Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Independent Film
of independence is possible only when films make so
little money they simply are not worth the studios’ time
or effort to own or control. The strange fact of
American filmmaking, especially in the modern era, is
that a director—even an unknown and inexperienced
director—can expect to enjoy far more creative autonomy
working on a $1.5–3 million so-called independent film
than on a $15–30 million studio picture. The minute
significant studio investment is in play, the minute significant
box-office is at stake, a filmmaker’s independence is
subject to second-guessing by executives whose primary
task is to protect the company’s bottom line.
While the relation between independent and mainstream
or commercial cinema has been an important
question in every nation that has had an established film
industry—Japan, India, France, Italy, and the United
Kingdom, for example—what follows surveys the history
of American independent cinema beginning with the
very first alternatives to Edison’s early films and the cartel
he subsequently founded. Of interest as well are the niche
films that proliferated in the early years of studio
Hollywood, the Poverty Row B-genre pictures of the
1930s–1950s, exploitation cinema from the 1920s
through the 1960s, the so-called new American cinema
avant-garde in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, and the
various independent cinemas that emerged as Hollywood
conglomerized and monopolized the entertainment market
after 1980.
INDEPENDENCE IN EARLY AND SILENT
AMERICAN CINEMA
So far as most American film histories and the US Patent
Office are concerned, movies in the United States began
with Thomas Edison (1847–1931). First there were the
patents on the Edison Kinetograph (the photographic
apparatus that produced the pictures) and the
Kinetoscope (the ‘‘peep show’’ viewing machine that
exhibited them) in 1891. And then there was the first
public demonstration of the Edison motion picture apparatus
at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in
May 1893, the place and date of what most agree was the
first publicly exhibited movie. The speed at which things
moved from this first showcase (which included the
screening of Edison’s crude moving picture Blacksmith
Scene, showing three men, all Edison employees, hammering
on an anvil for approximately twenty seconds) to
the production of entertaining and occasionally edifying
short movies was astonishingly fast. Edison had his Black
Maria Studio in New Jersey fully outfitted by the time
the Brooklyn Institute showcase was held. His first full
slate of movies was available for screening by January of
the following year.
In the spring of 1894, Edison renamed his company
the Edison Manufacturing Company. The new name highlighted
the business of making and selling Kinetoscope
equipment that seemed so promising in 1894, and also
clarified Edison’s vision about the medium and his role in
it. Movies were produced not by artists but by experts in
the technology of motion picture production. They were
made much as other products of industry were made on
assembly lines, by nameless, faceless workers toiling on
behalf of the company whose name was featured prominently
on the product.
American cinema was initially just Edison, but
domestic competition in the new medium emerged fairly
soon thereafter. Viewing independent cinema as an alternative
to a commercial mainstream, it is with these
first companies that took on Edison that independent
American cinema began. Edison’s first real competitor
was the American Mutoscope Company, later renamed
the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (routinely
referred to simply as Biograph). Biograph was a
particularly irksome competitor for two reasons: (1) one
of the principals in research and development at the
company was William K. L. Dickson (1860–1935), an
inventor who resigned from his position at Edison in
1895 after doing most of the work on the Kinetograph
and the Kinetoscope; and (2) the company worked in
70mm, a superior format that provided four times the
image surface of the Edison and international industry
standard of 35mm. With its first slate of films, Biograph
courted the carnival crowd. While Edison stuck mostly
to documentary short subjects, the Biograph company
founders Harry Marvin, Herman Casler, Elias Koopman,
and Dickson viewed cinema as first and foremost an
attraction. Their first films featured boxing bouts and
demonstrations of fire-fighting equipment, but soon
thereafter their ‘‘bread and butter’’ became crude gag
films (that is, short films that played out a single
comic skit).
Once the movies caught on—and it did not take
long—several other film companies emerged. In
December 1908, when it became clear that such a free
market (of independent film producers and distributors)
might quickly cost Edison his prominent role in the
industry, the inventor created the Motion Picture Patents
Company (MPPC) trust. The trust linked the interests of
Edison and nine of his competitors: Biograph, Vitagraph,
Essanay, Kalem, Selig Polyscope, Lubin, Star Film, Pathé
Freres, and Klein Optical. The MPPC effectively exploited
key industry patents on motion picture technology to fix
prices, restrict the distribution and exhibition of foreignmade
pictures, regulate domestic production, and control
film licensing and distribution. The trust was supported by
an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company,
the principal and at the time the only dependable provider
2 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM