For a small moment in Chris Smith's wry 1999 documentary, “American Movie,” Hollywood glamor seeps into the film's Wisconsin winter gloom. On a television, Billy Crystal monologued at the 1997 Oscars, a telecast that saw films like “Shine,” “Fargo,” “Secrets & Lies” and “Breaking the Waves” compete for major awards. “WHO are Your people?” Crystal bursts into a decent-sized laugh from an industry crowd unaccustomed to such scruffy indieness.
Mark Borchardt, floppy-haired, divorced and on the cusp of 30, watches from his mother's couch, exhausted but somehow absorbed and not exhausted. He's the only one in the movie who dreams the big dream: At first he wanted to write, direct and star in a personal-sounding drama called “Northwestern.” Now, the budding auteur has focused on making the horror movie that he really has in his bones, “Coven” (which he mispronounces in a way that he rhymes with “fabric”). Borchardt is spectacularly lacking in talent. It doesn't matter. Seeing his eyes shine, you want “Coven” to happen.
The 1999 project
All year long we will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the pop culture milestones that remade the world as we knew it then and created the world we live in now. Welcome to the Los Angeles Times' 1999 Project.
“American Movie,” which premiered 25 years ago this week at the Sundance Film Festival, took Borchardt’s aspirations and transformed them into something more evocative, crystallizing the moment when independent films stormed the gates of Hollywood castle. It's worth returning to Crystal's monologue, in which she flippantly calls that year's Oscars “Sundance by the Sea.” The idea that such interlopers would ever dominate the movie industry's big night seemed mildly amusing to him then; Now, the moment is full of irony.
Mark's bookshelf groans under the weight of self-taught zeal: scripts by Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh; “Notes” by Eleanor Coppola, about her husband’s calamitous filming of “Apocalypse Now”; several crumpled studies by Hitchcock and Kubrick. John Pierson's popular 1996 “Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes” would soon be published, chronicling the rise of independent outsiders, making their journeys seem replicable by anyone, you or me. (Pierson, along with power brokers John Sloss and Micah Green, would eventually turn “American Movie” into a hot property.)
Bill Borchardt (Mark's uncle) and Mark Borchardt in “American Movie.”
(Sony Pictures Classics)
But Mark doesn't fit the mold. As busy as he may seem, recruiting family and friends for his plans (including his best friend, the late Mike Schank, a man burned out on acid), the next Martin Scorsese is not expected to talk with a loud Milwaukee honk or work. a daily job vacuuming a cemetery.
That was part of the cleverness of the documentary. Smith and her co-producer Sarah Price, who, as a two-person team, began following the “Coven” team, had a hunch that the real story wouldn't be on the page. The relentless affinity of young hopefuls at Sundance had begun and that was material enough. With thousands of dollars in debt, Mark fears he is a “nothing.” His desperation turns the film into a paradox: a moving tragedy touched by gentle indulgence.
Before “American Movie,” the anti-genius genre was already booming. Tim Burton's “Ed Wood” from 1994 remains a milestone for its director, always more comfortable in the gothic company of the misunderstood. (That film's writing team, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, had another film in those strange 1997 Oscars, “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”) And we can look back to decades of reality television to find countless examples of the magnetism of the least. -how-gifted.
Call it dark fate, then, that “American Movie” found itself at Sundance, where Borchardt's dream of discovery came true, but for someone else. Grossing nearly $250 million worldwide, “The Blair Witch Project” was homemade horror at its most concentrated and inventive. It turned Sundance into a genre launching pad unlike anything seen before. It was basically “Coven” done right.
Mark Borchardt, right, and Mike Schank in the 1999 Sundance documentary “American Movie.”
(Bluemark Productions)
The two films are remarkably similar in strategies and potency. “The Blair Witch Project” is, at its core, a story of sad obsession: a headlong rush toward an enchanted forest by a dreamer who hasn't fully thought about it. The doomed characters turn the camera on themselves, hinting at the meta to come. (1999 would be as meta as the years.) Meanwhile, “American Movie” suggests a dark horror in the distinctly indie myth of the new and hot. Borchardt's status at the end of the film is vindicated and it's a disaster. To date she still has not finished “Northwestern.” He may be lost in his own forest.
There is a dream and a nightmare in “American Movie.” How much did it cost Mark to make “Coven”? – And that is one of the reasons why he still feels important. Since then, director Smith has found a rich vein of self-deception in many of the projects that followed: 2019's “Fyre,” the most harrowing account of that fake festival's implosion; The first pandemic comfort watch of 2020, “Tiger King”; and “Bad Vegan” from 2022 are all his. He has a new film at Sundance this year, “Devo,” about the iconic new wave band.
I hope Mark Borchardt is okay. I hope his three children, now adults, are also well. Laugh at him if you must, as Crystal did, from a studio that was already falling apart. But both “Coven,” a disaster, and “The Blair Witch Project,” a box-office hit, expressed the same longing for authenticity that has fueled – plagued? – the industry since then. And success, whatever that would mean in the new millennium, was a changing metric.
The “Coven” cast, from left, Miriam Frost, Mark Borchardt, Robert Richard Jorge, Sheri Beaupre and Tom Schimmels in “American Movie.”
(Sony Pictures Classics)
