Tag: This Is What Love In Action Looks Like

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The 25 Best (and One Worst) Films of the 2010s

It was a decade of great change in the film industry, with the digital revolution disrupting both the production and distribution ends, and corporate consolidation increasing its stranglehold on the business end. But there was no shortage of great works from both Hollywood studios and independent producers. Here’s my list of the best of the decade. But first, the worst.

Worst Picture Of The Decade: Dracula Untold (2014)
No movie epitomized the brutal cynicism and rampant executive incompetence that plague Hollywood like this abortive retelling of the Dracula story. Stripped of the sex and body horror that gives the vampire myth its beating heart, this piece of extruded corporate product was meant to kick off a Marvel-style series based on the classic Universal monsters by ripping of the worst parts of the 1999 version of The Mummy. It failed, but they’re still trying to get that series started, most recently with Tom Cruise’s woeful remake of The Mummy. I feel like I never recovered from this deep hurting.

And now, the good films!

25. Short Term 12 (2013)
Dustin Daniel Cretton’s autobiographical story of his time working in a mental health treatment facility for teenagers is the quintessential festival hit of the decade. Its empathetically drawn characters are brought to life by a stellar cast, including debuts by Brie Larson, Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, and Lakeith Stanfield.

24. The Love Witch (2016)
Anna Biller’s cheeky tribute to Hammer horror is the ultimate DIY project. Biller wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film, while somehow also finding time to oversee the flawless production design, create the costumes, and write and perform the score. And did I mention she did the whole thing on 35mm film? In 2016!

23. The Social Network (2010)
Little did we know, in 2010, how big an impact Facebook would have on the coming decade. The final image of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film, with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) compulsively clicking refresh, predicts a humanity devoured by its own information creation. We’re living in that world now.

22. Carol (2015)
Todd Haynes’ immaculate adaptation of the 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt is anchored by a pair of incredible performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It’s as impeccably crafted as it is gorgeous and moving.

21. Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)
The 2010s were the decade when the real and the fake finally collapsed into each other. Banksy’s sole director credit bites the hand that feeds it by deconstructing the high end art world with the story of the rise and fall of Mr. Brainwash. The fact that it might have all been a giant hoax just makes it juicier.

20. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
Edgar Wright’s visually groundbreaking hero’s journey bob-ombed on release but gained a cult following over the decade as people discovered how much fun it is. Working from a graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Wright’s film is the first to see the world through the lens of a generation raised on video games.

19. Little Women (2019)
I figured Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird would land on this list until I saw her adaptation of Little Women. The ensemble cast of Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen as the four March sisters growing up in the shadow of the Civil War, supported by Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and a flinty Meryl Streep, combines with an expertly reimagined screenplay that brings out the contemporary themes in Louisa May Alcott’s novel.

Leonardo Dicaprio as Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth

18. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Quinten Tarantino’s sprawling epic of the death of the 1960s stubbornly refuses to be what you think it’s going to be. A Pulp Fiction take on the Manson murders? Nah, how about a buddy comedy with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as an aging TV star and his stuntman bestie.

This Is What Love In Action Looks Like

17. This Is What Love In Action Looks Like (2011)
Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary of the protest movement that shut down the ex-gay therapy program Love In Action was the best film made in Memphis this decade. What starts off as a raw and angry story evolves into a pean to understanding and acceptance when John Smid, the head of the operation imprisoning 16-year-old Memphian Zach Stark, resigns and comes out as gay himself. The film, seven years in the making, is a triumph of perseverance and feeling.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

16. Eighth Grade (2018)
Bo Burnham’s directorial debut is kind of a small and unassuming movie, but it is elevated to greatness by Elise Fisher’s stunning performance as a girl dealing with the last week of elementary school. Her Kayla is the poster child for the age of social media anxiety.

Sorry To Bother You

15. Sorry To Bother You (2018)
Imagine Brazil set in a call center and you’re in the ballpark of Boots Riley’s sci fi farce. There are so many memorable moments, like Lakeith Stanfield’s rap debut at a corporate party and Tessa Thompson’s ever-changing earrings that comment on the action.

Director Agnés Varda in Faces Places

14. Faces Places (2017)
Director Agnes Varda’s penultimate film was as iconoclastic as the rest of her 50-year career. She partnered with the street artist JR to roam the French countryside, meeting people and creating artworks that were both monumental and fleeting—kinda like life itself.

13. Black Panther (2018)
Ryan Coogler proved himself to be the master of genre this decade. He rose above the bland competence of the Marvel machine with the Shakespearian story of the struggle between T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) for the throne of Wakanda. But it wasn’t just the fact that we finally got a black superhero that made it great. Coogler’s film has more in common with classic swashbucklers like The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood than it does with modern product like Justice League.

12. Cameraperson (2016)
Kristen Johnson has spent her career traveling the world, shooting documentaries for other directors. She saved the best bits that were cut out of those films and pieced together this collage of tiny slices of her life on the road, from shepherds tending their flocks in war zones to rape victims telling stories of trauma.

11. Paterson (2016)
Adam Driver has emerged as one of the best American actors of his generation, and he is never better than playing a bus driver named Paterson in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. Driver is a shy poet in a dead end job who obsessively observes the people around him and loves his eccentric wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). The little advances and setbacks in his modest life are blown up to big drama in this life affirming masterpiece from the Mystery Train director.

10. Booksmart (2019)
Not since the Blues Brothers have we seen a comedy team as brilliant as Beanie Feldstien and Kaitlyn Dever in Booksmart. The inseparable best friends have spent their entire high school careers toeing the line and over-achieving. Now, in their last night before graduation, they want to party. Director Olivia Wilde’s perfect film is the best pure comedy of the decade.

9. Inherent Vice (2014)
Was Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film of the decade The Master or Phantom Thread? Nope, it was his little-seen Thomas Pynchon adaptation. The paranoid neo-noir loses the plot in amusing ways as private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) tries to unravel the intertwined mysteries of the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterson, never better) and a cabal of drug smuggling dentists known as the Golden Fang. Or maybe not. It’s complicated.

8. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Wes Anderson’s jewel box of a film sits on the poignant cusp between the death of the old world and the birth pains of the new. Ralph Finnes gives the performance of his life as M. Gustave, the greatest concierge in history, who defends the old hotel against the predations of time and encroaching fascism.

7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
In the era of Disney dominance, as the corporate stranglehold on the film industry tightened, it was rare to see a singular voice cut through as effectively as Rian Johnson’s did with the middle passage of the Star Wars sequel series. His story examines where the decades of myth-making have gotten us, and offers a vision of a more positive future while giving Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker the heroic sendoff he deserved—and one that very few people in the audience were ready for—while sacrificing none of the fun you expect from the blockbuster franchise.

6. Inside Out (2015)
Pixar dominated the animation of the 2000s, but this decade was more of a mixed bag for the studio. Inside Out is Pixar at its most sophisticated, both psychologically and visually. Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old girl whose life is thrown into chaos when her family moves to San Francisco. The real action takes place in her mind, where her personified emotions, led by Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) try to keep things in balance. Inside Out is a beautiful, and important, film.

Choi Woo-shik, Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, and Park So-dam as a family of grifters in Parasite.

5. Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon-ho’s savage take on class conflict is a perfect film whose reputation will only grow over time. The underclass in his vision of Seoul lives literally in basements, while the top of the economic caste live in constant anxiety and discontent, despite being surrounded by luxury. The twisty, darkly comic plot is kept grounded by a bevy of great performances, the best of which is Park So-dam as the con artisté daughter of a family of desperate grifters.

Yalitza Aparicio

4. Roma (2018)
Alfonso Cuarón’s black and white remembrance of Mexico City in the 1970s is one of the great technical and emotional triumphs of the decade. The director’s peerless vision (he became the only person in history to win both the Best Cinematographer and Best Director Oscars for the same picture) is brought to life with a stunning performance by Yalitza Aparicio, a former schoolteacher who earned a Best Actress nomination the first time she ever set foot in front of a camera.

3. (tie) Get Out (2017) / Us (2019)
I couldn’t decide which of Jordan Peele’s twin masterpieces to include on this list, so I copped out and went with both of them. To me, they feel like companion pieces. Get Out is like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a finely tuned, ruthlessly efficient machine. Us is more like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, an exploration of themes and images by a master artist trying to map the psyche of a nation. Both of them are horror films that transcend and transform the genre into something new and exciting.

Mahershala Ali in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

2. Moonlight (2016)
Barry Jenkins is not only one of the best visual stylists of decade, but also our greatest romantic. The three part story of Chiron, a child of Miami’s Liberty City ghetto, is told with three different actors in three different eras of his life. He’s poor, he’s black, and he’s gay, and the film’s focus is his struggle to reconcile the identities that have been placed upon him and become a whole person. Moonlight, a transcendent masterpiece by any measure, features a career-making performance by Mahershala Ali and the most memorable cross-dissolve in the history of cinema.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
“Who killed the world?” is the question that hangs over George Miller’s post-apocalyptic epic. Released a month before Donald Trump began his campaign for president, it points a finger straight at a patriarchal capitalism that sacrificed civilization and the ecosystem  for short term profit and control. But this is no polemical think piece—Fury Road also happens to be the greatest action films ever made. It’s a direct descendant of Buster Keaton’s The General; Miller described its simple structure as “a chase, then, a race”. The editing by Margaret Sixel will be studied for as long as humans make filmed entertainment. In 2017, Stephen Soderbergh, one of film’s greatest craftsmen, said to Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead…[Miller] is off the chart. I guarantee you that the handful of people who are even in range of that, when they saw Fury Road, had blood squirting out of their eyes.”

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Cover Feature News

Growing Up “Feral”

CREDIT: Breezy Lucia

On Monday, June 29th, an audience at the Malco Paradiso will get a sneak peek of the first two episodes of a new TV series made entirely in Memphis called Feral. A week later, the eight-episode first season will debut on tablets, iPhones, and the web via a new streaming network called Gaius.

Feral is significant, not only because of its beautiful cinematography, fluid editing, and passionate portrayal of young, gay people struggling to find love and meaning in a confusing world. It also represents the long-awaited return to the director’s chair of one of the most vital figures of Memphis independent cinema: Morgan Jon Fox.

“I felt like we were making something important,” Fox says. “I’ve never felt so proud of something I’d made.”

Digital Rebel

Thirteen years ago, Fox co-founded the Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative (MeDiA Co-op) in the basement of First Congregational Church. Fox had graduated from White Station High School, but then dropped out of the University of Tennessee and a film school in Vermont. He returned determined to change his hometown — and the world — through movies.

From Lars Von Trier to Craig Brewer, digital video was beginning to democratize the medium. Fox, bursting with ambition and still feeling the pain of coming out as a gay teenager in the conservative South, gathered a group of amateurs and wannabes, studied the intuitive acting techniques of Sanford Meisner and learned how to use digital camcorders and Final Cut Pro on the fly while making a film called Blue Citrus Hearts. Its emotional realism and raw energy found an audience, first at the 2003 Indie Memphis Film Festival, where it won Best Hometowner Feature, and then at festivals around the country, where it garnered fans — some prominent — for the hot young director.

His subsequent features, 2005’s Away (A)wake and 2007’s OMG/HaHaHa, expanded his vision and technique while remaining emotionally grounded in the experience of queer and outcast folks creating their own communities in Midtown.

The MeDiA Co-op was meanwhile serving as an incubator for Memphis’ burgeoning film scene, nurturing talent such as Kentucker Audley, Brett Hanover, Ben Siler, Alanna Stewart, and Katherine Dohan. If there is a “Memphis style” of filmmaking — emotional honesty, improvisational acting, graceful handheld camera work, and tight editing — it came from the Co-op.

In 2005, when teenager Zach Stark came out as homosexual to his parents and was locked away in a gay reparative therapy treatment program in Raleigh called Love in Action, Fox was brandishing his camera on the front lines of the protest movement that erupted on the sidewalks outside. During the six years Fox worked on a documentary about the incident, This Is What Love in Action Looks Like, the program was shut down, its head, John Smid, renounced his past and came out of the closet, and public opinion turned against the ex-gay movement.

The documentary’s success brought Fox international acclaim. In 2009, he began a long association with Craig Brewer when he served as assistant director and editor on the groundbreaking web/TV series $5 Cover. “It was Morgan and I who put that show together,” Brewer says. “We were learning about episodic entertainment at the same time. Morgan’s one of the best editors I’ve ever come across. There’s the technical part of editing, but then there’s character and story and the choices you make to tell the best story and give characters life. That’s where he’s strongest.”

Fox worked for Brewer and other directors, learning all aspects of filmcraft. “I essentially took six years off and went to film school,” he says. “But going to film school is clearly not the answer to making a great film. I learned so much about production, and about managing production, and story-building. But I also became a more stable and happy human being. I was able to look back at the kid who made Blue Citrus Hearts and the passion I had then. I was so ready — after not having made a narrative feature for five years — to make a film with that kind of love and passion.”

Fateful Phone Call

Last spring, Fox caught a break, in the form of a phone call from Derek Curl, a film executive whose company, TLA Releasing, distributes This Is What Love in Action Looks Like. “He said he was starting a new company that was going to be like a Netflix for LGBT content,” Fox says. “He wanted to have some original shows, like Netflix has Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.”

Curl asked Fox to create the new network’s flagship series. But there was a problem: Fox and his fiancé Declan Deely were leaving for an extended Ireland vacation in two days.

“He said, ‘Welp, I guess you’ve got about 24 hours to come up with something,'” Fox recalls. “Luckily, I had some stories I wanted to tell. I just had to figure out how to put it together appropriately. So within 24 hours, I put together two separate pitches, and they took one of them: Feral.

“It’s about this household of roommates in their early-to-mid-20s, trying to live together, trying to pay the rent, trying to be a part of an artistic queer community, and dealing with some really difficult emotional issues. It’s a story about love and losing love and recovering from that. It’s what I’ve always told stories about: sad queer kids trying to find hope.”

Fox wanted to combine his hard-won knowledge of filmcraft with the improvisational Co-op style he helped pioneer. “What was super important to me was to make something naturalistic. Those are the stories that impact me the most. But I think there’s a bad tendency nowadays, in shows like Girls and Looking. I love those shows, but they tend to be based on cynicism. There’s a lot of cynical, self-absorbed people on those shows. Now, my characters are self-absorbed, too. But I did not want it to be based in cynicism. I wanted my characters to have very pure motives. I wanted their struggles to be pure and honest in a way that wasn’t just, ‘I’m a spoiled rich person without meaning in my life.'”

Feral centers on two best friends, Billy and Daniel, living together in a Midtown bungalow. The story begins when they are forced to kick out their third roommate, who has become addicted to heroin. “They’re people who are left on their own, whether it’s financially, whether it’s identity, or whether their lovers are deceased. Whatever that is, they’re left to their own devices to carve their own way. They’re feral beings.”

Breezy Lucia

Morgan Jon Fox consults with cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker on a shot as sound man Brandon Robertson looks on

Gathering Forces

In his years as the go-to guy for Memphis film production, Fox established relationships with some of the city’s best talents. “There’s something about the Memphis scene,” he says. “We work together, we earn each other’s respect, so when we can develop a project that we’re really passionate about, people come to your aid.”

The first person he turned to was cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker. “He’s always been great, but the last couple of years, he’s just above the game,” Fox says. “He’s a master of light. I really respect him. And he’s fun to work with. If I’ve ever seen him stressed on a set we worked on together, it was all about the integrity of the image, as he would put it.”

Parker and Fox had worked together on a number of projects, including Mark Jones’ 2012 feature Tennessee Queer and Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s short The Department of Signs and Magical Intervention. “I knew he was just a brilliant filmmaker and a wonderful person,” Parker says. So when Fox called, Parker says he told him, “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to sell you on me.”

In designing the look of the series, Parker threw out the rule book. “How can we approach this differently? How can we throw away everything we know about lighting and filmmaking and start with a fresh set of eyes?”

Parker designed a camera setup that would allow them to shoot at “a ridiculously low light level.” The lighting design was done using on-set lighting such as laptop screens and LED strips. The question was always: “How can we light this as if we’re in the environment with them?”

The vast majority of the filming was done using handheld cameras. “[Fox] wants it to be very actor-centric, very mood-centric,” Parker says. “By going handheld, it allows me to be as much of an informant of the action as the actors. I can find the shot I think is best. I can get into tight areas a lot better, and we can work a lot faster. If it had been too static, it wouldn’t have had the same energy.”

Breezy Lucia

Jordan Nichols and Tristan Andre Parks as Hart films a scene

For the lead actors, Fox chose Seth Daniel Rabinowitz as Daniel and Jordan Nichols as Billy. As the son of Playhouse on the Square founder Jackie Nichols, Jordan Nichols was raised in the theater. But Nichols had never acted in film before. “I just told Morgan, if I’m ever giving you too much or not giving you enough, just let me know, so I can give you the product you want,” Nichols recalls.

One of Feral‘s strengths is its portrayal of depression, most prominently in the character of Carl, played by Ryan Masson. “When we were first talking about it, he expressed that he wanted to show it in a way that had not really been in the storytelling world before,” Masson says. “There’s no real cure-all for it, there’s no easy-button reasons for it. Sometimes, it’s just an inescapable, reasonless place that someone is in.”

Fox says the portrayal of a young man’s downward spiral was carefully constructed. “I wanted to define this character by avoiding mistakes that are made when portraying mental health issues. Instead of pushing something, I always want someone to draw back into themselves. As opposed to acting upset, I would rather you not know how to act upset.”

Breezy Lucia

Seth Daniel Rabinowitz and Brother

The New Car

“The first day [of shooting], I woke up late,” Fox recalls. Used to being the assistant director, always the first one to the set and the last one to leave, he panicked. But for the first time in his career, he had a full crew working for him. “We started shooting at like 5 a.m. I came into my kitchen, and craft services was already set up. I thought I was a filmmaker, but this was the first time I felt like I had become an adult. Not in a boring way. I felt pumped. Now I have a car, and I’m driving it!”

Shooting Feral took about a month. “The way Morgan shoots, he’s capturing honest moments from actual people, more so than an actor playing a character,” says gaffer Jordan Danelz. “The militaristic machine of moviemaking can’t apply to Morgan’s style of directing. It would make everything too sterile.”

Nichols says it was unlike anything else in his career. “Doing this series introduced me to a group of artistic people I didn’t know before. On set, the whole atmosphere was very collaborative. It felt like we were in it together.”

One of the best scenes happened between Nichols and Masson during a hazy dawn on the Greenline. “I lost track of the actors for a little while, and when they got back they had completely transformed into their characters,” Fox says. “When they sat down and started improvising, it immediately turned into this incredibly intense moment. It felt like they had known each other for 20 years. It was magic. I have never on a set in my life — mine or someone else’s — had an experience like that.”

Parker says Fox is an expert at creating a mood. “If you can set the tone right, and it’s married with great acting and great dialogue, that’s when things start to happen. This project is one of the few examples I have of all of these things coming together in the right environment to work. Everybody got on board, because it was Morgan, and we all trusted him.”

Growing Up Feral

Since the Digital Co-op days, Fox has always kept tight control of the editing. But Feral was a project of firsts, and he had help from editors Laura Jean Hocking and Ryan Azada. The ability to stretch out story lines and spend quality time with characters was a revelation in the post production process.

“I feel like episodic material plays to my strengths,” Fox says. “It felt so much nicer to make little episodes that I could contain. You can celebrate little moments a lot easier. There’s one episode where we take a break from the main narrative and just spend time with two characters. It lends depth to the story, but in a feature film, you probably couldn’t take the time to do that.”

Feral‘s musical lineup is headed by Memphis’ Lucero and includes songs by Nots, the Echo Friendly, DJ Witnesse, DBraker, Jeff Hulett, and newcomers Julien Baker and James Sarkisian. True to the Co-op’s DIY ethos, Sarkisian recorded his contributions on his iPhone in his college dorm room.

After months of editing and sound mixing, Fox says he couldn’t be more pleased with the product. “It all perfectly jelled,” he says. “The feedback has been really great. It makes me nervous.”

Breezy Lucia

Chase Brother and Nichols prepare for a shot

“It’s been a really long time since I’ve watched something I’ve worked on and had a real emotional reaction to it,” Danelz says. “I cried twice when watching Feral. It touched something in my own life. I hope people can see the potential Morgan has if given more money, more opportunity, and more room to grow.”

Nichols says Feral shows the city’s great untapped potential. “I’m glad this opportunity arose for Morgan, for myself, for the Memphis film scene in general. It presents Memphis in a great light, and it shines a light on a part of this city and the people here that the rest of the country hasn’t gotten a glimpse of.”

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Film Features Film/TV

The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.