Introduction

In Chapter 1, I explained how the mid-to-late 1990s became the golden years of ‘indie’ cinema, an era of opportunity for filmmakers who had not always found it easy to finance their often challenging projects in the preceding years. Fuelled by the incredible commercial success of Miramax, the third wave of classics divisions and the increasing visibility of film festivals like the ultra-hip Sundance, the second half of the 1990s witnessed the increasing integration of a wide variety of films with distinctive characteristics (in terms of aesthetics, political viewpoints, thematic and cultural preoccupations, etc.) into the structures of global production and distribution finance.

This became particularly evident in the period 1995–6, when funding from European investors became readily available for independent films. As a French banker put it in an interview for Screen International: ‘[at that time] demand exceeded supply. We could not make films fast enough. Satellite broadcasters needed product. It did not matter what the film was or who was in it.’ And even though this development was very short-lived, it helped make ‘indie’ films increasingly visible in the international marketplace, especially when the number of crossover commercial hits started growing. Furthermore, and not surprisingly, it also had a major knock-on effect on all film production in the US, which increased exponentially, surpassing the one thousand films per annum mark at the end of the decade, irrespective of the fact that only a fraction of these films ended up finding theatrical distribution.