LOS ANGELES — For a tiny moment in Chris Smith’s wry 1999 documentary “American Movie,” Hollywood glamour seeps into the film’s wintry Wisconsin gloom. On a TV set, Billy Crystal monologues at the 1997 Oscars, a broadcast that saw the likes of “Shine,” “Fargo,” “Secrets & Lies” and “Breaking the Waves” jockeying for major awards. “Who are you people?” Crystal cracks to a decent-sized laugh from an industry crowd unaccustomed to so much scruffy indieness.
Mark Borchardt, lank-haired, divorced and on the cusp of 30, watches from his mother’s couch, exhausted but somehow rapt and not depleted. He’s the only one in the film dreaming the big dream: At first, he wanted to write, direct and star in a personal-sounding drama called “Northwestern.” Now, the budding auteur has pivoted to making the horror flick that’s really in his bones, “Coven” (which he mispronounces in a way that rhymes with “woven”). Borchardt is spectacularly untalented. It doesn’t matter. Seeing his eyes shine, you want “Coven” to happen.
“American Movie,” which premiered 25 years ago this week at the Sundance Film Festival, took Borchardt’s aspirations and shaped them into something more suggestive, crystallizing the moment when independent features were storming the gates of the Hollywood castle. It’s worth returning to Crystal’s monologue, in which he glibly calls that year’s Oscars “Sundance by the Sea.” The idea that such interlopers would ever dominate the film industry’s big night seemed mildly amusing to him then; now, the moment drips with irony.
Mark’s bookshelf groans under the weight of an autodidactic’s zeal: scripts by Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh; “Notes” by Eleanor Coppola, about the calamitous shooting of her husband’s “Apocalypse Now”; several creased studies of Hitchcock and Kubrick. Soon to be published would be John Pierson’s popular 1996 “Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes,” which chronicled the rise of indie outsiders, making their journeys seem replicable by anyone, you or me. (Pierson, along with power reps John Sloss and Micah Green, would eventually turn “American Movie” itself into a hot property.)