Forget Martians meeting Earthlings. This Independence Day weekend, the wacky worlds of low-budget film and public-access TV come together for a 24-hour marathon of undistributed features and shorts on oddly-numbered cable stations in 18 cities nationwide. Dubbed Independent's Day, the video festival was cooked up last winter by two filmmakers, Hilary Weisman and Marlies Carruth, indulging in the perennial indie-film jabber about the travails of distribution.
"It's our only alternative," says Carruth. A lot of films reach a distribution dead-end after inclusion in a regional festival or two, despite receiving good reviews. Though the past several years have seen a growth of TV outlets for small movies - like the Sundance Channel and the Independent Film Channel - Carruth says the Independent's Day project is "for those films that don't make it to those venues for whatever reason."
It seems on first glance that the public-access universe of strippers, astrologers, and manifold real-life incarnations of Wayne's World has little connection to arty independent cinema, but the two communities actually share many problems and ideals. "They seem very different," says Lesley Johnson, whose Chicago Cable Access will be broadcasting 10 hours of the show to its audience of 357,000 households. "But they have in common a model of programming a kind of material you won't see on commercial outlets. It's people trying to find a venue to getting their message out." In fact, when grainy images of struggling psychics are replaced by grainy images of the psychic struggle, many viewers might not notice the change of programming.
The anything-goes attitude extends to the fact that access programming doesn't come under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The channels are still bound to local obscenity laws, but - due to both a hands-off aesthetic and limitations on manpower - most stations don't prescreen shows for content.
On the other hand, the networked programming goes fully counter to the usual bottom-up dynamic of community-based programming. Though some local producers gain home-channel success and then take their shows to other communities, Johnson says she knows of no other widespread simultaneous broadcast like Independent's Day. She points out that the organizers not only had to deal with each station's differing ownership, programming, and scheduling models, but they also had to find a local resident to sponsor the show in each town. Even though the fest is spottily promoted and not carried in its entirety on some stations, "it's quite an amazing feat," Johnson says.
The marathon will feature 61 films by 53 filmmakers, including Weisman's Life's Too Good (Carruth's current feature, Girlfriends, slipped up and gained distribution this month, so you'll have to pay to see it later).
Of course, there might be obvious reasons why some of these movies aren't coming to a theater near you. But, Carruth says, even if a film doesn't provide 60 straight minutes of great filmmaking, "maybe you'll find 10 minutes; maybe you'll say I loved the shooter on that. There's magic in everybody's work."
