Last weekend, the newspaper pundits were full of ponderings concerning the state of “independent” film, following the end of the past Sundance Festival in Utah.

Reality check time.

Sundance, now either part- or majority-owned by Viacom, is not really about independent filmmaking and hasn’t been since at least 1997. At best, one can say it’s about “art house” film marketing, the sort of thing at which Roger Corman, Sam Goldwyn Jr., and their cronies used to excel. At worst, it’s just another excuse for celebrity gossip bullshit and studio dealmaking corruption—precisely what truly independent film is a rebellion against.

K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson has defined an independent record label as a record label that’s neither owned, financed, nor distributed by one of the five majors. A similarly simple demarcation could be made for independent movies, except for the huge gray area between a film’s production and its distribution.

The days of such indie-film companies as Goldwyn, Cinecom, Cannon, DeLaurentiis, Hemdale, and Atlantic Releasing have gone the way of RKO and Monogram. Nowadays, only three truly independent theatrical distributors in North America are big enough for Variety to notice—IFC Films (owned by big cable-TV-system operator Cablevision), Lions Gate, and Alliance Atlantis. All the bigger “indie” distributors are merely niche-market (and non-union) subsidiaries of the intellectual-property conglomerates: Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Miramax (Disney), New Line (AOL Time Warner), and Focus Features (Vivendi Universal).

These niche divisions don’t sit around buying up movies completed by rugged individualist filmmakers (despite the Sundance Festival’s mythology). More and more, they’re financing, packaging, and asserting total creative control over the products they release. (Miramax bankrolled the last Broadway revival of the musical Chicago to spur interest in its now-current film version.) They package mid-budget films as career-enhancing vehicles for stars under contract to the parent company. They crank out movies in fad genres for as long as the fads last (Pulp Fiction-esque hip violence, black-middle-class relationship comedies).

Some of the films but out by the big studios’ farm-team units are at least sort-of cool.

But they’re not independent films.

So what exactly is an independent film?

Here are a few guidelines:

• If it was made in Britain in the past ten years and doesn’t have James Bond in it, it’s probably independent.
• If it was filmed in Canada and actually set in Canada, it’s probably independent.
• If Tom Hanks was involved in any aspect of its production, it’s absolutely, positively not independent.
• If no cast or crew members have ever been on Jay Leno, it stands a good chance of being independent.
• If it stars a current or past boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez, it’s probably not independent (if it was made after or shortly before said Lopez hookup).
• If it’s all about the wacky travails besetting an independent filmmaker, it’s almost certainly an independent film (albeit a trite one).
• If it was directed by a woman who isn’t also an actress, it’s likely to be independent.
• If it was directed by an African American whose surname is neither Lee nor Wayans, it’s almost assuredly independent.
• If it’s about racial struggles but doesn’t have a noble white hero, it’s apt to be independent.
• If it includes a female character who both takes her clothes off and has actual speaking lines, it’s more likely these days to be independent.
• If it includes a male character who takes his clothes off (without being hidden by a dresser drawer or a potted plant), it’s undoubtedly independent.