Independent filmmakers must get creative with financing

That's the pitch espoused by tyro filmmaker Alice.ia Carin in a full-page ad that ran recently in the Nation magazine, a fundraising attempt for her film "Don't See This." Carin also promised to send profits from the currently unproduced soundtrack, book and film to "help fund [New York City] public school programs in music and fine arts."

With a median income of $83,000, the Nation's readers wouldn't seem a practical film financing alternative to hedge fund managers or trustafarian movie producers. Yet as Wall Street swoons, banks such as Société Générale opt out of the movie financing business and Hollywood studios retrench, the plight of indie filmmakers, never a secure career, appears increasingly precarious.

The specialty film arena is teeming with gloom, given the summer shuttering of art-house distributors such as Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, and the recent raft of films by major directors such as Steven Soderbergh that have sold to distributors for relatively paltry sums, if at all. Indie films -- particularly those with challenging subject matter or helmed by unknown directors -- have always had difficulty finding backers, but many are wondering if unconventional cinema is going the way of Starbucks triple mocha lattes, European vacations and other luxuries that are dispensable in these rough times.

"There will be huge challenges for getting films with budgets from $5 [million] to $10 million. All those deals that were made during the height of Wall Street. The funny money. Those deals will be impossible to come by," says Dawn Hudson, executive director of Film Independent, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that mentors independent filmmakers and sponsors the Independent Spirit Awards.

Commercial fare with stars can still scrape by, but for out-of-the-box films "it's the worst time it's ever been," says indie studio head-turned producer Mark Gill, noting that it's hard to raise money for "movies without stars, which are too American, very small dramas, or which are too familiar. I worked on 'In the Bedroom,' " he says, referring to director Todd Field's feature debut, which garnered five Oscar nominations in 2001. "That would be so much harder to pull off now. The odds against that movie were considerable then, and would be triply hard today."