Indiewood, USA ─ Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema

Indiewood is the place where Hollywood and the American independent sector meet, where lines blur and two very different kinds of cinema come together in a striking blend of creativity and commerce. This is an arena in which innovative, sometimes challenging cinema reaches out to the mainstream. Or, alternatively, a zone of duplicity and compromise in which the ‘true’ heritage of the indie sector is co-opted as an offshoot of Hollywood.

Indiewood is the first book to provide objective analysis of this distinctive region of the contemporary American film landscape. Case studies include the work of Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman and Steven Soderbergh and the output of the studio "specialist" divisions Miramax and Focus Features.

From the stylized violence and cult film referencing of Kill Bill to the literary resonances of Shakespeare in Love and from the mind-bending scripts of Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to Soderbergh’s Traffic and Solaris, Geoff King examines the way Indiewood features combine mainstream with more unconventional features in an attempt to have it both ways: to remain accessible while offering markers of distinction designed to appeal to more particular, niche-audience constituencies.