In these days of economic uncertainty, we've brought you many a blog post about how the sudden unavailability of cash infusions will impact the independent film industry.  It's difficult verging on impossible to get any kind of consensus (fewer film festivals will be bad news because it will mean fewer chances for a movie to break out/fewer film festivals will be good news because it will sift the wheat from the chaff; independent film is dead because there's not enough money to take a chance on anything but a sure thing/independent film will thrive because it will become truly independent again and not rely on studio money and mass marketing), and contrarianism is the rule of the day.

Want proof?  Take a look at this post from the excellent Poverty Jet Set blog, in which the question is posed:  how important is an audience to the success of an film, anyway?  Inspired by the lamentations of Project Pedal over their inability to draw millions of online viewers to clips from their upcoming documentary feature For Thousands of Miles, it seems like an absurd question:  and yet, and yet..."In this age of mass amateurization and instant worldwide publication," argues Mark Schoneveld, "it doesn't matter how many people watch your videos, but rather, the quality of the folks who watch."  After all, he notes, there are YouTube clips that draw in tens of millions of viewers -- but it's purely for the sake of ephemeral novelty, and few if any transform their YouTube fame into money, a career, or anything that will amount to more than a whatever-happened-to moment on VH1 sometime in 2018.

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As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, independent film is dead.  All hail independent film!  Yes, as is always the case when someone walks the streets in a doomsaying sandwich board, there is someone immediately following in his footsteps with brightly colored pamplets about how you, yes, YOU can cash in big on doomsday-related futures!  Oh, sure, a few people might say that this sort of the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king stuff might just be an indicator of how the king's prognosis probably wasn't as dire as it was made out to be, but they're just the sort of Johnny Level-Heads who won't be making any money as the Jason Voorhees-like corpse of independent film is resurrected for the fifteenth time.

As part of their ongoing coverage of New York's Independent Film Week, IndieWire has brought in producer, distributor, and all-around insider Peter Broderick to assure us that independent film isn't dead after all – it's just a Brave New World.  Part One of the series focuses on Broderick's dissent at Mark Gill's notably grim keynote address, where Gill described independent film financing as standing on the verge of a massive collapse which he compared to a medieval plague.  Broderick argues that this is an old-world perspective, ignoring such new distribution angles as the internet, direct DVD sales, split rights, video on demand, and target-marketed fundraising.  He provides useful charts and graphs, and even gives us ten basic principles of modern film distribution that makes it superior to the 'Old World' system, which he agrees is collapsing like a dying star.

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Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs.  Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh.  This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents.  Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention.  "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win.  We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

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Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week.  In New York City.   

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces.  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

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The 1989 shoestring production Chameleon Street was directed and written by Wendell B. Harris, who also plays the lead role of Doug Stone, a con man and sort of serial impersonator. In the movie, Harris's Street pretends to be a Harvard Medical School graduate and talks his way into a residency at Wayne State Medical School; he enrolls at Yale as a French exchange student, despite the apparent handicap of not speaking French. ("J'accuse, Jacques Cousteau.") Fixated on a woman who's a basketball player for Midwestern University — Paula McGee, who appears in the movie as herself — he presents himself as a Time magazine journalist and snags an interview with her. Other movies about successful impersonators share the joke that a big part of life is just appearing to be what you say you are, but Street's story has a special wrinkle that gives it extra potency: Street is black, and he knows from angry first-hand experience how important something as irrelevant as skin color is when it comes to deciding who gets ahead, or who just gets his foot in the door.

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