"The Passion" As Indie

When Eugene writes that we had "another installment in an occasional indieWIRE office discussion about the definition of independent film" when discussing whether or not "The Passion of the Christ" should be included in our indieWIRE:BOT tracking of independent and speciality films, he's hinting at one of the more interesting "What is Indie?" discussions we've had as a staff in a long time (something that started last week, even.) When you apply the checklist of "indie film traits" against "The Passion" it meets more of them than the average Miramax or Sony Picture Classics release, even though something feels totally different about the scale.

Not that the checklist (indie financing, indie distribution, outside of traditional development models, etc.) is the ultimate guide to what is independent and what isn't. It doesn't attempt any finer grain distrinction (between indie, underground and Indiewood), but it tends to be a pretty good guide.

We got hung up on one important question:

We typically don't list films that "open wide" (on more than 500-600 screens), and this is part of how we seperate out the "speciality films" from "traditional releases" from individual Indiewood companies (so if Miramax opens it on a 1,000 screens, we call it traditional release, versus when they open it on 20 art house screens ... even if it ends up "going wide" later in the run.) We were struggling with the scope -- Newmarket / Icon Distribution could have opened it on less screens, but is market demand and the ability to meet it, even outside the traditional system, a sign that something is no longer independent?

About halfway into the discussion, I suggested to Eugene to see what some other people in the industry thought, and the result is one of the more interesting articles we've published in a while about the nature of independence. Most of the distributors and producers Eugene spoke with seem to feel the same way -- that while a whole new category should probably be created for the film, it's "Indie with a capital I" specifically because it has done what it has outside the system.

In fact, I might argue that "The Passion" will be a watershed event from a business sense, as it sends the message that what a distributor provides (the mechanics of distribution) can be contracted, rather than encumbered with turning over creative or marketing control in the project. Before, people might have argued, "Yes, this kind of distribution could work, but it will never be as efficient as the Hollywood system."

So, however I might feel about the movie, and however different the impact might be than the filmmaker's intent ... thanks, Mel Gibson, for giving us the first example of what an independent film looks like when it scaled to the size of Hollywood's biggest reach.

posted to Independence on March 03, 2004