Tod Lippy: When did you move to New York?

John Pierson: I moved to the city in the summer of 1974—the summer prior to starting at NYU film school. But I had moved up to the New York area in ’67—I went to junior high and high school on Long Island, in Huntington, and I started to come into the city then. I remember one time we were supposed to have a high school social-studies class trip to see Lenny on Broadway—you know, we had one of those hip liberal American history teachers—and instead I sort of wondered off to see a bunch of movies. Last Picture Show had just opened, plus there was an Antoine Doinel triple bill at the Elgin. I’ll never forget that—it was a red-letter day for two reasons: I saw four great movies, and I got in trouble for bailing on the Broadway show. Normally, I was an obedient child, so I’m still not sure what compelled me to do that.

So you obviously already knew about the Elgin Theater.

I knew about it. Can’t remember where I saw the listing—was I looking at The Village Voice at that point? Probably. Again, this very same teacher probably told us to read the Voice, so it’s really his fault.

So you started at NYU in 1974?

Yeah. I got there after the “two Martys”—Scorsese and Brest—were already finished. In fact, Mean Streets had opened, and I remember that the NYU film school had a sort of unofficial holiday on its opening day. It was a big moment for NYU to celebrate—the first real triumph of an alumnus. But Marty Brest had also just passed through the program. He made a short called Hot Dogs for Gauguin, which ends with the Statue of Liberty being blown up—it was frequently screened around the film school.

Were you doing production at NYU? Or was the Cinema Studies program—the more critical/theoretical division—already up and running?

It was, and I was basically a Cinema Studies major, but I also did TV production work and film production. Annette Michelson was teaching there.

When I was at NYU, she was credited with causing at least one student breakdown in every seminar.

I think I touch on this in the book—the screenwriter Larry Gross was there, also, and he was, like, the smartest kid in school. He took her on, and I thought he actually got the better of her, which was pretty amazing because she was so formidable. And Bill Rothman was there, teaching Hitchcock over and over again. He later ended up at Harvard—teaching Hitchcock. [Laughs.] Bill Everson was there. Actually, when Janet and I got married we showed Seven Chances at the wedding, but the first place I saw that was not at one of the Buster Keaton revivals at the Elgin, which Ben Barenholtz did every February, but in a Bill Everson class. I’ll never forget, he introduced the film by apologizing for the fact that it had a slow start. “Don’t worry, it builds.” I couldn’t believe this guy was apologizing for Buster Keaton.

Were you also looking at a lot of New American Cinema stuff—Brakhage, Michael Snow, that kind of thing?

Yeah, actually, Brakhage taught one summer, and I took his course, which was kind of legendary because at the end I think he didn’t feel like having to grade anybody, so he took the “temperature” of the room and gave everybody a B+, which really pissed off the students with A averages. And again, there are a lot of Brakhage films that I think are great, but people thought I took a potshot at him in the book because I told the story about the day he was feeling besieged by unwanted questions, and he did one of his Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man routines. He took the word “question” and said, “Examine the roots: it’s ‘quest’ and ‘shun’. You’re shunning the quest, therefore you’re not thinking for yourself. So stop asking.” I was, like, is this a comedy act?

Did you start working for the distributor Bauer International right after you graduated?

There was a little pause; I probably did some traveling. I was out in January of ’77, and I answered an ad in The New York Times for Bauer. “A.J. Bauer” it was called, but it later became “Bauer International,” because it sounded more like a conglomerate. It was basically just three guys sitting around an apartment. But the two Cuban émigrés who started that company were both in their early twenties, and were able to convince Wim Wenders to let them handle his films up to and including Kings of the Road. They got involved with other New German Cinema stuff as well, like the Syberberg film Our Hitler. That was in the catalog, but they could never actually afford to pay for a print because it was so long. [Laughs.]      
   Those guys also started a movie theater. Before I arrived it was on Second Avenue, and then when I got there they moved into the Actors’ Playhouse on Sheridan Square. Other people who worked at Bauer were Tom Prassis, who’s now at Sony Pictures Classics, and Donna Gigliotti, who, after a long, very successful career—including an Oscar for producing Shakespeare in Love—is head of production for USA Films. And Kevin Lally, who writes for Film Journal.
   One of the two guys, Ray Blanco, eventually got involved with Spanish-language TV, I think—I can never quite keep track of him. But neither he nor the other guy, Ken Edwards, ever really became indie film mavens. They had to keep moving out of town to avoid their creditors.

When did Dan Talbot start New Yorker Films?

Oh, long before. He was everybody’s—well, I don’t want to say “mentor,” because it makes it sound like he was out to help everybody else. We basically looked up to him as the guy who really did it first.

It seems like New Yorker Films was a training ground for so many other New York film people…

Yeah. The people who worked for New Yorker were Reid Rosefelt, Jeff Lipsky, and, years later, Bingham Ray. Suzanne Fedak, Mary Lugo were there. That was kind of the core group.

What about Ira Deutchman?

He was at Cinema 5, Don Rugoff’s company.

Another distributor/exhibitor...

Yeah. In the early days, there was a real connection between those two sides. Rugoff, Talbot, Ben Barenholtz…

How do you think working in that context affected the people who ended up becoming the major New York indie distributors—like Ray and Lipsky at October, Deutchman at Fine Line, et al.—in the ’80s and ’90s? Did it create a uniquely “New York” mindset?

I think a lot of people learned how to be entrepreneurial, number one—even if you wound up being a division of a larger entity, like Sony Pictures Classics. Because people like Tom Bernard and Michael Barker were working at places like Films, Inc., they just got this more entrepreneurial instinct than a lot of the L.A. people might have had. Out there, I think it may have been more about plugging into a pre-existing system rather than making something up from scratch.
   I think the other thing—sort of the trademark of independent, specialized art film—was that nobody was shy about having opinions about what they liked, and what they thought was good. And in those days, anyway, you could really get behind something you believed in—you didn’t have to draw a line between, “Well, I like this, but who else would? Is there an audience for it?” It was more like, “I like it. It’s good. We’re gonna do something with this.” And with certain people it’s carried over to the current day.

Like with whom?

Well, most of the time with Sony Pictures Classics. I know they’re always talking about it. I mean, whenever I hear Michael Barker mentioning “demographics” it kind of makes me think the pods got him. I’m not saying they shouldn’t think about things like that, but when your roots are in the realm of personal taste, and a belief in quality, it makes a difference over time. That’s not to say that people in L.A. don’t have personal taste, or don’t believe in quality, but I think it’s more pronounced in New York. Everybody has an opinion, and stands by it. I mean, you’ve got Bingham Ray, a year after Blair Witch premiered at Sundance, saying, “I don’t care if it grossed $100 million, it’s shit.” So it goes both ways—it’s not just positive, it’s also stuff like, “That director’s no good, that film’s no good. Fuck it, I don’t care if people do go to see it—it’s still crap!” You know, in L.A., if it grosses four hundred million dollars worldwide, it’s not shit anymore.

Did any of the New York distribution companies have a West Coast presence, other than UA Classics?

Not really, besides those guys having to report to the studio in L.A., I think it was New York through and through. I mean, there was always Goldwyn on the West Coast, and then later, for a brief span of time in the mid-eighties, Island Pictures was dominant. But two years later, Miramax was on the rise, and that was that.

You talk in the book about 1979–80 being a very important period for independent film in New York, what with the founding of the Independent Film Project, the “American Mavericks” festival which you helped program—

Also, UA Classics was formed. At that point, I was programming “American Mavericks,” which happened in January of ’79, and then afterwards, Sam Kitt, who was director of that festival—and who now runs 40 Acres—set me up to program a little theater called the Harold Clurman, which is still there over on Theater Row.

What kind of stuff you were programming?

Well, there were three years of it, and we did some of everything. We did a very popular series called “Road Movies,” which was an attempt to define this genre of film that various people were beginning to write books about. That was very popular with the critics. And we made a ton of money doing rock n’ roll movies, which was a first love of mine. Nobody was really doing that in any kind of systematic way circa 1980, 1981. Stuff like The T.A.M.I. Show, which is one of my all-time personal favorites.
   So then I got another distribution job that overlapped with that, at a company that had been called Tri-Continental Films. They’d gotten a huge settlement to move out of that flatiron building on Sixth and Cornelia when it was turned into condos. They moved to Park Avenue South—when it wasn’t so fashionable—and changed their name to Unifilm. They were known for being the major importer of political films from Cuba and other Third World films that wouldn’t have gotten in here otherwise.

Like Memories of Underdevelopment?

Exactly. Then they had a sort of crossover hit with Pixote, and New Yorker had Bye Bye Brazil right before that, and all of the sudden, it seemed that there were other possibilities besides the college market, or institutional market. But, like many companies before and especially after, as soon as there was sort of a semblance of “Oh boy, we can have hits here,” people started spending too much money, and it kind of went kaboom.
   Then I formed a corporation called Roadmovies, out of homage to Wim Wenders’s production company back in Germany—he wasn’t happy we stole the name, by the way—and the people in that group were Anne Thompson, who’s now at Premiere, and Sam Kitt, Tom Prassis, Arthur Silverman, who went on to produce Parting Glances, and my NYU roommate Larry Altshuler. And there was a PMK publicist, too, Eric Myers. We came together because we liked certain kinds of films, and we had a theater to show them in. We did it at the Clurman for a couple of summers, and then we did it at the Bleecker. But then Sid Geffen, who owned the Bleecker and the Carnegie, asked me to just do it by myself, and, to the dismay of some people in that group, I ended up doing it. That’s how I wound up programming on my own.

How and when did you decide to become a producer’s rep?

It evolved right out of what I was doing in that same span of time between 1979 and 1985. I was programming film at the Clurman and the Bleecker, then I formed Roadmovies, worked at Unifilm, worked also at UA Classics in its last year—1982. I also went to Films, Inc., which was upping its catalog profile. We rereleased catalog items like Once Upon a Time in the West, and 400 Blows, and Warner Bros. Cartoons, and made new prints of lots of Paramount and Fox titles, because that’s what they had. And while I was there we got involved with programming the second screen of Film Forum, because Dan Talbot stopped doing it.
   So in other words, I’ve been around the block around twelve times. And if you’ve done that enough, a lot of people are going to bump into you.

How did you get involved with Parting Glances, which was by all accounts your first producer’s rep gig?

The guy who pulled me into the film was Arthur Silverman, who I’d mentioned earlier. He was going to law school, and he had a third year clerkship in Alaska, and he was like, “Hey, can you help me out selling this film?” We sold it at IFFM to Cinecom.
   I guess the reason Arthur thought I was ready to be the rep on Parting Glances was that I knew the players, such as they were then—of course, they’re the same people now. Go figure. And when he asked me to do it, I realized to myself, “Hey—he’s right. I do know these people, for a variety of reasons, and I do know how their system works.”

Can you define exactly what a producer’s rep does?

Well, there was no job description circa 1985. The zen part of the job was being a kind of a translator between the business interests—mainly distributors—and the filmmakers. And obviously it’s helpful in that kind of situation to have a working familiarity with how exhibition works, and marketing, and publicity. That would be the overview.
   What you need to do if you’re going to rep a film is you need to help get it finished—whether it’s with your own or other people’s money—and into a state where it’s showable to distributors, oftentimes at a festival. But not always back then; not always. You could go direct—there were not that many films—and say, “Hey, I’ve got one for you to see,” and just screen it for somebody.
   The psychological skill you need is the ability to make a film look as good as it can, or maybe better than it is. The business skill is to then try and parlay that into the best possible deal. There has been much said over the years as to whether “the best possible deal” means a bigger advance or more control over the release of the film, with greater participation in the back-end, or net profits. I used to give that kind of rhetoric a certain amount of lip service myself until over time I realized that you should get it up front. [Laughs.] You do need to get big advances wherever possible. That’s what locks in your relationship with the distributor—if they have more risk, they’re going to do a better job.
   So then you have to be able to negotiate all the aspects of the deal which are to the benefit of your filmmaker, without creating a complete breakdown in understanding between the two sides. You don’t want to drive things so hard that you have an alienated distributor.

Do you think your knowing a lot of these people socially worked to your advantage in negotiating?

I think it put everybody more at ease. And I think that everybody knew that I was familiar with their work. But again, you don’t want to have too much trust, because there’s an element that needs to be a little bit adversarial—because, of course, they always like to pay less. Having said that, though, in my experience, I’ve found that everybody wants to do best by the film. I never had a case where I felt like a film got in the hands of the wrong distributor who really messed it up. I remember people saying to us when we sold Working Girls to Miramax, “How could you sell a film to those guys? They’re rock ’n’ roll crooks!”—those were the very early days for them. But they ultimately paid more money than the three bidding companies, and they did a great job on the film. After that, I never really listened too carefully to “Don’t do anything with this one or that one—they’re terrible!” You just want to try to stay away from companies that appear to be on the verge of going out of business.
   After you do a deal, you still want to stay involved in a partnership with the filmmaker to make sure the right ad campaign is being developed, and the right trailer is being made. Like on She’s Gotta Have It, the fact that you could make a trailer where Island had the idea for the meat of it, and then Spike, of course, had the left-over idea to use Mars Blackmon selling tube socks as a frame—that was great. So you want to help things like that to happen.

Have you ever found yourself turning down a movie because of concerns about the filmmaker’s personality?

Well, I’ve been lucky, because the films that I’ve liked, with the exception of Amongst Friends, have been made by people who, if I haven’t loved them—and in many cases I have—have been very open-minded. I mean, the Michael Moore situation—where he had all of these sort of impossible demands—was part of who he is and the film he made, so that was kind of fun. I might feel differently about it now…

But it was a good ride.

Yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly right. That’s a case where there were, with and without my prompting, page after page of deal demands which we were able to get because there was such a hot pursuit of the movie.

What was the oddest demand he made?

It depends on who you talk to. The one that wound up being the politically weirdest, I think, was just this issue about which theaters it could or couldn’t show in in Israel, and whether they did or didn’t admit Palestinians after curfew. [Laughs.] I mean, funneling money back to the five families who are thrown out of their homes in the film, that was a really smart thing to do—especially after you get three million dollars.

Can you quickly sketch out the typical financial arrangement you make with a filmmaker?

Well, agents generally work off this 10 percent figure. When I started out representing films, I thought, “Well, that’s too much; let’s make it five.” And there were cases where, of course, I even bent lower than that. Then once I started helping to find money for people to finish their films, it went to seven-and-a-half percent. And in cases where I was able to invest my own money or money from a company I was involved with, like Island World, then that money was treated as any investment money would be treated—with an ownership interest in the film, and generally some kind of premium on the repayment of the investment itself.
   There are fewer of us sixties types left, but there used to be huge, raging debates about who should get their money back first if a film made something. There was generally a lot of derisive behavior towards investors—“Oh, they just invested money; people with deferments should get paid first.” It used to be endlessly debated, but now I think it’s become clear to people that money is money, and money gets returned first. But those issues were very much alive in the eighties. There were times when I felt I was being attacked for thinking that when you put the money in to finish a film, and then expect to see a return on that investment, there was something wrong with that.

That strikes me as a very New York indie attitude.

I think you’re right. And it was prevalent in the early days of the IFP in New York, with somebody like Sandra Schulberg, who was the forefront of certain issues like that. So even institutionally, there was a real concern about that kind of thing.
   There was a similar attitude toward distributors. Filmmakers would say, “That distributor made money off that film—it’s obscene that we haven’t gotten anything back.” And I’d say, “Well, that’s what they do: they distribute films. They get a fee for doing that.”

I remember in your book you talked about the friction around Go Fish, when the filmmakers were suspicious about where all the money from the advance had gone.

In that case, I just think that $400,000 wasn’t that much, even for a $60,000 film that had additional completion costs. And when it’s being split between me and Christine Vachon and the filmmakers, of whom there are two, that’s just arithmetic. But that’s another case where, you know, if you invest money, you get certain rights. If you want to pick on somebody, pick on Christine, because, yeah, she helped you get the film done, but we invested the money, and we should get our money. You have whatever opportunities you have because of that.
   They seem to have stopped doing this, but Ted Hope and James Schamus used to say, “Oh, John makes really hard deals.” In the meantime, their whole theory was that they wanted a piece of the action in future films from people. I think asking for participation in somebody’s future can be the hardest deal of all.

Obviously, the business of independent film has changed enormously in the last several decades. Generally speaking, do you think things are better or worse?

This is a very long, long answer to what seems like a simple question. We used to think that a film in the early eighties that grossed half a million dollars—with a much lower ticket price than we have now, by the way—had disappointed us. Hey—for all the acclaim and wonderful attention to American Movie, it’s huffing and puffing and chugging to try to get to a million-dollar gross now. So I’m not really sure if that’s a now vs. then proposition. There are so many films now—Slam is another good case in point—that get so much attention and oomph behind them now that actually don’t do business—and those two are relatively successful. There are literally a hundred films that opened last year in New York that basically couldn’t draw a fly.
   So in the eighties, for instance, when less films were being released, I actually think that the films, on a case-by-case basis, got more attention. But having said that, I think it’s crucially important within film culture to realize how incredibly influential a Fassbinder film in the seventies was. Or, in the eighties, a Todd Haynes film like Superstar, which for legal reasons is basically unshowable. Their influence vastly exceeds their box-office performance. So people who are trying to apply the rules from the top down, Hollywood-fashion, are crazy, and that’s where at the end of the nineties, when you look at Brothers McMullen’s gross—even though I swore to Ed Burns I wasn’t going to pick on him anymore—you go, “Wow. That’s a ten-million-dollar film.” That’s great. But when you look at it as some sort of independent-minded breakthrough, well, it’s a struggle to come up with some kind of explanation for how that might be challenging people. Not to take anything away from him, because I’m sure he made it from the heart. But I don’t know why anybody would be impressed just because it performed. On the other hand, if you talk to the audiences who were seeing that film, they enjoyed it. So you’ve got the same problem. The people who are so adamant about how audiences want something better than what Hollywood is offering, well, they’re wrong. The so-called independent audience is happiest at Life Is Beautiful.

Or Shakespeare in Love.

But I liked Shakespeare in Love, so I’m not going to pick on that one. [Laughs.]

Yeah, but like it or not—

All I’m saying is, in a recent poll Life Is Beautiful was voted the favorite foreign-language film of all time. That is so much more troubling than a $650-million gross for The Sixth Sense. Nothing could be worse for film culture than that, because it shows that you can market anything, and Miramax has. Even if I liked the film, I’d be suspicious. Even if I didn’t know that Roberto spoke pretty good English.

So which kind of success do you think independent filmmakers would rather have?

I think people want both. I mean, maybe in New York, if you’re not really talking about the old, old school, I think you’re really dealing with people who want to have it both ways. Someone like Kevin Smith, or a New York–area born-and-bred guy like David Russell—he’s managed to have it both ways. That’s impressive to me. His three-film arc is amazing. Forget about John Sayles this and John Sayles that—David is my model. From an ultra-low-budget film to a modestly budgeted Miramax film to a studio film that really is, using Manny Farber’s term, a “termite movie”—completely subverting the system from within. It’s great. That’s a model of a person trying to go both ways. And I feel the same way about Kevin.

The indie film atmosphere here is generally described as “collegial,” but I know you’ve previously cited Lynn Hirschberg’s article about Miramax in New York magazine from several years ago, where she talks about how “spiteful and fractious” that world can be.

That whole article was basically going to be her taking down Bob and Harvey. She went to all of their competitors, and they all railed against the two of them, thinking they were taking part in an article that was going to be extremely critical, and then, basically, it turned into a love letter to the Weinsteins. Harvey ended up looking like the truly talented person that he is, and the seductive person he can definitely be. And next thing you know, Lynn Hirschberg is in negotiations with Miramax to start the magazine project they were supposed to launch before Talk…

You recently stated the current independent film scene has become “all about marketing.”

My theory is that Miramax has led the charge here, and everybody else has figured out how to copy them. Although, in some cases, there have been innovations coming from elsewhere. I know Tom Bernard and Michael Barker are very sensitive about the idea that Miramax started it all. The point is, Miramax markets the high end so well—you know, taking a film that’s crossing over, that’s breaking out, and taking it steps and steps beyond. So if it took all these years to get a film to go to $15 or $20 million, like Kiss of the Spider Woman did back in the mid-’80s, then you get to Sex, Lies and Videotape, and suddenly you can go to $25 million, and it’s like, “Wow, this is great!” And then you just count the steps on the way: The Piano, The Crying Game, and then you get to Pulp Fiction, and finally to Scream.

And then to Blair Witch.

Well, that’s obviously in a category all by itself. And that’s an area where somebody else, namely Artisan, really does deserve credit for not merely copying a Miramax model, but going into a new area and trumping them.

But do you think this emphasis on marketing has had a detrimental effect?

Well, going back to the example of Life is Beautiful—thanks to the marketing, you have everybody in a little town like Cold Spring sitting around and talking about it, and that’s great, because if they didn’t see Life Is Beautiful, they wouldn’t see anything, so you can’t really let that bother you. But hey, the people who are all flocking to one film in Manhattan, for instance, when maybe they could have broken up their votes into three, four or five different ones—experimented, you know, seen a Todd Haynes film—that to me is not a positive. That’s a bad development.

Also, you want to think better of New Yorkers. You would almost expect them to be a little more adventurous—you know, searching out the tiny, postage-stamp sized Film Forum ads in Time Out.

You have to get so microcosmic on a certain level. You look at, for instance, the Hank Greenberg documentary. There are baseball fans; there are people really into Jewish issues. If you can mobilize these two forces, you will have a far, far, far better run in a few weeks at Film Forum than you will for the highly touted, very well-reviewed American Movie. Go figure: it’s because there’s a real targeted audience. There’s a handle; you can motivate people to get out there. I mean, they’ve been on The Today Show, they’ve had lots of coverage in The New York Times. For a little movie opening at Film Forum. That’s a good thing. So on the one hand, you have these little subniches, and on the other, you have these breakout hits that go through the roof. The question becomes, what happens to the middle ground? It gets harder. One reason for that is that there is no shortage of theaters, no shortage of openings—you’ll see thirty non-Hollywood films running on any given weekend. How could anybody possibly say that Hollywood movies are crowding these films out? The fact of the matter is, in New York or anywhere else, if a movie isn’t performing, whether it’s an indie film or a blockbuster, it’s going to get bumped.

Where did anybody come up with the “let it run three months and see what happens” rule? When did that ever work? Oh, I know: My Dinner with Andre. Everything is about My Dinner with fucking Andre.

What about The Marriage of Maria Braun? That had a yearlong run at The New Yorker in the seventies…

That was a huge hit, though. It came off the New York Film Festival and opened with a bang, and just stayed. I mean, it was Dan Talbot’s theater, so he might not have played it for a year if he weren’t distributing and showing the film. Now there’s an incentive for somebody. And that’s why when Sundance opens their theater chain, they’re going to have to think about becoming distributors.

You’ve said that if something catches fire in New York, it will give it a much better shot nationwide.

It will give it the possibility of getting booked all over.

When I heard that I was thinking about Sandra Bernhard’s paraphrase of the Sinatra song: “New York, New York—If you make it there, you’ll fail everywhere else.”

Well, that could be true also. I’ll qualify it: it will get you play dates elsewhere. I mean, who’s going to go see Hank Greenberg in Dallas?

Any thoughts about the New York press, particularly the influence of The New York Times?

Well, Janet Maslin’s gone now. I would say the impact of the Times has been declining—and I’m not blaming it on her, I’m actually very fond of her—since the end of Vincent Canby era. Janet couldn’t necessarily make a movie. Now what’s interesting is that, even after that sort of dwindling of influence with Maslin, you’ve got this troika of critics at the Times who will have equal weight—which means less weight for all three.
   But on the other hand, even though there were other good reviews for that recent Indian film, The Terrorist, I would bet it was the A.O. Scott review in the Times which led to a $13,000 opening at the Screening Room—the likes of which they’ve never seen. So in that limited a run, I think the Times can still matter.
   Reid Rosefelt says—and I’ve come to believe him—that it’s not just having a rave review, it’s how the review actually describes and characterizes a film. Because there are certain films, like American Movie, again, that no matter how much you try to twist and bend and talk about how it’s so much more than just a movie about a guy trying to make a film, basically I think that’s all that people could read. Could Vincent Canby in his heyday singlehandedly have done for American Movie what he did for Roger & Me? I don’t know.
   It wasn’t even about grosses; it was more in terms of authority. And you can say that authority’s bad—I mean, the whole idea of the Internet is a breakdown of authority, a democratization. And that’s what everybody wants in independent film—they want everything to be democratized—“Let’s not get stuck in traditional distribution thinking; let’s think Internet.” “Let’s not get stuck with these three critics having all the power—anybody can be a critic!” “Let’s not get stuck thinking that all movies need to come from Hollywood—or even New York. Let’s have movies from Austin and Milwaukee and Flint.”

And digital video is playing into that even more.

Right. “Let’s take over the means of production.” But in an age of more authority, you could pick up The Village Voice and read Sarris doing the more mainstream stuff, Hoberman being Hoberman, and Tom Allen doing the genre stuff. And then Canby at the Times, and of course, Pauline Kael. I mean, you could really sink your teeth into what they wrote, and you could generally sink your teeth into the movies they were writing about. But again, as an old dog, I have to say that in many cases they were, in fact, writing about better movies. I think that a lot of younger critics now are like, “Stop glorifying the seventies with this rosy nostalgia.” But you know? I think they’re wrong. I think it was better.

Do you think that stems from a lack of interest on the contemporary audience’s part for that kind of more challenging material?

I can’t really get my fingers on it. I think in independent film, though, in the current twenty-year era, it becomes harder and harder to break new ground. Even if you start to look closely at movies from twenty years ago, it’s hard not to say, “Well, that’s sort of like that movie from forty years ago.” If you wait long enough, it’s new again. Everything’s happening in a tighter cycle now. I think it’s really hard as you get to the end of a two-decade span to look at a film and say, “Wow. That’s a true watershed, pacesetting movie.”

A “masterpiece”?

Not even that. I mean, few people would call Blair Witch a masterpiece, but you can’t deny its impact and meaning. I wouldn’t pick on the film as much as a lot of people have.

Well, you have a slightly vested interest.

Well, that’s true. But I have to say that Blair Witch doesn’t mean to me what She’s Gotta Have It did, or what Slacker did, or even what Clerks did.

Of the films you’ve repped, which would you characterize as being the true “watersheds.”

I think She’s Gotta Have It for sure. And I think Parting Glances over time, you know, played a huge historical role in the rise of gay cinema—and obviously launched Steve Buscemi’s career as well. But She’s Gotta Have It is a great film, and it launched Spike’s career and brought back Black filmmakers. The Thin Blue Line—there’s one of the few films that actually changed history. Roger & Me. I’m sorry Michael turned out to be a sort of one-trick pony, but that was a really good one trick. In the context of that Reagan-Bush decade, it’s a very political film. I think Clerks has just launched literally hundreds of other filmmakers, for better or worse, like Slacker did before it. Those two link up in my mind because Kevin saw the former before he thought he’d ever be able to make a film. But again, they’re so different, because Slacker, even though it doesn’t seem so, is actually very stylish, and Clerks is just not. To this day, Kevin is really not a filmmaker, but he’s a great writer, and very provocative and funny as shit. And then I’m a complete Chris Smith fan, but I can’t really tell what his two films thus far have done in terms of influence on other people. That’s a case where you’re just falling below a threshold.

How did you first get involved with Blair Witch?

Dan Myrick sent me a copy of the trailer they’d done for investors without telling me it was a fake, and I went for it. He got a big laugh out of that. I just waited a day and then said, “We should put this on Split Screen,” and then have you guys talk about what you’re going to find when you look through the footage”—the whole investors’ trailer just said that the duffel bag full of stuff was being turned over to Haxan Films. Then I said, “We have to take this a step further. Next spring, come back on the show to tell us what you’ve ‘found’.” So we gave them $10,000 for those two segments. That was a third of their budget.
   I loved the play between “Is it, or isn’t it real?”; “Do you or don’t you believe it?” I’m amazed to this day that so many people bought it. Needed to buy it. I’m a big X Files fan, and it just makes you wonder how many people sit around at the end of each episode going, “Yeah! That really happened!” [Laughs.] That was the ultimate nineties urban legend show. One of the things that was really amazing about Blair Witch, and this is the sad thing about it, was that it mobilized this demographic—teenagers—that everybody always thinks they might be able to get for an independent film but never do. You know, maybe Pulp Fiction got some of them, or Clerks on its video run, but Blair Witch was so teenage.
   And this is the audience you have to worry about getting for independent film, since it’s the generation that will eventually grow up and become independent film’s potential audience. One of the reasons you’ve got a falling off of general support for everything is that the core audience is an aging audience. And it’s aging audience that is less able or apt to go out.

And there’s video and cable, especially for people with kids.

Right, and this audience is acutely aware of making those calls now. “Is this one to see in the theater, or rent, or should we just catch it if it ever shows up on cable?” It’s almost unconscious, it’s so quick.

You’ve spent some time in L.A.; you talk about your trip there to sell She’s Gotta Have It in your book—

I find L.A. a very pleasant to visit, especially on days like this, when I have to shovel snow off my porch. I spent an entire seductive month there during Roger & Me.

Do you think you could have done what you’ve been doing anywhere but New York?

In the nineties, I started getting interested in some really non-L.A. and non-New York filmmakers: Rick Linklater was from Austin, Michael Moore’s from Michigan, Rose and Guin were from Chicago, Chris Smith’s from Milwaukee. But I still feel like New York was a better base than any of these other places, because for one thing I just got the sense that these filmmakers really had a better time visiting New York than they would have had going to L.A. But I never got involved with an L.A.-based filmmaker.

You’re not repping anything anymore; what are you up to? Are you still producing?

We spun off a movie from last year’s show, a documentary called How’s Your News? which I cofinanced with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, which may be a movie or may be an hour-long TV special. That will be done later this year, and we’ll figure out what’s going on with that. The director, Arthur Bradford, has been a camp counselor at this place called Camp Jabberwocky, for mentally and physically challenged people. He picked five of them, and they went across the country to interview people on the street.

What do you see your role as these days?

That’s a stumping question. I feel like, on certain level, the parade is sort of passing me by. But I’m willingly let it go right now. I enjoy a kind of “elder statesman” role. I feel like Ben Barenholtz must have felt ten years ago. [Laughs.] I think I can provide some perspective at times. I’d particularly like to find a way to cash in big time with those Internet bucks, based on what I’ve done and what I know. But as for being a productive member of the film community, I’m a bit perplexed right now. I’m having a crisis. I liked more films in 1999 than I have in years. It was a great year. But, as I’m fond of pointing out—Blair Witch and American Movie aside—Sundance had little or nothing to do with it. American independent film had little to do with it, except that the David Russells of the world grew up through the ranks.
   So I’m not sure how my part of the world fits in with that part of the world. I’m a little confused right now. But I’m thinking about opening a snow-shoveling business…