Lights! Camera! Cut the Budget!

By Stephen Koepp

Did someone forget to inform Robert Townsend that a Hollywood picture costs serious money, like $15 million? Why else would anyone have the nerve to launch a movie on a savings account of just $20,000? For Townsend, the film's director and star, a strong entrepreneurial urge overcame weak financing. When the director's cash ran out, he simply started using his two credit cards. Then he applied for twelve more of them to pay for film, costumes, rental equipment and food. He even paid his actors by filling up their gas tanks and charging it. His artful dodging finally paid off when he showed a rough version of the film to Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., whose independent movie company decided to give Townsend the financial backing to finish and distribute the picture. Even so, Hollywood Shuffle, a satire about struggling black actors that opened last week in Manhattan and Washington, cost less than $1 million.

Directors and producers with Townsend's kind of moxie are storming the film industry like the Bedouin warriors in Beau Geste. No longer do the seven major studios and several so-called mini-majors have a lock on what is shown in U.S. movie houses. More than 350 independent films were produced worldwide in 1986, an increase of nearly 60% from the previous year. While such independent cinema was once synonymous with sexploitation pictures and artsy foreign films, the new wave of modestly budgeted movies is gaining widespread acceptance at the multiplexes in Everytown, U.S.A.

Filmdom's establishment has good reason to be envious, since independents are stealing the most prestigious scenes. When the Academy Awards ceremony takes place next week, the spotlight will shine on two independently produced films, Platoon and A Room with a View, which led the nominations with eight apiece. Last year the top acting Oscars went to A Trip to Bountiful and Kiss of the Spider Woman; both were the work of an independent studio, Island Pictures. The major studios left an opening for such films by sticking too long with expensive formulas calling for car chases, special effects and predictable stars. While those features have perennial appeal for teens, the baby-boom generation is developing a taste for movies about relationships and , eccentric characters, films that often take less money but more ingenuity to make.

Yet when it comes to profits, the most successful independent movies would put many major-studio pictures to shame. Platoon, which cost $6 million, has grossed $93 million so far, while the $3.5 million A Room with a View is expected to bring in more than $50 million worldwide. Even so, independent productions remain highly risky investments, since fully half of such films never find distributors willing to handle them.

Two of the fastest-rising independent companies are Hemdale, which started in London and moved to Los Angeles in 1978, and Cinecom, a four-year- old Manhattan firm. Hemdale, the producer of Platoon, quickly followed up with Hoosiers this year, a much praised sentimental film about an Indiana basketball team. Cinecom, which backed A Room with a View, this month released Swimming to Cambodia, a $485,000 movie that consists entirely of a monologue by Actor Spalding Gray. While both companies have lately scored huge hits, their philosophy is to survive on modest successes by keeping costs low. Says Amir Malin, Cinecom's president: "The major studios have to make a tremendous profit to meet their overhead, so they go for the home run. We go for the singles."

The challenge of making movies on the cheap is to keep them from looking the part. Thus the scrimping goes on behind the scenes, where the cast and the crew forgo the usual Hollywood frills. Says Larry Jackson, head of production for Goldwyn: "We have only one hairdresser instead of six. People share bathrooms. In many cases, you'll find actors carrying props." Moreover, big- name actors sometimes agree to work for reduced wages on small pictures they believe in. Says Bette Davis, who stars in Alive Films' The Whales of August, to be released in September: "What Jack Warner ((of Warner Bros.)) never understood was that if an actor is offered a really good part, he'll do it for next to nothing."

Rounding up the financing is half the battle, but independents are now finding many more sources. Filmmakers can often patch together their financing from advance sales to videocassette distributors, cable-TV channels and foreign exhibitors. Thus part of the procedure for upstart filmmakers is to hit the road with sample reels of their movies-in-progress, seeking to find buyers at film festivals and industry conventions all over the world. One independent, John Sayles, director of the 1984 hit The Brother from Another Planet, finances his own movies by grinding out screenplays like The Clan of the Cave Bear for major Hollywood studios.

In promoting their films, independents avoid the mass-market techniques employed by major studios. Instead, they aim for bargain exposure to specific audiences. A Room with a View, for example, based on the E.M. Forster novel, was screened last year for a Chicago convention of English teachers, who were encouraged to use the film as a study aid for their students. Waiting for the Moon, a new film about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas starring Linda Hunt, will be screened for feminist groups and advertised in gay newspapers.

When independent filmmakers team up with major studios, the drawbacks of working for a big company suddenly hit home. Director Spike Lee, whose 1986 picture She's Gotta Have It earned $7 million on a $200,000 budget, recently caught flak from executives of Columbia Pictures, the Coca-Cola subsidiary that is distributing his current $6 million movie. Reason: Lee's lead character was named Slice, which happens to be a brand of soft drink produced by rival Pepsi-Cola. The director reluctantly changed the character's name to Dap.

With reporting by D. Blake Hallanan/Los Angeles and Jeanne McDowell/New York