Ted Hope: “The Indie Film System Is F**ked” — Locarno
deadline.comVeteran indie producer Ted Hope opened Locarno’s industry symposium Thursday afternoon with a provocative keynote during which he declared: “The indie film system is fucked.” The talk, titled Indie Films: 50 Years Of Building The Wrong Thing, began with Hope’s pointed declaration before he reassured the audience of predominantly European industry insiders that now is the time to build a new, self-sufficient indie eco-system. “There’s a huge chance that we’ve never had before to build something better,” Hope said, adding: “And I actually think it’s quite doable.” Hope has made similar assessments in the past.
In 1995, the producer, best known for helping to launch the careers of indie filmmakers such as Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Todd Field, and Michel Gondry, published the seminal essay Indie Film is Dead.
Today, however, Hope said his past thesis wasn’t quite right. At the time, he said he hadn’t realized that there has never been “such thing as a stable indie film system.” “It might’ve been rife with biases and prejudices, but the model worked,” Hope said. “It was prey to different trends and certain people’s manipulations.
That, to me, is the old indie. And that’s what we have to say is over.” Hope added that the main business failure that has contributed to the death of old indie cinema is that industry execs often solely base their funding and commissioning decisions on the success of past projects, which has kept the industry stagnant.
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