Betting That Witching Hour Will Come Again

With breakout independent film successes last year like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Dogma,” companies like Artisan Entertainment, USA Films and the smaller Lions Gate are hoping to build on their success in 2000 and become major players in the minor leagues of independent film distributors.

Artisan made a huge leap forward last year with “The Blair Witch Project,” which gave the company the kind of credibility in the financial and distribution communities that “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” did for New Line and “Scream” accomplished for Miramax. Among its ventures for the current year are one of two planned sequels to “Blair.”

USA Films, which merged Gramercy Pictures and October Films, had a critical and box-office success with “Being John Malkovich” and is releasing films both companies had in the can, as well as the first of its own productions.

Buoyed by the success of “Dogma,” its first nationwide release, Lions Gate has a number of other wide-release titles, including “American Psycho,” based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel.

But the indie slate for 2000 is, as always, incomplete until the Sundance, Berlin and Cannes film festivals fatten up their release schedules. As usual, there are planned British- or Australian-made releases, a smattering of other foreign titles, some medium-budgeted American films boasting recognizable names, and a few foreign-language titles, though most independents have either abandoned or severely cut back on subtitled fare. Sony Pictures Classics is the notable exception.

The thriller genre will be strongly represented among the independents. Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning writer of “The Usual Suspects,” earns his directing stripes with the kidnapping thriller “The Way of the Gun” (Artisan), due for release in late summer. Paramount Classics has the political thriller “Deterrence” starring Kevin Pollak and Timothy Hutton this winter, which will also see Artisan offer Roman Polanski’s occult suspense film “The Ninth Gate” starring Johnny Depp. Artisan also has “Pi” director Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up film, “Requiem for a Dream,” starring Ellen Burstyn, which will surface in early summer, and later “Soul Survivors,” starring “American Beauty’s” Wes Bentley. USA has an outer-space thriller, “Pitch Black,” due in February, featuring Australian-born actress Radha Mitchell, last seen in “High Art.”

Come Halloween there’ll be “Blair Witch 2,” a sequel to last year’s monster hit. (“Blair Witch 3,” due in 2001, will actually be a prequel.) Artisan won’t be alone on the horror movie front as Lions Gate is planning a fall release for “Shadow of the Vampire,” in which John Malkovich plays legendary German director F.W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe is German actor Max Schreck, who was the director’s star in “Nosferatu.” The twist is that in this version, Schreck is a real vampire playing a vampire.

“Soul Survivors” is just one of the many films--not all of them thrillers--that will pit fantasy against reality. In spring there’ll also be “Passion of Mind” (Paramount Classics) starring Demi Moore, and the Australian “Me Myself I” (Sony Classics) starring Rachel Griffiths, in which both actresses imagine different lives.

For comedy, Lions Gate will offer “The Big Kahuna,” about lubricant salesmen played by Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito, due in the spring. The first of USA’s productions, “One Night at McCool’s,” a wry drama starring Matt Dillon and Liv Tyler, will appear toward year’s end. USA also has a British comedy about the early days of punk called “Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?”

“Woman on Top” is Fox Searchlight’s English-language romantic comedy starring Penelope Cruz, for spring; Screen Gems will release James Toback’s “Black & White,” starring Robert Downey Jr., about white wannabe rappers; and Sony Classics has the Alan Rudolph film-noir comedy “Trixie,” starring Nick Nolte and Emily Watson, due for the summer.

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Hollywood is always a target for silliness, and in August, Fine Line will release David Mamet’s “State and Main,” starring Alec Baldwin and Philip Seymour Hoffman, which deals with what happens in a Vermont town when a film crew lands in its midst. John Waters has his own take on the movie business with “Cecil B. Demented,” about a group of indie filmmakers who kidnap a major Hollywood star, featuring Stephen Dorff and Melanie Griffith. It’s due in late summer or early fall.

On the non-English-language front, one of the major curiosities should be the fall release of Ang Lee’s Chinese-language action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Sony Classics), starring Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. The other is Lars Von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” (Fine Line), a fantasy musical due at year’s end starring rock singer Bjork (who wrote all the music), Catherine Deneuve and David Morse. And “oddity” is a suitable description for Bhutan’s Oscar entry, “The Cup” (Fine Line), due at the end of the this month in the U.S. It’s a comedy about Buddhist monks obsessed with soccer’s World Cup.

Deneuve will surface early this year in the French drama “East-West” (Sony Classics). Oscar winner Juliette Binoche stars in Andre Techine’s latest, “Alice and Martin” (USA), coming out in summer. Sony Classics is also planning to release Zhang Yimou’s next film, “Not One Less,” which won the grand prize in Venice last year. Peter Greenaway’s latest, “8 1/2 Women” (Lions Gate), also replete with nudity, has secured an R from the Motion Picture Assn. of America as well.

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There will be no NC-17 for “American Psycho” (Lions Gate) either, despite the graphic, horrifying nature of the novel. Starring Christian Bale as a yuppie homicidal maniac, the April release is described as a “smart, funny film.” Come spring, another popular novel, “The Virgin Suicides” (Paramount Classics), directed by Sofia Coppola and starring James Woods, comes to the screen.

Independent films don’t fit into one genre, and writer-director Neil LaBute’s (“The Company of Men”) movies seem to be a genre all their own. Next up for LaBute is “Nurse Betty” (USA), starring Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman, due out this summer. USA also has Stanley Tucci’s ‘40s New York drama “Joe Gould’s Secret,” due in spring, starring Susan Sarandon. Eclectic Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (Artisan), set for release in February, stars Forest Whitaker. And Philip Kauffman’s “Quills” will take a look at the world of the Marquis de Sade with a cast featuring Kate Winslet and Geoffrey Rush.

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Richard Natale is a frequent contributor to Calendar.