If you want to know how to make a successful feature film from scratch, read Robert Rodriguez’s book Rebel Without a Crew. Written in a droll Texan drawl, it is one of the most inspiring books on filmmaking ever written, bristling with the desire to demystify, inspire and enable all those wishing to have a crack at Hollywood.
The book documents how Rodriguez financed his 1992 debut by volunteering as a human lab rat at a medical research facility in Austin, Texas. He planned to shoot a Spanish-language film and sell it to the Mexican home-video market for $15,000, then use the proceeds to make two more films and assemble a demo reel to persuade Hollywood to let him make a “real” movie. With 90 per cent of his budget going on film stock and processing, Rodriguez imposed a one-take rule and found workarounds for mistakes in the edit.
Once he had a trailer, Rodriguez decided to chance his hand by showing it to International Creative Management (ICM), one of Hollywood’s leading talent agencies. The agents were astonished by what he had made for less than $7,000. Columbia Pictures then acquired the film, spending a small fortune on post-production and marketing before releasing it theatrically in 1993. El Mariachi subsequently grossed more than $2 million worldwide and earned a place in Guinness World Records as the lowest-budget film to make $1 million at the US box office, a record that still stands.
Sadly, anyone emboldened to follow in Rodriguez’s footsteps today will find themselves operating in a different world. For starters, online streaming long ago rendered the lucrative Mexican straight-to-video market completamente muerto.
However, over the past fifteen years, creators have been bypassing traditional gatekeepers by building audiences on YouTube and TikTok. The internet has in turn given the entertainment industry a new hunting ground, allowing it to soar above billions of hours of online content like a digital turkey vulture, before swooping down to transform cultural capital into intellectual property.
The collateral damage caused by this shift could be independent cinema. Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s insurgent movement Dogme 95 helped legitimise a raw aesthetic that paved the way for Mumblecore and the lo-fi sensibility that informs modern classics like Tangerine (2015), The Beasts (2022) and The Zone of Interest (2023).
If Hollywood simply starts buying the creative energy generated at the margins, rather than allowing these movements to evolve in their own time, the danger is that it will starve the very ecosystem that produces outliers like von Trier and Vinterberg.
Two recent films illustrate the status quo from very different directions: Kane Parsons’s Backrooms and Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. One emerged from a flourishing online subculture; the other from independent cinema and queer culture. What connects them is Hollywood’s growing ability to identify cultures alien to it, and recruit insiders to let it in through the back door.
Parsons was barely out of his teens when his nine-minute film, The Backrooms (Found Footage), attracted seven million views in a 48-hour viral surge back in January 2022. The Backrooms originated on 4chan in May 2019, when a user invited others to post “disquieting images that just feel off”. One posted a blurry photograph of an empty, yellow-lit commercial interior. Another comment suggested you might “noclip” (which translates as “pass through solid objects”, in video-game parlance) into an endless maze of empty rooms, where something lurks nearby. That spawned a glut of user-generated lore which spiralled exponentially within hours of the original post.
Parsons eventually pitched his vision to A24 after being scouted by 21 Laps Entertainment. A24’s backing propelled Backrooms to the top of Box Office Mojo’s worldwide chart, leaving Hollywood’s other major players scouring the internet like prospectors during the California Gold Rush, scrambling to stake a claim on audiences and ideas that have developed beyond their reach.
But Parsons was not simply a young director with a horror film to make. He was a portal to an existing world, a fandom and the community accumulated around them. By giving him the means to make a feature on a much bigger scale, A24 gained access to an otherwise inaccessible culture through a creative plasma exchange. It was a win-win: Parsons got to make his film, while A24 got a cellular reset.
Schoenbrun’s route was very different. They emerged through independent film culture, driven by obsessive cinephilia and a determination to make films on their own terms. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow showcased an authentic voice shaped by online alienation, horror, adolescence and queer experience. Schoenbrun was far from a packaged figurehead; they were the product of years of creative labour and an intimate relationship with the material.
Why, then, did MUBI step in to finance and distribute a $10 million queer, anti-corporate IP satire, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, when all the major studios and distributors had passed? Because it helped elevate its status as – forgive the reduplication – an arthouse powerhouse. And when Schoenbrun went on to win the Cannes Queer Palm and receive broad critical acclaim, all the risk-averse Hollywood studios could do was eat their dust.
Ironically, MUBI could still be accused of engaging in a form of cultural acquisition, even though it backed what the mainstream rejected. But if it gives authentic voices the room they need to grow, perhaps that is just the price of doing business.
What struck me about Schoenbrun’s film is its extraordinary circularity. They were hired to make a film about a filmmaker hired to exploit the very culture they represent. I get a headache trying to work out who wins that one.
A studio recruits queer filmmaker Kris Williams to revive a horror franchise with a transphobic legacy, wishing to use her credibility and audience to access a culture it cannot convincingly represent on its own terms.
But Kris turns out to be a complicated human being rather than a neatly packaged marketing proposition. In one cringe-inducing Zoom call, her chaotic creative process horrifies executives more accustomed to working with seasoned industry professionals. The scene brilliantly exposes the gulf between high-end production and the instincts of a young, truth-seeking filmmaker. It is very funny. Unfortunately, it sits at odds with the rest of the film, whose narrative jumps about like a bag of rabbits. At times it feels like a musical with the songs taken out that does not know if it wants to be Carrie or The Wizard of Oz. But even so, it is still pretty wild.
Parsons and Schoenbrun represent two different forms of cultural acquisition. In both cases, the industry can buy access. But it will never be able to buy the creative freedom and cultural energy that brought those respective worlds into existence.
Surprisingly, there was a brief period when Hollywood gave outsiders the freedom to make something genuinely unhinged. Producer Bert Schneider, a central figure in New Hollywood, helped create the conditions for filmmakers to challenge the industry from within. Easy Rider was not the result of a studio commission building a rebellion film around a carefully vetted countercultural representative. It was an untidy, chaotic mess, made by people whose sensibilities had old studio heads choking on their stogies.
Letting Dennis Hopper direct Easy Rider really was like giving a gorilla a machine gun. Today, if a studio wants to hand a gorilla a machine gun, it leaves the safety on and places sharpshooters on the rooftops.
El Mariachi falls somewhere between Hopper’s chaotic rebellion and Parsons’s algorithmic harvesting. The crucial difference is intent. Rodriguez was a natural-born showman who used his $7,000 film as a Trojan horse to break into the studio system. Parsons, by contrast, says he never intended The Backrooms (Found Footage) to be a proof of concept for Hollywood. It was a creative experiment exploring the strangeness of liminal spaces. Rodriguez broke the door down. Parsons went viral.
The real question for the next generation is whether creators who built independent worlds for the sheer love of the subculture can absorb that sort of studio money without losing the unruly instincts that made them worth buying in the first place.
If that is what happens, Backrooms and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma could become Hollywood roadkill: evidence of the industry’s ability to find something alive beyond its borders, drag it under the juggernaut and risk flattening it in the process.
The good news, in case you were worried, is that the spirit of Dennis Hopper is still alive and well, threatening people with guns and stealing cans of celluloid. Only now, instead of haunting the dive bars of late-sixties Hollywood Boulevard, he has translocated to the unknowable, rhizomatic jungle of fan-driven online chat rooms.
Unfortunately for Dennis, A24 will see to it he never gets out – unless someone pays a large ransom.
