Inside/Outside

CBS Cable show about independent movies.

00:55Copy video clip URL Footage of Hollywood, including Mann’s Chinese Theater and the Cheateau Marmont. A billboard for Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981). 

01:16Copy video clip URL An interview with filmmaker Shirley Clarke: “I think the thing that’s bothering most of us is that we keep feeling pushed and pushed and pushed more into making a certain kind of film. Okay you can make documentaries and that’s gonna be allowed. And then if you want to make one or two personal films we’ll allow you to do that. And there’s a whole history of wonderful filmmakers who’ve done it. And then you better go the trip which is, basically, making a commercial movie mostly with the intent to sell.” 

01:47Copy video clip URL Narration about Clarke and footage of her films The Cool World (1963), The Connection (1962), and Portrait of Jason (1967).

04:16Copy video clip URL Clarke discusses “giving up” due to not being able to make a living as a filmmaker. 

04:37Copy video clip URL Douglas Holloway talks about only being able to break into the industry by making a film himself. Discussion of and footage from his film Fast Money (1981), about drug smugglers in Texas. 

06:10Copy video clip URL Mike Nolan, from 20th Century Fox, discusses with Holloway his decision to decline to buy Fast Money due to technical inadequacies. Holloway later reflects on the difficulties of breaking and the ways that studios waste money without giving new artists a chance. 

08:03Copy video clip URL Eagle Pennell discusses his film The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978). Footage from the film. 

10:18Copy video clip URL Pennell discusses the exhausting production and logistics of independent filmmaking and his brief time in Hollywood, when problems with drugs led to him losing his contract with Universal, who told him he’d “never work in Hollywood again.” 

11:53Copy video clip URL Jim McBride discusses his difficulties following up his low-budget independent feature David Holzman’s Diary (1967). Footage from the film. McBride details his efforts to raise small budgets to make subsequent films and his many unproduced screenplays. He mentions Breathless among them, a remake of the Jean-Luc Godard film that he would eventually film. 

17:28Copy video clip URL Yvonne Rainer discusses working outside of Hollywood on minimal budgets. Footage from Lives of Performers (1972). The growing audience for challenging films like the ones she makes. 

20:47Copy video clip URL Mark Rappaport, a filmmaker like Rainer who relies on grants to fund his movies. Footage from his film Mozart in Love (1975) and The Imposters (1979). The lack of a system of support for independent filmmakers in America, unlike in other countries. “I’m tired of making films this way. I really feel that you’re really just re-inventing the wheel every time you go up to bat, to mix metaphors here.” 

23:08Copy video clip URL Interview with Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, and Allan Holzman about working for Roger Corman. Dante: “If you really care, and you’re really willing to kill yourself and work real hard, you can get somewhere…. If you give Roger the things that he wants, which are exploitable elements that he knows he can sell–” Arkush: “You have to do the genre film, though. When he says the genre that you’re in, you really gotta do that part of it really well. So if it’s a car chase movie, you gotta do the car chases really well. And if it’s a horror picture you gotta give him all the horror stuff. What you do in between then relies on yourself and whatever you come up with.”

24:00Copy video clip URL Holzman, an experienced film editor, discusses his first directorial effort for Corman, Forbidden World (1982), then titled Mutant. Holzman talks about Corman approaching him with an opportunity to use standing sets from another production for five shooting days to make a feature that Corman wants to be “like Lawrence of Arabia in space.” 

24:40Copy video clip URL Dante talks about making Piranha (1978) and the difficulties in devising a story that could logically include the requisite number of piranha attacks required by Corman: “You had to have a piranha attack every ten minutes, and it got to be extremely difficult to try to justify having a piranha attack every… How come people don’t know about this?! Why doesn’t somebody tell someone?!” Footage from the film. 

25:07Copy video clip URL Arkush discusses Rock’n’Roll High School (1979), which began as a project that Corman had titled “Girls’ Gym”: “‘That means you want a lot of girls in a gym, literally.’ I said that and he said, ‘That’s right. You can do anything else you want.’ I said, ‘Can I blow up the high school?’ And he said, ‘Ooh that’s a good idea!'”

25:45Copy video clip URL John Sayles discusses writing and directing an independent feature, Return of the Seaaucus Seven (1979), after years of writing screenplays for Corman. Footage from the film. “There are stories that will never get told on film unless independent filmmakers make them. There are subjects that will never be treated in a certain depth unless independent filmmakers do it. That’s just… You know, Hollywood is nice but it’s Chinatown.” 

28:01Copy video clip URL End of tape.