A friend of a friend at a company gave me a VHS cassette and said, “You really should look at this. My friend’s friend’s son is trying to make a movie.” Late on a Sunday night, I put in a VHS tape of very early unfinished work from Eddie Burns of The Brothers McMullen. I looked at it thinking I would look at it for two or three minutes, and then I had done my job and I could nicely pass. But it was great. It was what really makes independent films. And, in many ways, makes my entire philosophy about film, because that film was probably the least expensive ever to come out of the major system in history. I’ve worked on the least expensive and I’ve worked on Avatar, the most expensive. Here’s what I’ve learned: the audience, the folks out there on , they don’t care how much a movie costs—they care how it makes them feel. Does it make them feel something, something memorable, something significant, a feeling that they’re not going to get outside of that movie theater?
Watching that little videocassette of that movie, I realized, “Oh, I’d never seen this story.” These were three Irish brothers. I’m a Jewish kid from Baltimore. I’d never seen this particular depiction of sibling life, and yet it was tremendously relatable. Eddie Burns was lugging cable for Entertainment Tonight to pay the rent. It’s happened to me a few times in life, maybe half a dozen times in a 30-year career. I got to make that phone call: “Hi, Ed, you don’t know me, but quit your job. I’m sending you a plane ticket. Your life’s about to change.”
We finished Brothers McMullen and put it in Sundance. It won the prize at Sundance, and it and Eddie and Fox Searchlight were off to the races. Festivals are extremely important and were, for twenty, 25 years or so, the lifeblood of independent film. What’s happening now in the past couple of years to traditionalists like myself, I find it not so great. The festivals, which used to be a great proving ground for indie films that would go theatrical, are now really easy pickings for the streamers. It doesn’t matter to them what they pay; if there’s a really good film, streamers can always outbid an indie film company, and that is good and bad. It’s good for some young people and good for investors, but maybe not so good for the long run, because some of those movies appear on streaming services, and if the algorithm isn’t in the right mood that day, they disappear. Make an indie film that succeeds at the box office, now you’ve impacted the culture, and impacting culture is the real mark of enduring cinema.
