Hype Dreams

It is, of course, a two-edged sword: however freewheeling, bachelors spend a lot of time looking to hook up with an Other and sacrifice their freedom for a sense of belonging, union and financial cooperation. Similarly, no matter how marvelously and self-expressively autonomous they may feel, indies still want to be absorbed by a studio and accepted into the mainstream. Any beginning filmmaker who thinks he or she can come out of the system unscathed and uncompromised is as naive as the newlywed husband who thinks taking out the garbage should be a non-gender-specific chore.

Every budding young director should take note of the short-but-hairpin-curved career arc of Steven Soderbergh's two-film oeuvre. In a recent Variety survey that pitted a film's bottom-line cost against its profits, sex, lies, and videotape was judged the most profitable film of all time, earning back 100 times its $1 million budget worldwide. Not bad. Don't even mention the awards at Cannes or the Oscar nomination. With a modest film featuring four characters, Soderbergh managed a nearly Herculean feat: establishing himself instantly as a financially powerful player as well as a redoubtable talent. His next step seemed well-reasoned: He selected a reputedly brilliant script that had been gathering dust on studio shelves for years (Lem Dobbs's Kafka), he got Jeremy Irons to play the lead, and he went to Prague with a truckload of studio money. When he and it came back, Kafka was roasted by critics and bombed badly, suddenly casting into doubt whatever notions the studios had about dishing out eight-digits'-worth of investment capital to geeky youngsters who happen to strike a rich lode with their first low-budgeter.

That revelation's chastening effect on Hollywood's hype habits lasted only a few weeks--just about Kafka's theatrical run, in fact-- and then it was open season on young'uns once again. The '90s indie rush had begun.

The '90s Scorsese spawn have all, suitably, begun as urban independents, enjoying the freedom and pro-am showboating that low-budget, guerrilla-style film shoots afford. Fresh from maxing their credit cards and haunting the festival circuit, these novice filmmakers are easy prey, and once the industry scouts get ahold of them, it's Faustian bargain time: sign away any notion of actually making the films you want to make, and we'll guarantee you've got enough money to make them.

Everyone has his or her own story, but few map out the potholes young directors must navigate as effectively as the complementary (and ongoing) sagas of Quentin Tarantino and Nick Gomez. Both are indisputably testosterone-heavy, post-Don Siegel movieheads, each co-opting in his own way the history of American genre films. Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs has been trumpeted as loudly as any independent film since Do the Right Thing, and understandably so: it's a bloody '90s dance number through the familiar noir territory of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), with enough confrontational acting riffs and bristling Mametian dialogue to make an otherwise dozy industry sit up and smell the gunpowder. Tarantino's far from a Hollywood outsider. An experienced small-time actor (appearances ranging from an episode of "Golden Girls" to Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear), he began grinding our screenplays five or so years ago, managing to attach both executive producer Monte Hellman and star Harvey Keitel to Reservoir Dogs by using his producer Lawrence Bender's acting teachers as middlemen, which eventually led to rehearsals at the Sundance Institute Director's Workshop and Lab. Tutored by the likes of Sydney Pollack, Terry Gilliam and Volker Schlondorff, the then 28-year-old Tarantino fine-tuned the material, assembled a dream cast and shot it for just 1.3 mil.

Since his first movie's festival raves and national release, Tarantino is swimming in studio offers, has up to five original scripts in production (with titles like True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Past Midnight), and is slated to write an original script for transplanted Hong Kong action-meister John Woo. It seems hardly anyone can help themselves from wondering what Tarantino's follow-up films will be like, or rather, how great they'll be. (I think he may've shot his wad, if anyone's wondering.) The guy better be careful: hype can be the film industry's steroids, bulking you up as your face breaks out, your penis shrinks, and your brain gets deep-fried in its own Mazola. But, because of his rapacious relationship with movie culture, Tarantino currently seems inviolate from Hollywood's worst tendencies--you can't buy me, he's saying, I'm already sold.

If Chris Columbus is the aging wunderkind generation's Zeppo, and Tarantino is the new generation's Groucho--the irreverent wiseacre who is unaccountably given authority as a college president or leader of Freedonia--then Nick Gomez, 29, is closer to Harpo, a relatively incorruptible agent of anarchy. His Laws of Gravity, which he completed on a $38,000 budget, is as much a movie-movie as Dogs, but with a difference. Instead of feeding on the remains of timeworn mainstream genres, Gomez traffics with the independent-film pathmarks of yesteryear. Laws of Gravity hearkens explicitly to Scorsese's Mean Streets by using its characters' names and its Gotham neighborhoods; more significantly, the ghost of John Cassavetes is invoked by the movie's hyperrealism, hand-held camera, and penchant for toe-to-toe domestic psychodrama.

Though Reservoir Dogs and Laws of Gravity were yoked together during their prerelease festival hype phase--both are, after all, portraits of mano-a-mano lowlife where every third word is "fuck"-- the chasm between them and their directors widened when the guys began wondering how they'd get their second films made. As much as Tarantino is swamped with options and open for business, Gomez has been holding out for a deal in which he gets as much autonomy on his second film as he had on his first. In Hollywood terms, he may as well hang a string of garlic around his neck. His first three-picture deal with Island Pictures last April was a good beginning, until they required that he cast Marky Mark in his new urban filth-fest about Boston car thieves, Young Americans. You don't like that? the executives asked. All right, how about a sequel to Laws of Gravity designed as Elizabeth Taylor's comeback vehicle?

Not surprisingly, Gomez walked. He cut his losses by repackaging his project, then began directing episodic TV (including "America's Most Wanted") and decided that if he couldn't get substantial backing, he'd hit the streets guerrilla-style again, and practice the same balls-to-the-wall type of ultracheap filmmaking he's proven he's the best at since the early Coen brothers.

Like manna from heaven, the ubiquitous studio contract sometimes falls into a young filmhead's life with almost divine grace. Twenty-four-year-old Robert Rodriguez had the most modest of film production strategies: raise $7,000 by selling himself as a medical-experiment guinea pig, make the first of a projected handful of shoestring Spanish-language gangster movies, and sell it to a Latino video company. Rodriguez figured he'd work his way up to skid row this way, and didn't think much would come of leaving a screener of El Mariachi on ICM's Los Angeles desk. Soon the bandwagon-jumpers at Columbia who bought up John Singleton were calling him, contract at the ready, and El Mariachi was given a February '93 release date.

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you're young, period. But even Mr. Rodriguez has to give a little, take a little as the studio tries to get the tenderfoot to Anglicize and whitewash his subsequent scrubby-bordertown scenarios. There's more than integrity at stake: as one can see by comparing the undeniably unique personality of a film like El Mariachi to the usual homogenous Hollywood product, too many power-mad dolts masquerading as cooks will spoil the gazpacho.

Hype often attaches itself tick-like to the unlikeliest of hosts, most notably Nick Gomez's SUNY Purchase alumni compatriot Hal Hartley, perhaps the reigning dean of filmmakers too young to remember where they were, or if they were, when JFK was shot. Still only 33, Hartley's practically a veteran, each of his films (three features, three original TV projects) garnering berserk critical accolades and earning enough in urban markets to ensure subsequent funding. That Hartley's films are, subjectively speaking, built on perfume-ad posing, dead one-liners and sub-Pinter pauses makes his success all the more baffling. Watching his films is like getting lost in Attitudeland without a map, and if his brand of half-lidded film-school archness can reap respect and press (his latest, Simple Men, was hyped heavier than the last three Lawrence Kasdan films), then even the most uncommercial of personal filmmakers can take heart in a seemingly hopeless world. Hartley's attraction lies in the simple fact that he makes his films his way, and however you feel about his movies, they're definitely the distinctive work of a single man.

While it may be self-evident that maintaining a directorial voice is an easier stunt to pull when your movie costs less than a used BMW, what's less obvious is how a filmmaker's subject matter itself can be a hurdle. Alongside fellow urchins Richard Linklater (Slacker) and Atom Egoyan (Speaking Parts, The Adjuster), Hartley's terrain, no matter how idiosyncratic, is easier going down the Hollywood gullet than last year's spate of emerging gay filmmakers. Sexually frank, formally risky movies like Gregg Araki's uppity homoerotic AIDS roadtrip, The Living End, Christopher Munch's quixotic hypothesis on an unrequited John Lennon/Brian Epstein love affair, The Hours and Times, and Tom Kalin's smooth-as-silk reupholstering of the Leopold and Loeb case, Swoon, were praised everywhere, played well, and nevertheless present Hollywood with an ideological conundrum, Gus Van Sant or no Gus Van Sant.

All under 32, neither Araki, Munch nor Kalin seem to be very easily marketable or hypeable properties, despite their films' acclaim, respectable art-house receipts and the industry's sympathy for AIDS issues. The hype was there, but it was critical hype characterizing the three as the front guard of a gay minimovement. And critical hype can only do so much, especially when a filmmaker's chief virtue is marginality. Of the three, Munch seems to have the best shot at. transforming himself into a mainstream Van Sant-ish art-house wonder; Kalin and especially Araki are too expressly absorbed in gay issues and too infatuated with the try-anything prerogatives of low-budget moviemaking to be taken into the industry fold anytime soon, where the big-time hype makes for big careers. Kalin and Araki have, after all, designed their films to be snot-nosed winters of discontent in a homophobic world; they don't try very hard to be liked. Remember that Hollywood's idea of an acceptably risky film about gay life was 1990's Longtime Companion, an Oscar-nominated weeper about AIDS that was, nevertheless, independently financed. One can't help but imagine the collective bureaucratic jaw-drop that accompanied the studio's first look at The Living End, with its CHOOSE DEATH bumper sticker and rough-trade, gun-in-mouth sex scenes. If they stick to their same-sex cinematic agenda, these three guys will remain independents for at least as long as it takes Spike Lee to remake The Birth of a Nation.

Serious industry hype is, finally, a precious ingredient of the film-culture diet and is not dished out indiscriminately. Hollywood only serves up a leafy, fiber-strong Caesar salad of hype with main courses they know the public will eat in substantial quantities. The industry wants some level of confidence that the tyros they put at the helm will justify their faith by making easily masticated movie fare--the better for John and Edna Q. Filmgoer to digest the notion of paying $7 to see a film directed by someone the age of Bobby, the boy who mows the lawn every Saturday. Of course, the more the young filmmakers are hyped, the younger they get--picture Matty Rich unable to buy a can of beer next door to the theater showing his film. How long before a fresh-faced 12-year-old writer/director signs a three-picture deal with Paramount? Splitting time between story meetings and 6th-grade math instruction? Fielding questions from "Entertainment Tonight" interviewers? (Actually, that'd be the easy part.) The day is coming, my friends, just as surely as Sister Act 2.

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Michael Atkinson is a film critic for the New York Press.

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