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The Myth of the $7,000 Movie

John Pierson exposes the tricks of the art film

By Richard von Busack

"Taxi Driver," which was filmed cheap and (though it isn't widely known) mostly in a Hollywood studio with just a week's worth of New York locations, offers a primer on how to make a lack of money look like a load of mood. Watching it anew is more instructive--and a lot more entertaining--than the schmoozefest that is John Pierson's self-congratulatory book about converting low budgets into big profits: Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema (Miramax/Hyperion).

As a producer's representative--a liaison between independent filmmakers and the big studios--Pierson was present at the transformation of various on-the-cheap independent films into national art-house phenomena. He was there, most notably, to do the right thing and invest $10,000 into She's Gotta Have It. Building on this smart investment, Pierson proceeded to other feats, including shepherding Slacker, Go Fish and Amongst Friends from the film-festival circuit to video shelves near you. His biggest deal was brokering the $3 million payoff to Michael Moore from Warner Bros. to purchase Roger & Me. Remember the proverb about how success has a thousand fathers? Pierson is one of those fathers.

Pierson got his start as a movie programmer at some of the most eclectic art houses in Manhattan, picking and choosing films to run in revival (a dream double bill for him was the Fritz Lang and James Bond special, You Only Live Once and You Only Live Twice). When the VCR all but killed off the revival houses, Pierson began investing in selected independent movies, and has been doing so ever since, bringing parties together over contracts.

He's working with the newest generation of moviemakers; his former protégé Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, (and less memorably, Mallrats), is interviewed between chapters. Smith, on the credits of Clerks thanked Richard Linklater (Slacker), Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise) and Hal Hartley (Amateur) as his own guides, but he's especially indebted to Pierson. "That's what's so cool about John Pierson, he makes you feel so important," Smith says in a journal entry faithfully reprinted here.

Pierson isn't one to hide his light under a bushel basket: "I've been called a lot of peculiar things in print--guru, dealmeister, scout, shaman, veteran angel," though some might disagree with his celestial qualities, particularly those he once encouraged and changed his mind about. His former client Rob Weiss, of the suburban gangster film Amongst Friends, is derided for his high-handedness, his white-gangsta mannerisms and his profligacy.

Pierson's aim is ostensibly not revenge; his purpose is "to portray, in a reasonable fashion, the truth about profitability." Through budgets and deal memos reprinted here, Pierson thoroughly squashes the myth of the $7,000 movie. (Although it's true that El Mariachi was brought in for seven grand, it was couldn't be released without sound and visual fixes that added three more digits to the budget.)

The budgets reproduced here are informative, and so are the basic tips to young filmmakers: Don't make movies about movies. Don't get your expectations of money too high. Don't flaunt your budgets as the lowest ever, lest you undercut yourself when the bidding starts. Along the way, Pierson also poses an interesting point about American independent film: could something like Pulp Fiction, with its relatively large budget and name stars, really be considered independent?

Pierson can be funny at times. At one film festival, a young director objects to being described as part of the "TV generation"--and then goes on to discuss with the other filmmakers the nuances of The Brady Bunch. For the most part, though, Pierson is a clumsy, haphazard writer. "It's often said that life is what happens when you're making other plans," he ventures at one point. "Coca-Cola and ice cream turned out to be his Midwestern staples."

The book is swollen with cascades of dropped names, and Pierson, shaman of indie film or not, has the money-man's traditional contempt for movies that didn't perform at the box office--even first-rate independent films such as To Sleep With Anger and Spanking the Monkey. He feels that way even about some of his own projects, like End of the Night. Pierson is a career self-aggrandizer so smug that he isn't even shaken when director Smith describes what it is that Pierson actually does: "In essence, you're a very selective, very finicky video clerk." The difference is that a video clerk doesn't get ten percent of what he rents.

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Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema by John Pierson; Miramax/Hyperion; 371 pages; $22.95 cloth.


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