INDEPENDENTS HONOR THEIR OWN

It was a suitably casual precursor to tonight’s Academy Awards, with hardly a black tie or TV camera in sight.

But to the film makers in attendance, Saturday’s annual Friends of Independents awards luncheon brought welcome acknowledgment of a pursuit not all that different from the one being saluted tonight.

The hosting Independent Feature Project/West, an informational support group claiming about 800 film makers as members, this year was joined by Filmex, which presented prizes in its first-ever independent feature competition.

The Findie award (pronounced finn- dee) itself gives a good idea of what independent film making is all about: It is a shoestring--as in shoestring budget --painted to look like a strip of film and encased in acrylic.

In Hollywood, where low-budget movies start at seven digits and a star’s salary can exceed the GNP of some developing nations, it’s difficult to imagine somebody making a high-quality film on money borrowed from Uncle Stu.

But the 16 independent film makers in the Filmex competition know better.

Each brings to the art of film making the unlikely combination of visual storytelling and professional arm-twisting, the ability to scrape together “less than a million dollars and more than $3,” as one film maker put it, to get his or her work before the public.

One of them, Nell Cox, walked away with the Grand Prix prize for her film “The Roommate,” written by Neal Miller and produced by Miller and Richard Mellman.

Also honored were “Before Stonewall,” directed by Greta Schiller and co-directed by Robert Rosenberg, as best nonfiction film and “Before and After,” directed by Aziz Ghazal and written by Rebecca and Aziz Ghazal, in the fiction category.

Findies, issued immediately after the Filmex prizes, went to Island Alive, the distributor of such films as “Choose Me” and the Filmex opener, “A Private Function”; and to Glen Glenn Sound, Cineplex Theatres U.S.A. and PBS’ “American Playhouse.” All were cited for their generous support of independent film making.

“Ten years ago there were only three or four of us out there,” independent film maker (“Purple Haze”) and Independent Feature Project/West President Victoria Wozniak said between bites of duck salad at 385 North, site of the awards luncheon. The chic surroundings and attendance of about 100--including Independent Feature Project advisory board member David Puttnam, whose “The Killing Fields” is up for best picture tonight--attested to how far the American independent movement has grown.

The gathering also hinted at how close the independents are to the Hollywood mainstream.

“Most of us are very story-oriented,” said Teresa Sparks, writer-director of the coming-of-age film “Over the Summer.” “A film is a piece of art, but if it’s not seen, it’s not completed.”

“One of the things that IFP does is tell people it’s a business, so if you want your film to be seen, you have to give it a broad enough base,” Wozniak added.

Works such as “The Roommate,” a sort of college-age “Odd Couple,” are not experimental or avantgarde so much as they are small films that don’t quite fit into the Hollywood concept of what can be mass-marketed.

“I think of our films like restaurants,” said Andrew Silver, writer-director of the romantic whodunit “Return.” “What the studio system wants is a McDonald’s or a Burger King, not a specialty restaurant.”

Kathleen Dowdey, whose “Blue Heaven” is a fictional look at middle-class wife-beating, learned from one brief encounter with a major studio that she would have to make her film independently. “We were told that we should have had the woman shoot the man at the end of the picture,” she recounted before the luncheon.

In many cases, the film makers are also first-time feature film directors who wouldn’t be given the chance to make a film unless they raised the funds themselves. “Roommate” writer-producer Neal Miller, who also directed another film in competition, “Under the Biltmore Clock,” said he had “many careers--computer science, management consulting and venture capital.” It was not until a few years ago in his late 40s that “I became insane and started making films.”

Cox said she has directed episodes of “Falcon Crest” and other TV series but has yet to get a crack at a studio film. But she seemed representative of the independents in her optimism about her method of pursuing her craft. “There’s a difference in attitudes between people who grew up in the film industry. We (independents) are more aware of alternatives.”