Filmmaking blogs are the new black

Now Mike Monello, one of the "Haxan Five" who made The Blair Witch Project, is blogging. Mike's a smart guy who has his hand in a lot of innovative projects, cinema-related and not.

In one of his first posts, he jumps into a long-running discussion about what an "independent film" really is. Yeah, yeah, everyone talks about it all the time--but that's because there's no good answer.

Mike sez:

"Independent" is not a genre. Independent films are comedies, dramas, horror films, thrillers, mysteries, documentaries, family films, and more. Some of them are profound, others are trite. Some of them are brilliant and many of them are terrible. A few of them even reflect "the experiences of those on the margins of society," as Anthony [Kaufman] writes, but let's face it -- the vast majority of them do not.

Mike concludes that The Passion of the Christ is indeed an independent film, for reasons that have little to do with the elevation of its brow. I agree with him. As I said in a comment here, "Gibson spoke to an audience that the studios weren't speaking to, and he went around their system to say what he wanted to say. That unserved audience just happened to be huge and, er, passionate."

The only good thing about Jesus Chainsaw Massacre (I stole that, can't remember where; update--in the comments, David Hudson notes it was coined by Slate film critic David Edelstein) is that it has expanded the definition of an indie film. I know it's opened my eyes more than a little.

Neither Mike nor Anthony Kaufman has actually seen the film (not that it necessarily matters), but I have. I think every independent filmmaker should attend a screening of it, preferably a busy one, just to see the audience reacting to it. It's a brilliant demonstration of the failure of Hollywood. These audiences love The Passion with a passion. I'll grant you, they're insane, to a one. But lots of people are insane. And these maniacs, and there are millions of them, were just sitting there, ripe for the picking. Hollywood could have served their needs. It did not.

The way The Passion has opened my eyes is that it makes me wonder what other unserved audiences are out there.