…but here’s one that’s not boring, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Wheadon.

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.

IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

…Punk: Pistols to Present, a 25-year retrospective that actually includes some of the pioneer acts often forgotten in such retrospectives (Damned, Runaways, Buzzcocks). The VJ’s background set and the show’s “bumper” logos (what you see before and after the commercial breaks), however, look creepily like the work of a corporate ad agency trying to ape a punk look (PoMo-ironic drawings of safety pins, “graffiti” typefaces). The “…to Present” side of the show’s equation is heavy on the MTV-friendly side of ’90s alternarock. Green Day is playing as I write this; I fully expect to see the Offspring and Stone Temple Pilots by the show’s end. I also expect to not see Fugazi. SO: Decide for yourself. Tribute? Exploitation? All of the above?

(Update: Further on in the show, there’s a No Doubt video and a documentary segment about a display of oldtime punk DIY posters—at a Levi’s-sponsored summer package tour!)

(Further Update: The show concludes with the predictable pairing of “God Save the Queen” and the newly-released Nirvana outtake song.)

…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.

The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:

• It’s on its country’s premier network, in a premier time slot: 11:25 p.m.-12:25 a.m. every weeknight, commercial-free. It’s cutting-edge, but it’s not “fringe.”
• It’s carefully curated and sequenced, despite the enormous amount of material it requires. Canada has vast short-film and animation scenes (due partly to arts grants and to the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada), and Zed could consume all its output in a grab-baggy way. Instead, each episode carfully curates a mix of dramatic-narrative shorts, outre comedies, odd cartoons, mini-documentaries, modern-dance clips, spoken-word snippets, avant-garde musical performances, and items too odd to classify.
• Elegant, erudite emcee Sharon Lewis deftly weaves common threads around each night’s selections, without resorting either to support-the-arts hype nor to PBS-style smugness. She knows these are engrossing, captivating films, and she knows she doesn’t have to hard-sell them to you.
• Under the slogan “Open Source Television,” the show solicits viewer contributions. One of my favorites in this category was a tape of a 10-year-old boy trying hard to stay awake to watch the show.
• The show welcomes viewers of all ages, but doesn’t pander or clean things up for them. In keeping with the Film Board’s heritage, the films on Zed can include quite heavy subject matter (abortion, poverty, bereavement, loneliness). The cartoons can range from the gross-out to the incomprehensibly symbolic. Nudity and cuss words are left intact. One clip featured the writhing of a nude male modern dancer; its soundtrack consisted of the dancer discussing the kind of man with whom he’d most want to fall in love.
• The show’s segments have MTV-like credit screens at the beginning and end. These titles include “Web ID” numbers for each short. Anything you see and like (or want to decipher), you can see again online. And if you live where CBC isn’t on cable (i.e., the United States south of Tacoma), you can see and hear the show’s component parts online, though one piece at a time and without Lewis’s introductions.
• But the most important aspects of Zed are its confident attitude and Lewis’s honest rapport with her viewers. The show presumes a universe in which the sorts of ideas and expressions it presents are fully-accepted and respected features of a sophisticated urban society. Zed is neither elitist nor pandering. It fully respects its viewers’ intelligence. It doesn’t divide the populace into “cultured” and “uncultured” castes. It fully expects you to “get” whatever it shows; and if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, something else will be along in less than six minutes.

Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).

My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.

WEDNESDAY’S EDITION of the new Pyramid was a Seattle special. It was still taped in LA, but had KOMO-TV’s Kathi Goertzen and Steve Pool as the “celebrities,” and locals found at a recent audition as the civilian contestants. One category was “Things Associated With Grunge.” They were: “T-Shirt,” “Jeans,” “Flannel,” and “Tattoo.” Nothing about music was among the items on the list, at least not among those Pool and his partner could get to within the alloted time.

…TV viewing is good for the brain. Now stop your anti-pop elitist whining already.

And if you don’t like what’s on TV, go out and make some of your own.

…not included on the station’s website, claims Seattle’s second (and Portland’s first) in the number of unmarried living-together couples. The news item claims one in four Seatown pairs haven’t bothered to get the legal certificate of wedlock, compared with one in ten nationally. The station didn’t say whether the region’s lousy economy (which causes folks to delay or forego all sorts of commitments) might have something to do with it.

…continues abroad.

Last year, we praised Britain’s ITV network for its heritage of decentralized and impermanent authority. Historically, ITV was “owned” by a regulatory commission, which licensed local network-affiliate stations for multi-year contracts that weren’t always renewed. The local stations produced the shows and sold the ads, under the regulator’s heavy guidelines. The bigger-market stations (including the two that split the London franchise by days of the week) had more opportunities to put shows into the network schedule. But no one company controlled the network or its schedule.

The result was a diffuse system with different “voices” and different ideas on what would make a good and/or popular show. It brought forth countless small-screen classics; including Coronation Street, The Avengers, Ready Steady Go!, The Saint, Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, The Muppet Show, This Is Tom Jones, Upstairs Downstairs, Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, and the original versions of Three’s Company and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

That all began to change in the Thatcher years. The 11 ITV stations in England and Wales got bought up by two companies. Now those two are merging, forming a behemoth that will control half the UK’s TV ad revenues–at least until “synergy”-obsessed mismanagement drives more viewers to other broadcast, cable, and satellite outlets.

By the way, if you click on the above link and you live in the US or Canada, you’re commiting some kind of intellectual-property crime. To which I naturally say go for it. (Another item about the story is at this link.)

The Seahawks predictably lost on Monday Night Football. As part of the show, ABC paid to have its logo painted onto the infield of an empty Safeco Field, a painful reminder of the Mariners’ failure to make the baseball postseason. That failure has prompted M’s manager Lou Piniella, catalyst of everything the team’s ever accomplished, to quit. And the team that snuck ahead of the M’s to win the AL Wild Card slot won the league penant, setting up an (ugh! double ugh!) all-California World Series.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle canceled a fundraising appearance by Leonard Nimoy, after federation bigwigs discovered the retired actor and cult legend had just created a book of photos combining nekkid ladies with Jewish religious iconography. (The two great tastes that taste great together!) Instead, Nimoy will appear at a local Jewish congregation the next day, Oct. 24. Of course, this won’t be the first time he’s gone against Federation directives. (I know, I had to say it…)

…of an attempt to make a TV series visiting America’s most wonderful and wacky attractions. Alas, now I can’t see some of the places the show would’ve gone to; particularly the many defunct second-string theme parks of Florida.

…one you can only play once a year. It involves the Oregon State-USC football game. There’s only one rule: Down your drink whenever an announcer says anything to the efffect of “the Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

…the two most bizarre spectacle on yesterday’s all-day, almost-every-channel memorial marathon. The No. 1 most bizarre sight was eminently predictable: The merchandising of gaudy flag-ribbon trinkets, bald-eagle collector plates and such on the shopping channels. The No. 2 most bizarre spectacle was much more unexpected: ESPN senior announcer Chris Berman reciting from the Gettysburg Address between inninngs of a Yankees-Red Sox baseball game.

CONTINUING MY TOUR of local appearances by national game-show producers, I stood in line for nearly three hours on Wednesday to attend the Seattle auditions for the new syndicated version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It all took place in the unfinished second phase of KOMO-TV’s new building, under the scary 30-foot-high grins of new Millionaire host Meredith Viera and new Pyramid host Donny Osmond. (The long “blemish” on Viera’s face in the above picture is the Space Needle’s reflection.)

Once we finally got inside, the 250 applicants in our group (one of four groups that day) were herded into a big unfinished room on the main floor. Among too-few folding chairs, big flat-screen monitors blared promos for the station’s new fall shows for an hour.

Finally we were herded into unfinished elevator cars up to another big unfinished room on the fourth floor. We were handed No. 2 pencils, small sheets of cardboard, and fill-in-the-tiny-squares data-processing slips familiar to anyone who’s voted in certain jurisdictions or taken certain public-school standardized tests.

We had 30 multiple-choice trivia questions to answer in 12 minutes. Only those who scored above an unmentioned threshhold were to be kept around for in-person interviews (where the production staff would presumably weed out candidates lacking in hot looks, perky personalities, or the correct demographics.)

Your former professional trivia writer failed to make the first cut. Perhaps if I’d previously boned up on Henry VIII’s wives or Argentinian geography, but oh well… Back to worrying about the daily bills like most of the rest of you.