Cinema: Lights! Camera! Pittsburgh!

Here comes independent regional cinema

Camelot is alive and well, on motorcycles—in Pittsburgh. The redneck revenge movie has found a new hero—in Shelby, N.C. Teen-age actors play at deadly gang wars—in Boston. The radical political spirit of the northern frontier is put on film—in Crosby, N. Dak. A company of actors turn 30, and another young man makes a movie about it—in North Conway, N.H. Tab Hunter and a 300-lb. transvestite named Divine enact a suburban passion play—in Baltimore.

The directors who made these films didn't go "on location." Most of them live where they work: on their own, away from the Hollywood movie machine. They are evidence that independent regional cinema—the hope of every film maker with big ideas and a tiny budget—is beginning to achieve the vitality and clout of America's burgeoning regional theater. George A. Romero's Knightriders (Pittsburgh) opened last week to a flurry of critical raves. Earl Owensby (Shelby), who built himself the largest single film studio outside Los Angeles, announces in Variety that Living Legend, which he produced and starred in, has grossed $11,284,028. John Waters (Baltimore), who earned a cult reputation with the fecally funky Pink Flamingos, is going respectably R rated with Tab Hunter and Polyester. John Sayles' no-budget comedy, Return of the Secaucus 7 (North Conway), has earned $1.2 million in small theaters around the country. And a group of ornery independents have organized to show their films in a Manhattan art house. Viewers who might otherwise catch Caveman will discover 17 fiction features and documentaries, including John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's painterly Northern Lights (Crosby) and Jan Egleson's vivid The Dark of the Street (Boston), featuring a curly-haired charmer named Laura Harrington. Good, bad or just different, regional cinema may be here to stay.

In fact, the film makers share little more than the ambition to get their movies seen and a compulsion to do it their way, without the meeting-taking and compromises of the Hollywood scene. Most of the 17 films being distributed by First Run Features were financed, at least in part, by state or federal arts agencies. The government can hold the independent director in a grip as tight as any old-line studio chiefs, but without those grants the films might not be made. With the Reagan Administration planning to halve its funding of the arts and humanities endowments, these film makers must seek capital from private sources and from the public; hence the new theatrical showcases. Other artist-entrepreneurs raised money without feeding at the government teat. John Sayles wrote horror-movie scripts; Earl Owensby sold industrial supplies; George Romero shot sports profiles and TV commercials.