A Panicked Hollywood Can Make Indie Film Stronger

While I fully support #BlocktheMerger, and the impassioned efforts of our independent film collectives, anti-trust activists, and those fighting against the twin evils of Hollywood/Streamerwood intent on destroying our jobs, algorithmificating our content, and colluding with authoritarianism, let’s be real: That's what big media companies have always done.

Independent film (and media) wouldn’t be independent if there wasn’t something to rebel against. This is what helps cultivate and define the mavericks, the renegades, the avant-garde, whether Jonas Mekas’ New American Cinema Group of the 1960s, heralding John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” and railing against censorship and what they called “Product Film”—“the falsity of their themes, their lack of sensibility, their lack of style”—or the rise of American Independent Film in the 1980s and ‘90s, reacting against the Reagan-Bush years of rampant discrimination, materialist greed, economic inequality, and the dominance of the Hollywood blockbust…