Listen to the full interview above
When I was at Sundance last month, there was a renewed hope in the idea of building something new from the ashes of Hollywood — particularly as big tech swallows the industry and courts the favor of an authoritarian president.
“We need a nondependent, separate ecosystem that’s not beholden to the people who actually censor, to the people who actually deprive aesthetic exploration,” legendary producer Ted Hope tells me on this week’s Rushfield Lunch.
“We’re still selling this myth that there will be a golden elevator up, and only four films get bought (at Sundance). What’s it for? It’s for the people who want to do that horrible act of taking advantage of the artist. It’s all a metaphor. What has happened to our country is happening to our culture.”
Enter nondependent film, or NonDē film, a term Ted coined that is catching on, representing a new potential system outside the traditional studios.
Ted comes to this conversation with good authority. He co-founded the production company Good Machine in the 1990s and produced three (three!) Grand Jury Prize winners at the Sundance Film Festival (2003’s American Splendor, 1995’s The Brothers McMullen and 1994’s What Happened Was…). He’s also widely credited with helping to create the vibrant FilmStack community (see our event at Sundance).
“We were just throwing around the word ‘indie,’” Ted says, explaining how he came upon the term “NonDē” for the future of the indie sphere. “It was kind of akin to what happened in the ’90s, when ‘alternative’ came to be an all-encompassing term and nobody felt the need to police it, [yet] it came to mean nothing. Indie film, being so non-independent, really started getting under my skin. And I like playing with words.”
The rest is history.
Listen to the conversation above for more from Ted, and make sure to subscribe to his indispensable Substack.
