Cinema on a Shoestring

Although France's new wave of film makers has long since begun to ebb, American moviegoers are currently discovering a similar movement sprouting in this country. Within the past year, there has been a strong sprinkling of offbeat, low-budgeted pictures to spice up the standard fare provided by the major studios. Many more are slated for the near future. Or rather, many more are in production and hopeful of release in the months ahead. For these are the works of independent picture makers who owe neither financial nor artistic allegiance to the Hollywood studios. Indeed, most of them will cheerfully admit that the kind of movie they want to make is something that the studio mentality could never understand. The only hitch is, all the main channels for getting films into the movie houses are firmly controlled by the tentacular distribution arms of those same studios. The road to recognition -- which is what most of these youthful pioneers want more than riches -- is not an easy one.

But strangely, there is little sense of frustration about them. If at present the big distributors have chosen to ignore their efforts, the investors have not. Many of the current crop of low-budget independents are being financed by former theatrical angels who had their wings singed once too often by the stage. Broadway's record in recent years of a few profitable hit shows amidst a succession of costly failures has made the movies seem a safer, if not quite so glamorous, field in which to take a flyer. The independent productions cost no more -- and often considerably less -- than a Broadway show; and their audience potential is, by comparison, enormous. Even the palms of hardfisted Wall Streeters have begun to itch a little.

The pattern for these new independents is already clear-cut. After an inexpensive short or two, in which the would-be film maker both tests and proves his ability, he is ready to take on a feature production. Armed with his one- or two-reeler, and the story or a developed script on what he wants to do next, he begins his search for backers. At one time, he might have gone directly to the distributors; in this day of agency deals and star packages, however, the chances for an untried talent with an offbeat idea to win a sympathetic hearing are minuscule. The real opportunity lies in coming in with a completed picture. To help with this, a new type of producer has already appeared on the scene -- the man who knows little about movies, but a great deal about where the money is. Since many of them have theatrical backgrounds, they have been largely instrumental in deflecting potential investors from Broadway to the screen.

The result has been something strikingly similar to the growth of the off-Broadway theater in the past few years -- a kind of off-Broadway movie. The accent is not only on low budgets, but on a nonconformist approach to themes that are themselves far from the beaten track. Most of these film makers will hasten to explain, however, that theirs is no deliberate, premeditated radicalism. Actor John Cassavetes, whose improvised Shadows foreshadowed the movement, recently said, "I'm a conservative, strictly a conformist. But this was a story I wanted to make and the only way I could make it." The manner of its telling, with the actors inventing their lines as they went along, was motivated as much by the low state of his finances as by the high purposes of his art, Cassavetes admitted. He just couldn't afford a writer.

If any one philosophy unites these young film makers, it is this insistence that their productions be done their way, and represent their point of view. "Anybody who has anything to say, and enough in him to say it his own way, can make a movie with $10,000," says Jonas Mekas, a Greenwich Village film critic and the editor of the highbrow periodical Film Culture. Mekas recently completed his first movie, Guns of the Trees, for that sum (not counting deferred payments to actors, laboratories, etc.). Apart from this, however, both the social and the artistic credos of the individuals making off-Broadway films are strikingly dissimilar. Although a few have banded together along with Mekas under a "New American Cinema" banner, many prefer to deny that any such thing as an American new wave exists. It is less a movement than a coincidence, they maintain.

The fact is that all of the new waves of the past few years, whether in France, England or Italy, have been pretty much coincidences -- coincidences transformed into movements by critics, magazine writers and canny press agents, rather than by the film makers themselves. In France, the breakdown of the large movie companies gave an unprecedented opportunity to predominantly young (under-30) assistant directors, camera assistants, documentary directors and movie critics who had never before handled a camera. Because the pictures turned out by the French old masters had become too expensive and too unprofitable, producers welcomed experimental films made on low budgets -- especially since they were generally financed by the film makers themselves. And when first the French moviegoers, then the American distributors, showed marked interest in these works, the welcome grew hearty indeed. On the other hand, the moribund English studios, where bookkeepers rather than film makers reign supreme, had so discouraged anything offbeat or chancy that the government itself intervened to provide funds for a Free Cinema movement, the original impetus behind such films as The Entertainer, Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

But whether nouvelle vague or Free Cinema, each of the works bearing the label was itself sharply individual. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine pictures of more contrasting aims and styles than such successful French efforts as the lush, allegoric Black Orpheus and the crude, slice-of-life realism of Breathless, the frank eroticism of The Lovers and the probing, philosophic Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the slickly commercial The Cousins and the poignant yet angry The Four Hundred Blows. More than anything else (except, perhaps, the fact that they were made for peanuts), this sense of individuality, of a director making a personal statement on film, affected the young ambitious film makers in this country. If it could be done in France, they reasoned, it might at least be attempted in this country. And so, quite independently -- in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles -- pictures went into production, the pictures that, coincidentally but inevitably, were to be grouped together as America's own new wave.

One more impetus worth noting is Hollywood's lamentable inability to search out fresh film talent. When new directors appear on the studio contract lists, they are invariably men who have already made their mark on Broadway or in television. New writers are brought to the studios only after a hit play or a successful novel. They may know nothing whatever about the peculiar demands of the motion picture medium; but if they made it once, the theory seems to be, perhaps they can do it again. In the crafts -- photography, editing, assistant direction, sound -- the unions have made it virtually impossible for any newcomer to find work. Even if he should be so fortunate as to be admitted into a union, he still must serve years of apprenticeship before being permitted to advance to a creative role. By setting up his own production, however, an ambitious and talented film maker can circumvent both the frustration of waiting and the necessity of gaining prior recognition in one of the other entertainment arts. These are important inducements.

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Because the critics, for expediency's sake, have tended to tag every American low-budgeted, independently produced movie by an unfamiliar director with the new wave label, there is an assumption that at least the aims -- if not the themes and techniques -- of all such film makers are the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the motivations are almost as varied as the individuals who make these pictures. Two extremes are evident, however. At one end are those film makers who make pictures because they have something to say which, they feel, can best be said in movies. At the other end are those who make pictures mainly because they want to break into the studios. They remember that Stanley Kubrick moved into the big time on the strength of Killer's Kiss, an action melodrama shot largely on the streets of New York. More recently, Leslie Stevens, John Cassavetes and the Sanders brothers landed contracts with major studios on the basis of their own first shoestring productions.

The result has been a spate of inexpensive melodramas, like Blast of Silence, whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that their producers can turn out routine merchandise every bit as good as the Hollywood brand, but cheaper. (Actually, this is rather less of an accomplishment than it sounds. Some of the unions will close their eyes at corner-cutting on a first production that they would never otherwise permit. Nor are the independents saddled with the studio overhead charges -- generally about 40 percent of the budget -- that are automatically added to any picture produced by or for a major.)

Ironically, it is here that one finds most of the blasted hopes. Attempting to beat Hollywood at its own game, the novices too often lack the slick production finish of the studios, or the resources to include in their casts even such lower-magnitude luminaries as the distributors consider essential for marquee bait. It is axiomatic that nobody can make a Hollywood movie better than Hollywood itself; and there must be at least two dozen proofs of this currently languishing in the film vaults of New York and Los Angeles -- Hollywood-type pictures made by aspiring tyros that no distributor has been willing to handle.

But there is a further irony in the fact that the most conspicuously successful film of this kind, Private Property, blatantly advertised itself as "the first American 'new wave' picture." Produced and directed by playwright Leslie Stevens for a paltry $60,000, it is reported to have grossed $1,000,000 -- which is the kind of waving that Hollywood can understand. It earned Mr. Stevens a multiple-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox (where he went to work immediately on a $2,000,000 adaptation of his hit comedy, The Marriage-Go-Round, featuring such new faces as Susan Hayward and James Mason). Private Property, with its intimations of homosexuality, its promise of rape, and its moments of calculated violence, was about as new wave as his The Marriage-Go-Round. Had it appeared only a few months earlier, it would probably have been handled as a routine exploitation picture and gone promptly into the burlesque houses. Canny salesmanship transformed it into an experimental film, however, and won it screen time in art theaters throughout the country. In the process, Private Property added significantly to existing confusion about the new film movement.

Perhaps Private Property's ready acceptance, both by the theaters and by audiences, provides a valuable clue as to what the off-Broadway film is not. Its serious and articulate directors speak derisively of movies that are too easy to enjoy, of pictures that permit one to loll back in his chair and be entertained by three hours of Technicolored, widescreen vapidity. This, they point out. Hollywood does with a vengeance. They want their pictures to make demands of an audience, to involve them, to force them to react. They want to handle subject matter too touchy, or too special, for the major studios -- not necessarily sex themes (although sex is certainly not barred from the premises), but material that reflects the people of today and their problems. They dare to be controversial, even antagonistic to the status quo. Above all, they recognize that they are not making pictures that will please everyone. The time has come, they feel, to admit that there is such a thing as a minority audience, and to realize that this minority is large enough to support serious, artistic, adult, low-budgeted productions.

That this is true to some extent has already been proven by such American new wave forerunners as Morris Engel's highly successful Little Fugitive of a few years back (which several of the French new wavers have claimed as their own source of inspiration), the handsome Jazz on a Summer's Day, such semidocumentaries as The Savage Eye and Lionel Rogosin's bitter Come Back, Africa and Cassavetes' Shadows. But it is also true that Engel's latest picture, Weddings and Babies, still awaits a distributor, despite an armload of prizes from European festivals; and that Tom Laughlin's A Proper Time and Alex Singer's Cold Wind in August, although both taken by distributors, have received only the most cursory exposure. The film makers may be convinced that an audience exists for their works, but the distributors -- and particularly the major distributors -- are as yet unwilling to work out the patterns for reaching them most effectively.

Fully aware of this, Shirley Clarke, one of the leading figures in the New American Cinema movement, decided to bypass the distributors altogether in introducing her movie adaptation of Jack Gelber's off-Broadway play, The Connection. No sooner was the first print out of the laboratory than she was off to Europe for a round of the film festivals there last summer. First stop was Cannes, where her picture, although shown out of competition, won an award from the French Society of Film Authors. She also screened it at Locarno, Spoleto and Venice. By the time she returned to New York, she had completed distribution deals not only for the United States, but for France, Great Britain. (continued on page 100) Cinema (continued from page 66) Israel, Japan and Sweden as well. "I felt I had to handle it myself," she said recently. "The big companies have a dozen pictures to sell at a time. I had only one, and I knew it by heart. Who was better qualified to do the selling job? Besides, I think I've shown that all films don't have to be handled in the same old way."

Mrs. Clarke, a spry, vehement, intense young woman, perhaps best typifies the purposes and the attitudes of America's new film makers. She chose Gelber's The Connection for her first feature because, as she put it, "I felt it was important. I liked what it had to say. To the big studios, it was probably just a depressing play about dope addiction. To me, it's the story of people trying to make some connection with the world they live in. I tried to keep it as true to the original as possible, filthy language and all. And I think in the end that we've achieved a greater sense of truth in the film than was ever possible in the theater."

In the play, two documentary film makers interrupt the action from time to time, Pirandello fashion, to explain to the audience, to talk to the actors and to shoot their picture. In the film, what the audience sees is the documentary that was being shot -- an apparently straightforward account of what went on in Leach's pad while a group of junkies gathered to connect with their fix. To achieve this, Mrs. Clarke had her set designed with four solid walls. Nothing was shot from any camera position that would necessitate the removal of a wall, or even the shifting of furniture. The actors, most of them from the New York company of The Connection, were encouraged to live their parts. Cots were set up in the studio, and between takes they would stretch out on their bunks and listen to progressive jazz played for them on Mrs. Clarke's "Victrola." (Her use of the word invariably sent the hipsters among them into gales of laughter.) Throughout the 19 days of shooting, every effort was made to sustain the illusion of the claustrophobic, self-contained world of the confirmed addict.

Surprisingly enough, the all-union crew enjoyed the experience tremendously. Many of them had worked earlier with Elia Kazan for On the Waterfront -- and not since Waterfront, they said, had they been involved in anything so exciting. Some of them even went so far as to invest in the film, buying shares in the limited partnership that had been set up to finance it. And they came to the daily screenings of the rushes (which is not only unprecedented but impossible in any major studio). "After the first week or so," Mrs. Clarke reported, "the crew began to abandon their poker games and stretched out on the cots listening to the 'Victrola' -- while the actors took up poker. They all had a great time."

The Connection may well go down in history for an odd reason. Because the junkies refer to dope with a four-letter obscenity, New York's Board of Regents has refused to license the film for public exhibition. As of this writing, the picture is not yet in release. When it appears -- if it appears -- it will be the first time that word has been uttered from the screen. Pending an appeal, Mrs. Clarke pointed out, "Here is still another area where we've got to sell the idea of specialized films -- the courts. With a film like The Connection, you can't just hang out your sign and say, 'Come and get it.' You've got to realize that some people will be shocked, some bored, and some, I hope, fascinated. Those are the ones I've got to reach -- not the vast, anonymous mass audience that Hollywood plays to. I want to prove to the courts, to myself and to other film makers that there are special audiences for specialized films in this country."

Most producers of these new, offbeat pictures are awaiting the American reception of Mrs. Clarke's experiment with more than ordinary interest. Their own futures, they feel, are very much involved. They know too well the reluctance of distributors and exhibitors to handle anything too unconventional, or pictures designed for less than maximum patronage. The experience of young Curtis Harrington is not atypical. A former experimental film maker who had spent the last six years as production assistant to Jerry Wald, Harrington took a leave of absence to produce and direct Night Tide, a romantic drama with supernatural overtones. Based on his own original script, financed with money that he himself had raised, the picture was completed last summer and promptly began the rounds of the distribution offices. No one was interested. The picture was good enough, they admitted, but it was -- well, different. Harrington held a number of sneak previews in various parts of the country. The preview cards were predominantly favorable, some excellent. A print was sent to Spoleto, then Venice. The Italian critics were unanimous in praise of its "cinematic storytelling." The American distributors remained uncertain. Its story of a young sailor who falls in love with a girl who thinks she is a mermaid -- and might well be one -- they considered too far out for the circuits. Eventually, Night Tide landed with a small company that specializes in exploitation of horror pictures, and went out as a second feature early this year.

Tom Laughlin, a husky football player and TV actor turned director, has an even more difficult problem. Based on the fact that the sale of his first film, A Proper Time, returned him a 100-percent profit, he was able to obtain financial backing for a far more ambitious second picture, Among the Thorns (Part One in a projected autobiographical trilogy titled We Are All Christ). Laughlin's objectives were at once limited and specific. In his study of a high school senior who thrives on adulation and turns from his church in despair, he hoped to create on the screen an image with which modern youth could identify, a hero whose problems would be shared and understood by today's teenagers. Preliminary test runs in a few college towns in California and the Middle West (where the picture was shot) were most revealing. The youngsters, most of them, were wildly enthusiastic over what they saw. In at least two instances, Laughlin's admirers set up additional on-campus screenings immediately after the previews. But adults fled the theaters in droves. The director's attempt to shoot each scene quite literally as his young hero saw it at the time was incomprehensible to them. (The boy's father, for example, a weak and negligible man, is left partially outside the frame in a number of the shots.) Unfortunately for Mr. Laughlin, few distributors are teenagers. He is currently re-editing his picture and plans additional shooting in the hope of making his picture more marketable.

Jonas Mekas' Guns of the Trees presumably is destined for a similar fate. After a preliminary screening last winter at New York's avant-garde Cinema 16, the picture apparently has nowhere else to go. Mekas has nowhere else to go. Mekas has described his film as an examination of "the thoughts, feelings and anguished strivings of those among the young generation who are faced with the moral perplexities of our times" -- hardly a theme designed to capture the mass market. Filmed in and around New York, it is a perhaps overly earnest attempt to explain that "those fearful tremblings which, to the older outsiders seem merely beat prose, are the inevitable price of a rebirth." Mekas' film, with its poetic interludes written and read by Allen Ginsberg, with its script designed to irritate all but the initiate, with its answers that are no answers, poses the knottiest question of all. Can a movie that makes no compromises win an audience of any size, an audience large enough to make the production of such a picture profitable?

And yet, without waiting for an answer, the wave continues to mount. Ernest Pintoff, who turns out some of TV's cleverest cartoon commercials, has just completed a live action featurette, The Shoes, starring Buddy Hackett, and now has three features that he plans to do. Robert Frank, the photographer who (concluded on page 104)Cinema(Continued from page 100) made the beatnik Pull My Daisy, recently finished The Sin of Jesus, based on a short story by Isaac Babel. Lewis Allen, a theatrical producer and partner of Shirley Clarke on The Connection, filmed William Golding's shocker, Lord of the Flies, in Puerto Rico last summer. On the West Coast, Kent MacKenzie, a talented industrial film maker, put the finishing touches to a three-year labor of love, The Exiles, a wholly factual account of the Indians who live out their aimless lives in the heart of Los Angeles. Presented at the Edinburgh Film Festival last fall, it delighted the documentarians there -- and enraged our State Department representative. Mekas' Film Culture group has two more productions, Hallelujah the Hills and Waters Abate, written and ready to go; and Shirley Clarke is at work on the script for her second feature, an adaptation of Warren Miller's The Cool World.

Even the studios are no longer completely oblivious to this movement. John Cassavetes, on the strength of Shadows, went on to direct an offbeat -- and, he insists, honest -- picture about jazz musicians for Paramount, Too Late Blues. He wrote the story himself, and cast it with a number of the actors who had worked with him on his earlier film. To his delight, he reports that Paramount gave him a relatively free hand in the production. Dennis and Terry Sanders, whose Dostoievsky-in-blue-jeans adaptation of Crime and Punishment, U.S.A. was another precursor of the American new wave, recently completed War Hunt, starring John Saxon. The story of a psychopathic killer in the Korean War, it is their first of a two-picture deal for United Artists. "The only restraints we've known," says Dennis Sanders, "came from our budget. We chose the story, developed it ourselves, and made it our own way. The people at U.A. didn't even see it until after our final cut." (Nevertheless, the Sanders admit that they have several other stories in mind that will have to be made outside a major studio -- stories that not only violate the industry's Production Code, but could not possibly be cast with star names. For these, they would need the utter freedom of the new independents.)

To accompany such offbeat features, there are even more offbeat shorts. The protean Mr. Pintoff has established new levels for sophisticated humor in cartoons with his The Violinist and The Interview, the latter a devastating parody of a radio announcer trying to communicate with a far-out hipster. The Day of the Painter (which took an Academy Award last year) and A Bowl of Cherries, two clever spoofs of the abstract expressionists, have already been widely circulated. Rooftops of New York, perceptively photographed and cleverly edited by a new group of young professionals, trains a fresh eye on the Manhattan skyline. Toys on a Field of Blue views children's war games through the bitterness of a shattered veteran. Weekend Pass follows an ingenuous sailor through the fleshpots of downtown Los Angeles. Together, these shorts are infusing vigor and wit into a field too long dominated by dreary travelogs and increasingly conventional cartoons from the major studios.

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No matter how these newcomers cut the corners, however, and no matter how much of their production they do on their own, film remains the most expensive of all the arts. Raw stock, processing, sound recording, the rental of special equipment -- each of these sends budgets soaring. When to these basic costs are added the wages of union technicians and prescribed union crews (inescapable if a film is to be shot in a studio), the expenses skyrocket. Cassavetes, shooting largely with hand-held cameras on the New York streets, brought in Shadows for $40,000; Shirley Clarke, making The Connection entirely in a studio, ended up at almost $170,000 -- of which, she estimates, $70,000 might have been saved if she could have gone nonunion. Some of the independents, counting their pennies, shoot all of their exteriors first with nonunion crews, then make their deals with the unions when they enter a studio. Some have even tried to skirt the unions altogether, although they know that this is risky. Both Blast of Silence and Rooftops of New York were made nonunion, then sold to majors for distribution -- and were withdrawn in several important markets after brief runs. The projectionists refused to handle them. Projectionists, of course, belong to the same over-all union as the electricians, grips and stagehands.

Not all union officials are the heartless ogres that they have often been painted. On occasion, they have proved willing to make concessions to young people starting out on their first film (although only on their first film). Within the past few months, there has even been talk of a profit-sharing arrangement between independent producers and the unions -- although nothing has come of it so far except talk. Producers have balked at the notion of having their scripts approved by union officials, and several of the unions have refused outright to consider the proposal at all. What is clearly needed, however, is some comprehensive policy for this new kind of picture making. Obviously, Guns of the Trees is never going to reach as many people as The Guns of Navarone; more people will see Mutiny on the Bounty than Night Tide. The theatrical unions, simply by comparing the number of chairs in an off-Broadway theater with the houses farther uptown, have conceded the necessity for dual scales. The off-Broadway movie is less fortunate. There is always the possibility -- albeit remote -- that a film like The Connection will break through to the big time; and in that eventuality, the unions want their people well protected. Unfortunately, to date their only formula for meeting that eventuality has been to charge the small independent the same as MGM.

Perhaps the day will come when these film makers, for their own protection, will see the need to band together in the movie equivalent of the League of Off-Broadway Theaters. It will not be easy. Not only are they spread across the country from New York to Los Angeles, but often they are separated by an even wider ideological gap. The realist tendencies of a documentary trained director are scorned by the poetic film maker; the beatnik is derisive of any story idea that might possibly be commercial; and the skilled professionals sneer at any trace of amateurism in a picture regardless of the excellence of its ideas. The quality of individuality that is this new movement's greatest strength may also prove to be its greatest weakness. If differences of approach remain equated as personal differences, differences that preclude any unified action, the financial problems facing each of these new film makers may never be solved.

The same may be said of distribution. New patterns have already been suggested, including the circuiting of pictures of limited appeal through a series of one-night stands in art houses and university auditoriums throughout the country. Again, however, cooperation is essential -- cooperation, and the reluctant admission on the part of the film maker that his picture might be of limited appeal. Most of them, however, still think of distribution in conventional terms. Most of them still hope that the special audiences they envisaged for their pictures will come to see them at their neighborhood houses.

Perhaps someday even that may be so. For the qualities that these new film makers are bringing to their pictures are the very ones that Hollywood has lost in its mad scramble to make the most expensive movie of all time on the world's widest screen -- the urgency of a personal statement, the adventure of untrammeled subject matter, the stamp of the individual artist. What the off-Broadway movie promises, above all, is a kind of creative vigor and excitement that has been too long missing from our films.