Is an Indie Film Resistance Possible?

In January 2005, George W. Bush was being inaugurated for his second term as U.S. President, while American soldiers and Iraqi citizens were dying by the thousands (and the Left were licking their wounds in despondency and rage). At the time, I wrote an article for the Village Voice called “Living in Oblivion: Reagan-era callousness sparked an indie film renaissance. Will Bush II inspire another?” where I wondered whether “the country's extreme rightward turn could ignite the type of movie renaissance not seen since eight years of nuclear proliferation, HIV discrimination, and materialist greed helped produce the American independent film movement of the late '80s and early '90s. If the careers of Todd Haynes, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh were all launched during the Reagan-Bush regime, imagine what's possible over the next four years.”

Here we go again, 20 years later, with a new generation of lunatics running the asylum, and an artistic community that is again feeling shell-shocked, imperiled, and not sure how to respond. But I wonder if a new renaissance is possible, and more urgently, whether an effective resistance is possible, and if it is, where might it come from?

In 2004, filmmaker Todd Solondz (whose film “Palindromes” is, by the way, celebrating its new 20th anniversary re-release) told me, "I've always felt Bush winning a second term would make for better material for filmmakers to work with. It's all just too rich—like living in a real live Kubrick movie."

The Kubrick analogy still seems relevant to our current times (though I can’t decide whether it feels more like “A Clockwork Orange” or “The Shining” these days)—and so, too, are certain parallels with the entertainment industry at the time. Twenty years ago, like today, Hollywood was freaking out: The studios saw a 6.2% drop in ticket sales, and were looking to save their skins, while indie blockbusters like “The Passion of the Christ,” “Fahrenheit 9/11” and surprise hit “Napoleon Dynamite” helped the box-office bottom-line.

Despite those independent successes, however, there was still a lot of skepticism that Hollywood would support boundary-pushing or political content. "I don't think Warner Bros. would make ‘Three Kings’ today," filmmaker David O. Russell told me at the time. "My bet is that Warner will funnel everything over to [their specialty arm] Warner Independent. I think there are going to be studio divisions that are happy to make movies for the blue states. That's a lot of people."

Today, however, speciality divisions are shadows of their former selves; corporate consolidation has become ever more consolidated; the global-streaming-dominated entertainment universe has become more conservative; and under Trump’s next term, public media will be more endangered than ever, misinformation will flourish, and conglomeration and deregulation are sure to be exacerbated.

If there was ever a time we needed Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, it’s now. But as we all know, Participant shuttered, while other tech billionaires from Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk have completely gone over to the dark side. And streamers and television executives are too afraid for their livelihoods to push against the country’s authoritarian, oligarchic, and Christian Nationalist turn. On the contrary, most media corporations have increased their programming commitment to right-wing audiences.

As Vulture’s Josef Adalian wrote last week, “the folks who write the checks have become more risk- and conflict-averse, and relentlessly focused on turning a profit in streaming (or, in the case of Netflix, maximizing its profits). There will no doubt still be a resistance against Trump, but as of right now, it’s sadly hard to imagine it will come from the television business.”

As I’ve written before and will be writing more about soon, the progressive social-issue and political documentary sector is also in dire straights, with fewer places to fund and distribute their work—and it’s only going to get worse during Trump II. If there was ever a time for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, it’s now. But that entity, as I wrote about earlier this year, is also gone. R.I.P., as well, CNN Films, producers of Navalny and RGB.

I come back to something I wrote about last week, and apropos of this piece, it echoes something that producer-screenwriter-professor James Schamus told me in 2005. "To get a political film out there through that thicket is difficult,” he said, referring to the corporate media industry. "The one place you've got a shot is Internet culture and open source culture. That's the thing to track."

Similar to today, there’s been a lot of talk recently about some kind of additional alternative streaming platform that can harness and house the need for this type of independent and overtly political or radical content that mainstream media platforms have increasingly shunned. I don’t know if such a platform is the answer, but based on recent history, I am somewhat confident that the extreme right-wing pressures inflicted on America by Trump II will produce equal and opposing forces from the Left… somehow. The way that the Trump-Musk-Fox-media-complex has managed to control America’s narrative (just enough) suggests to me that this is explicitly a battle that needs to be and will be waged in and by the media. So my dear readers, most of you are on the frontlines.

In 2004, before Bush was re-elected, I spoke to a lot of filmmakers for another article called “Docs Populi: Raging against the Republican Machine,” and it was exciting to hear about the activist impulses from those in the entertainment industry. “This presidency has galvanized many who are lethargic on the left, and I include myself,” Hollywood screenwriter Lawrence Konner told me at the time. He founded something called The Documentary Campaign with the intention of creating activist docs and produced one, “Persons of Interest,” but I’m not sure what happened to it after that. There was lots of other political docs that year, but just like a lot of media efforts in 2024, they ultimately failed to swing the election.

Even so, I would hope that a number of stronger media collectives and organizations will sprout up in the near future as part of a newly energized campaign to save our humanity. (Sign me up, please.) The main question, of course, is whether the newly consolidated and risk-averse financing and distribution structures currently in place prevent them from breaking through.

Either way, I don’t think that’s going to stop filmmakers from trying. As “The Corporation” co-director Mark Achbar told me twenty years ago, "If I didn't think documentaries had an impact, I don't think we would make them.”