No Whiners Allowed

How much do you want to see the intimates?” Ry Russo-Young asks her client. “What we were planning on doing was, she’s going to take her bra and throw it aside as he comes into bed with her,” she continues. “It’s not a detailed shot. We could do something more detailed. Is it necessary to see every girl in a bra? No, just her? OK, cool.”

So this, I thought, is how ladies’ unmentionables get sold, as Russo-Young discussed lingerie on the phone.

Soho-based production company Bunker (run by Warren Fischer, of the band FischerSpooner) is working with Elle magazine on a series of commercialsas-short-films (“branded content” is the ad-world parlance) for their client, which happens to be DKNY’s designer lingerie line. Russo-Young, who is known among the indie film world for her 2007 debut feature Orphans—which won a Special Jury Prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival—will be directing the spots.

While her talent may be focused on bras these days, Russo-Young still has film projects that are set to be released or are in the works. You Wont Miss Me—which debuted at Sundance in 2009 and won a Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You—is scheduled, in fact, to open at a theater near you Nov. 12. After navigating the complex maze that has become indie distribution today, Russo-Young found a home for the film with Factory 25, the small Brooklyn-based multi-platform distributor. She’s also in development on her next feature, Nobody Walks, for which she was at the Sundance Writers Labs this past June. This is the life of an indie filmmaker.

Regardless of what kinds of films they want to make, the dream of successful indie filmmakers supporting themselves through their work is rapidly becoming more and more of an impossibility. Since graduating from Oberlin in 2003, 28-year-old Russo-Young has worked at a vintage clothing store, as a production manager for Doug Aitken, as a freelance editor and, now, freelance director.

The independent film world has been in a self-proclaimed crisis mode for more than two years, and it’s a crisis that doesn’t seem to be abating anytime soon. “Yes, the sky is really falling,” Mark Gill, the former president of Miramax Films, said in 2008 at a conference in Los Angeles. Gill’s listing of the causes of the indie film world’s crisis was comprehensive: the shuttering of many specialty-distribution companies, the decline of DVD sales, the increase in competing forms of entertainment, net-based and otherwise. Of course, there is also the Great Recession and the lack of Wall Street-based venture capital. Making experimental, slow or dead-serious dramas for a decent budget has never been tougher for an indie filmmaker.

"I used to work all of these miscellaneous jobs on sets. It feels ridiculous to even say I really did them, because I just did them a few times here and there,” Russo-Young explains. “One thing I did was, I would buy vintage clothing out of state and then sell it at the store I worked at. The markup was just insane. I could buy a dress for like, 12 bucks and sell it for $85. These are the weird ways people have of generating income.”

Just as most novelists choose to teach at colleges to make a decent living, it may be expected to see filmmakers splitting their time between their own work and lucrative projects to pay the bills. Indeed, we’ve already seen Antonio Campos (Afterschool) and Barry Jenkins (Medicine For Melancholy) direct branded content spots for Bloomingdale’s, and indie darling Josh Safdie’s feature debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, grew out of a series of spots for Kate Spade. The result of all this is that indie filmmakers’ attentions seem to be more divided than ever before. In an industry that is notoriously competitive, filmmakers are taking on the added roles of being their own business managers, in addition to finding ways to make rent (be they commercials for fashion companies or collecting unemployment) and, naturally, the minor task of trying to produce good works of art.

At the moment, what’s concerning Russo-Young is pinpointing her client’s needs. Part of the series involves interviewing the actresses on their thoughts regarding intimacy. “Is there anything they are looking for in terms of content?” she asks the project manager at Elle. “Anything they want to be said, verbally—what the girl says?” The answer, it turns out, is no.

“They really trust me,” Russo-Young explains after the call has ended. “I have a lot of creative freedom on the project.” ------

Another New York-based indie filmmaker, Daryl Wein’s story had a peg that helped him land mainstream media coverage. He wrote and put together financing for a modestly-scaled feature called Breaking Upwards over the course of the past few years with his girlfriend, Zoe Lister-Jones. But it was a difficult trip to get there.

“When I was in college, I was acting professionally through an agent, so I made a little money from commercials, TV things,” Wein explains. “Then, I babysat. A huge part of my income came from freelance editing— editing promo videos and whatnot. So I was doing that, and I’m also on unemployment.”

Wein and Lister-Jones’ film charts the travails of a couple that decides to only be in their relationship four days a week. Made for a paltry $15,000, it involved a bunch of favors and begging; the budget and schedules of those involved didn’t even allow for consistent shooting, so it was shot in stops and starts over the course of a threemonth period. Anyone who’s ever made a film knows that shooting your project all at once is difficult enough; to shoot a feature in random bursts is about as far from an ideal situation as a filmmaker can imagine.

Regardless, Wein—who directed and starred alongside Lister-Jones—put the film together and got it some play on the festival circuit. Participation from some recognizable names, like Olivia Thirlby (Juno) and Grace White (Transformers, believe it or not) certainly helped. IFC Films, the biggest indie film buyer on the market, made an offer for a VOD-only release. With no sales agent, Wein and Lister-Jones handled their own negotiations with the Cablevision-owned distributor. They countered with the proposal that IFC give the film a one-week, two-city (New York and L.A.) theatrical release, covering costs with the $35,000 it was going to pay the filmmakers for the VOD rights in the first place. IFC agreed, and the film became an unexpected hit. In its opening weekend in New York, it had the second-highest per-screen average of any film in the country.

When the dust settled, the film had played on five screens (in various markets) over an eight-week run, and grossed $77,000. Those are not insignificant numbers considering the paucity of the film’s print and advertising budget.

Since Breaking Upwards’ April release, Wein and Lister-Jones have sold their script Motherfucker to Fox Searchlight (it’s a romantic comedy about a guy who falls for his girlfriend’s mom), with Wein attached to direct. They also lined up another feature, Lola Versus, with executive producer Michael London (Milk, The Informant!) attached.

“It’s all because of Breaking Upwards,” Wein says. “The film was sort of a highconcept take on the romantic comedy genre. Zoe and I kinda want to make it our goal to reinvent the romantic comedy. Although I think for the moment, we’re sort of being pinned into a corner in Hollywood—people see us as only doing these young-people relationship movies.” ------

The day after I met with Russo-Young at Bunker, I met up with Lena Dunham, who, like Russo-Young, grew up in New York. They also both attended the same high school (St. Ann’s) and college (Oberlin)—though they didn’t meet at either (Russo-Young is five years older). Dunham co-wrote Nobody Walks with Russo-Young, and is also spread thin: She’s directing, writing, starring in and executive producing a pilot for HBO in November (on which Judd Apatow is serving as a producer). She’s also attached to adapt and direct a young adult novel for mega-producer Scott Rudin, who actively seeks out young indie filmmakers for adaptation work. Finally, she’s working with IFC on the release of her latest feature, Tiny Furniture.

The film was also a small-scale project put together on a five-figure budget, with a cast and crew comprised primarily of friends. It concerns a young woman who has just moved back in with her mother following college graduation, trying to get her life in order. It won the Grand Prize at South By Southwest in March, and it was that award that put Dunham on the map. From it, an agent at UTA and the gigs with HBO and Rudin followed, all in not even a half-year. Remarkably, the film wasn’t even Dunham’s first feature. She made Creative Nonfiction (2008) while she was still enrolled at Oberlin.

Dunham had suggested it might be helpful for me to see the environment she works and lives in: her parents’ Tribeca apartment. It is a whited-out, minimalist space that evokes the sense of a Bavarian nanny who might scold you for using the wrong fork. Dunham’s artist parents— painter Caroll Dunham and photographer Laurie Simmons—both have works in MoMA’s collection.

“When I was making Tiny Furniture, I babysat. I worked in an office. I worked in a children’s clothing store for nine months,” Dunham says. “Now, I’m lucky in that I’m supporting myself with the work I’m doing for this pilot. So some version of this is my full-time job.”

Dunham seems to be the inverse of a stereotypical New Yorker with bohemian underpinnings. She comes across as a bit insecure on the surface—trying to “figure it all out”—but who in fact, underneath, knows exactly what she’s doing and is fully confident in her capabilities.

The independent film world has been in a self-proclaimed crisis mode for more than two years, and it’s a crisis that doesn’t seem to be abating anytime soon.

“It’s funny. When I was making Tiny Furniture, I always kind of did a sub par job with my paid job in order to do a good job with my own work. I’m too much of a jerk about my work to compromise on that,” Dunham explains. “I think the hard thing is moving back and forth between all the heads: You have to be in the writer mindset at the same time you have to be in the promoting-your-movie mindset at the same time you’re in the six-months-down-the-line mindset. That’s challenging, because that’s not an inborn skill I have.”

Dunham’s modestly sized bedroom contains little more than a bed, piles of books and DVDs and a few posters. I noticed that the poster for The Pleasure of Being Robbed hangs on one wall and find out Josh Safdie helped out on Creative Nonfiction. All these New York filmmakers seem to be acquainted with one another in some way.

For all of Dunham’s success, she still lives with her parents. “I made the choice to live with my family, originally, so I had time to make movies, so I didn’t have to get a major job, something 9-to-5,” she says. “Now, living here is a nice way to stay grounded.” Dunham pauses, then chuckles, recognizing how that comment might be misinterpreted. “When you’ve been doing something all day that is solitary—like writing, or stressful, like filmmaking—it’s nice to finish the day around people you feel very comfortable with.” Initially curious how these young, emerging filmmakers are able to cobble together a life while trying to create, I was impressed at how they navigated the city, the film industry and its myriad obstacles. All three of these filmmakers have at least one quality in common: gratitude, a thankfulness that they’ve been able to break through in an industry that is storied for its competitiveness. Of course, there’s always the chance that the industry will right itself and they’ll all be dumped back into the aggressive, personal, difficult world and work of the early ’90s. Maybe that’s exactly what the industry needs to revive itself. We may be fortunate enough to find out soon enough.