to evolve into an amalgamated, diverse and interesting medium. In fact, it seemed the perfect opportunity for cool, smart, creative filmmakers from all cultural backgrounds to join together and kick Hollywood's slick, mainstream, tired white ass. Since then, however, we have all watched the independent film industry go from what it could have been to what it is -- a scrawnier, slick, mainstream, tired white ass.

And so it is with most independent films today -- the filmmakers, the casts, the content and the industry as a whole -- all are arrestingly white. It's as if white America assigned itself eminent domain on the industry. Not only white, of course, but predominantly male. Every possible variation of The White Guy is accounted for within the industry. The Hipster: Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich); The Middle-Class Jersey Boy: Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy); The Intellectual: Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums); The Wild Card: Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy); The Pretty Boy: Ed Burns (The Brothers McMullen, No Looking Back); The Dark Horse: Gus Van Sant (Five Ways to Kill Yourself, Drugstore Cowboy); The Elder: Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape), etc.

And then you have the chosen exotic delegates (which are by definition "other" and so therefore may be male or female) -- Sherman Alexie (representing all Native Americans everywhere), Mira Nair (representing all Indians worldwide), and Miguel Arteta (representing all Latinos, only, although not necessarily in his films). There are others, both women and men, who come up in any indie film conversation worth its salt -- Todd Solondz, Nicole Holfcener, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tom DiCillo, Doug Liman, Allison Anders, to name a few. Not a black face in the bunch. As Jakob my hair stylist quite reasonably demanded, to no one in particular, when he found out there was to be a movie version of Scooby Doo: "What is going on?"

"What's interesting to me," says filmmaker Jim McKay, director of Our Song, about three black teenage girls in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and a man who has taken a considerable amount of guff for being a white filmmaker who makes films about black people, "is that a lot of filmmakers of color aren't really interested in being part of independent film." McKay notes that he knows a lot of talented black filmmakers who are more interested in making big studio films, and who want to get paid, too. "And I know why that happens," he says, "although I don't want to make the assumption that all filmmakers of color are underprivileged, as much as I don't want to make the assumption that all white filmmakers are privileged."