It's strange that "chasing the oscar" became the main marketing strategy for the film industry. When you really look at the choices for best picture over the past decade or so, one wonders why the Academy Awards haven't gone the way of Miramax. When "No Country for Old Men" won, I thought how appropriate. The academy members selected a film that speaks about their existential angst. Can most of those old guys even see the films they're wielding life and death power over?They probably hear half the dialogue wrong. Most old guys I know aren't considerate enough to use hearing aids, in order to hear another human being. I can't imagine those old men holed up in their decaying Bel Air mansions putting on the DVD and really focusing. Mental focus tends to deteriorate as well. It's like in those dictatorial regimes when the leaders are so out of touch, but no institutions are in place to remove them, so they dither along and continue to drive things into the ground.

The rise of Miramax as a mainstream-marketplace phenomenon was as much a death knell to indie film as Geffen snapping up alternative bands was to "alternative rock." Sure, there was more of an outlet for an indie sensibility. But that also created the concept OF the "indie sensibility," which led to a series of strangely homogenous tropes(on a spectrum, perhaps, of Solondz to Tarantino) you can see any time you randomly turn on IFC. People call the twin breakthroughs of film & music in the early 90s a victory, but I'd just call them marketing corrections. They realized what people wanted to buy and adjusted.

Mirimax commodofied independant movies and created a bland "pseudo-indie" product. And, yes Mr. Lipsky, Pulp Fiction is an over-rated movie. Nice to hear someone other than myself say that.

I find this article a little odd in that the quotes from industry insiders seem to restate so much that Andrew has written over time about the state of independent film, but he seems to be disagreeing with that analysis now. Or am I confusing a reserved tone with a critical one?

Also, a number of the movies he lists as important to the Mirimax legacy come after the Disney purchase, so it's hard to understand the "Disney buyout detrimental" focus of the article.

Miramax is dying a slow death, but that has nothing to do with independent film as a category. The allure of the offbeat, complex, maverick-driven film goes through cycles. In another ten years, Hollywood will once again "discover" independent films, and we'll have another flowering (or explosion, depending on how you look at it) of cachet for the independents, with studio honchos and mainstream critics patting each other on the back for their "bravery" and "leadership" in backing films that are actually good and imaginative, instead of brain-dead crap.

It's happened before and it'll happen again. Anybody going on about the "death" of popular and big-money interest in independent film hasn't been paying attention, so that tells you what their opinion is worth.

The bad hair in Pulp Fiction drove me crazy then and now. The mis quoting of scripture wasn't great. But the dialogue was amazing.Kill Bill is a bunch of heartless crap that ended with Carradine dead with a shoelace tied around his private parts and fate was being merciful for letting him off so easy for beng party to such an abomination. But Kill Bill is Pulp Fiction with all the creepiness and none of the creativity.

But as messed up as Pulp Fiction is in ways, it really is a masterpiece. WHy? Linear narrative is a drag, and Tarentino busted loose from it, and besides, the sound tracki is amazing

As for the rest of the article, one thing that's missing is some context of the film market in the general economy.

Miramax blew up right round the same time as the dot-com era and the long US economic boom, when there was plenty of money sloshing around to throw at indie pictures. Indie producers wanted to make money by releasing their own films, and the financing was there to do it. The studios wanted to make money once they saw that the indies were making money, so went the wave of consolidation when indie companies became specialty divisions for major studios.

Now that no one has any money and studios have to guarantee a return on their investment to satisfy their corporate overlords, it's not surprising that truly independent films that take any kind of risk are struggling. Miramax showed just how successful an indie can be, but also how the conditions have to be just right for it to happen.

Good independent brand gets bought by a big conglomerate which then applies their management magic to it. The brand was successful in the first place because it wasn't managed by the big industry cookie-cutter technique. Now that it is, it starts to look exactly like all the other cookie-cutter brands out there. The original consumers of the brand leave in droves.

If the management is good, they drum up a new audience and have successfully integrated the new brand into their stable. In a few years, they'll need to trim a brand or two, but no one will connect the dots, unless it is the new brand that goes.

The car companies did this when they bought luxury brands like Jaguar and Bentley. The fashion industry did this with Coach and Brooks Brothers. The list is endless.

The trick for the management of the conglomerate is to keep moving so your acquisition is a feather in your cap and its subsequent tanking is the fault of someone else.

Harvey Weinstein was a major, if not the major, factor in the collapse of independent film by over paying for films and destroying the cost benefit ratio for himself and everybody who tried to compete with him. He was a terrible business man and having sat in a couple of creative meetings with him, a hamfisted moron with a whim of iron when it came to judging the actual creative content of whatever film he had on the butchers block at the moment.

Kieslowski tried to literally take his head of with truncheon at some film festival. Too bad he never succeeded.