September 2007 • Anthropology News 27 FIELD NOTES Notes From Hollywood SHERRY B ORTNER UCLA 12/30/05. I sit in a coffee shop on the west side of Los Angeles, waiting for film producer Albert Berger, whom I am planning to interview as part of a research project on Hollywood. Hollywood has only been studied once by an anthropologist, Hortense Powder- maker, whose fieldwork in the late 1940s resulted in the book Holly- wood the Dream Factory. The book was not well received. A review in Variety called it “A dull and tedious tome.” The reviewer went on to say that it was “downright silly...Most of it could have been put together by any Hollywood correspondent in two weeks.” Not an auspicious backdrop for my own study. Berger, a pleasant looking man of about 50, walks into the coffee shop and joins me. He sits down, takes a few sips of coffee, and patiently sub- mits to an interview on this bright Saturday morning. I ask him about his personal background, the trajec- tory of his career, the nature of his work, and of course his films. Berger is one of a new breed of independent producers who are putting together some of the most intelligent films to come out of the American film industry in a very long time. He and his partner in Bona Fide Productions, Ron Yerxa, have an impressive list of films to their credit, including Election, The Wood, Cold Mountain, The Ice Harvest, Bee Season and 2006’s breakout hit, Little Miss Sunshine. Independent producers, in the simple sense of producers working outside the big studios, are noth- ing new, and independent pro- duction companies have been an important part of the Hollywood landscape throughout its history. Nor are all independent produc- tion companies today in the busi- ness for reasons of artistic indepen- dence. Many of them continue to make, as they did in the past, fairly mainstream Hollywood films. What is new is, first, the tre- mendous growth of an indepen- dent film movement committed to making films—“indies”—that stand outside of, and to varying degrees against, the Hollywood mainstream. Hollywood movies are seen as “cookie-cutter movies,” made by committee, whitebread, all action, mindless, blockbusters, franchises...you get the picture. The anti-Hollywood indie move- ment has been growing rapidly since the 1980s, and is arguably still accelerating. But second, the movement is by now old enough that it has itself fanned out across a spectrum of positions concerning its relation- ship to “Hollywood.” At one end of the spectrum are filmmakers determined to continue working within an austere indie framework, both financially and artistically, so as to retain their complete inde- pendence. Take David Edwards, an anthropologist who produced and codirected a film called Kabul Transit, which was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past summer. The film, consisting of a series of beautiful and/or disturb- ing vignettes of life in contem- porary Kabul, has no directional- ity and no voiceover narration to guide the viewer’s understanding. At the other end of the indie spectrum today are producers and filmmakers who are trying to find the groove between sustaining an independence of spirit on the one hand, and making a certain effort to connect with larger audiences on the other. In 1997 the New York Times Magazine had devoted a whole issue to what the editors called “The Two Hollywoods,” the world of independent filmmaking and the world of studio movie production. That was probably the moment of maximum polarization between the two. Long-time Hollywood observer Neal Gabler was pessimistic at that This is precisely the space now occupied with increasing success by, among others, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa. In that first interview with Berger in the coffee shop, I was trying to grasp what kind of work he and Yerxa did, and raised the question of the indie/studio interface. Berger said, “Well, I think that is right where we live.” He explained that most of their films were financed by one or another of the “specialty divi- sions” of studios (more on these later), but that nonetheless he and Yerxa sought to make creatively independent films. FIELD NOTES Producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa. time about the possibility of bridging the gap: “Now that the independents have relieved their film makers of the obligation to reach a large audience, and studios have relieved theirs of the obligation to make intelligently crafted pictures, the split between art and entertainment is larger than ever and, one fears, never the twain shall meet.” But in that same issue critic Janet Maslin identified several “hybrid” films, like The Full Monty, The People vs Larry Flynt and LA Confidential . She described them as films “in which grand ambition, art- ful trappings and independence of spirit are perfectly intertwined,” and called on filmmakers to explore this “great untested midrange” of movie making. He went on to speak about their newest project along those lines, Little Miss Sunshine. At that point the film was still “available,” meaning that it did not yet have a distributor. But Berger and Yerxa would be taking it to the Sundance Film Festival in January and Berger was feeling optimistic. He said he was “really, really excited about it” and that he had “high hopes that the film world will love it.” 2/11/06. I have an interview with a young, up-and-coming producer named Ted Kroeber (American Gun) at a coffee shop in his neighbor- hood of Ladeira Heights. (He is a In the question and answer period, the audience at the screen- ing was split, with some view- ers congratulating Edwards and his partners (Gregory Whitmore and Meliya Zulfacar) on the com- plexity of the film and on not “mollycoddling” their audience, and others expressing a sense of frustration at the lack of informa- tion and guidelines that would help viewers understand what they were seeing. Edwards told me afterwards that he and his part- ners were having trouble getting distribution for the film. I asked whether he would be willing to modify it if he could get, say, a television deal. He said absolutely not, he would rather go directly to putting the film up on the web. See Indie Movement on page 28 This is Part 1 of a two-part series. In it Ortner reports on a project of the inde- pendent film movement that, starting in the late 1980s, has radically changed the American movie environment. The Indie Movement