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24 A Rant James Schamus THE FOLLOWING IS a transcript of the keynote address I delivered at the 1999 Independent Feature Project/West Spirit Awards. Since the speech was, if I do say so myself, a bit of a bomb, I thought that, in an act of unutterable mercy, I would spare you all the lousy jokes that prefaced the substance of the talk. And, too, I thought I’d make a couple of postmortem revisions in order to underscore some of the points I hastily touched on in my rush to get off stage. The speech was organized around a simple, perhaps tongue-incheek proposal: that the Independent Feature Project (IFP) as we know it, and the Spirit Awards too, should be immediately disbanded. Aside from the obvious overabundance of awards shows out there these days, the reason for the proposal was simple: the IFP has already, and fabulously , achieved its goals. It has won its battles. The war is over, and we should all at this point happily celebrate, around the pyre of our victory bonfire, the achievements that have brought the independent movement this far, and wonder, perhaps, if from the ashes something new might arise, informed by the spirit of the founding mothers and fathers of the independent movement that led to the IFP’s creation twenty years ago. Why would I argue this? Let me share some statistics with you, because statistics are objective and these statistics support my point. I did some research, and I discovered that in 1986, at the very first Spirit Awards, the total box office of the nominated films in all categories was about $20 million. Fast-forward thirteen years to this year’s awards. The total box office for all nominated films, excluding foreign films, is $300 million. Now certainly there’s inflation, and more films in more categories this year, but even a simple averaging out of box office would 253 show an exponential rise in the economic heft of films considered worthy of “independent” kudos. This is a remarkable feat, all the more so when one considers the often “independent” feel—and substance—of many of the bigger-budgeted studio films. Now back in 1986, fully 50 percent of the box office of the Spirit nominees was earned by the major studios, namely, in the form of Warner Brothers and its Martin Scorcese–helmed After Hours. This year, I pointed out in my speech, $299.98 million of the $300 million earned was made by either major studios, their affiliates, or distributors backed by large-scale financial institutions. Of course a key objection to this “objective” statistic is the inclusion of fiery upstart Artisan, with its enormous hit The Blair Witch Project (1999), in the “major corporate” category. Artisan was pulled together by a group called Bain Capital, which, in a recent press release, boasts of its more than $7 billion in capital and its record of taking “over 20 companies public with a combined current market capitalization exceeding $24 billion.” But I failed to note that two of the partners in the venture had recently bought out Bain’s stake in the company. In fact, it was unfair of me to lump Artisan, a marvel of entrepreneurial energy and imagination, in the same category as the studios per se. My point was simply that, for all intents and purposes , the films recognized at the Spirit Awards have succeeded overwhelmingly in entering the mainstream system of commercial exploitation and finance, and today the economics required to make oneself heard even as an “independent” are essentially studio economics. In this so-called independent arena even the “little guys” need big capital if they are to survive in any economically viable form.1 Sure, the IFP nominating committees have managed to make certain that a number of worthy films with little or no distribution make their way onto our ballots, and these films fulfill more than a symbolic function in reminding us of the casualties left by the side of the road in the indie rush to success. But let’s face facts—the folks at the IFP are confronted with a terrible conundrum. How many of the five thousandplus voting members will have seen these films? Does their inclusion begin to look like mere, and perhaps mildly futile, tokenism? Or is there at least some sense in which the modest “exposure” such nominations get for these films makes the gesture...

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