da: The New York Times
“IT is time to blow the whole thing up.” In September 1960, when those words were lobbed at the world by a New York-centric, off-Hollywood circle of malcontents called the New American Cinema Group, there was no mistaking their radical urgency. Given the cold war times — one of the first large ban-the-bomb rallies had been held in Madison Square Garden some months earlier — this call to annihilation might have seemed tasteless. But for this group, whose numbers included the film critic, later filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the not-yet-director Peter Bogdanovich, the time for a free American cinema, one rooted in personal vision and liberated from censorship and the distribution and exhibition strangleholds, was now. The time may have come once more. In the last few years American independent cinema has been rocked by seismic changes — including downsized companies and emerging technologies — that have altered this world more profoundly since 1993, the year that the Walt Disney Company bought Miramax Films. In the ensuing years the other major studios followed suit (Sony already had a boutique with Sony Pictures Classics), building specialty divisions, snapping up talent and writing bigger and bigger checks. It was an industry shift that soon resulted in a studio-indie infrastructure that had its own auteurs as well as its own producers, agents, lawyers, managers, publicists, festival programmers and…