Hope Davis during shooting of the InDigEnt film Final. View Slideshow 
Independent filmmaking is a rough business. Of the more than 1,000 American independent features completed each year, only a handful reach theaters.
But a more pragmatic and sustainable production model for independent filmmakers may be emerging: the digital film studio.
Several companies in New York are attempting to use digital moviemaking tools to produce a steady stream of low-budget, profitable and arty feature films. In at least two cases -- Independent Digital Entertainment (or InDigEnt) and Blow Up Pictures -- the plan seems to be working.
InDigEnt, a production company founded by director Gary Winick, attorney John Sloss and producers Jonathan Sehring and Caroline Kaplan, has completed and sold seven features since 2000. Five of those films, including Richard Linklater's Tape and Ethan Hawke's Chelsea Walls, were released in theaters.
InDigEnt's latest offering, Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity, opens Friday in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
InDigEnt's process has as much in common with a Hollywood studio from the 1930s as with an independent production house. The company owns its own cameras and editing facilities, has fixed production budgets and a core creative staff, and produces an annual slate of films. One of last year's films was Winick's Tadpole, which was purchased by Miramax after a bidding war and released last July.
"The idea behind InDigEnt is to give experienced filmmakers an infrastructure, a way to work in the digital medium, to use (digital video) to tell stories," said Winick.
The words "infrastructure" and "independent film" aren't often heard in the same breath. The renegade, guerilla-style directors -- famous ones include John Cassavetes, Robert Rodriguez and the Blair Witch crew -- remain the icons of indie filmmaking. Risk seems an essential part of the game.
But the advent of affordable digital cameras and editing systems make that risk increasingly manageable.
Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente of Blow Up Pictures have produced, and sold at a profit, five digital feature films during the past three years, including Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing and Miguel Arteta's Chuck and Buck.
"We made Chuck and Buck for a half a million dollars," Kliot said. "If we had shot it on 35-mm film it would have cost $1.4 million. We sold it for $1.1 million -- a really good profit. But if we had shot on film we would have lost money."
Another innovative venture, Madstone Films, hires young film directors and produces their first features on digital video. The company's initial offering, Rhinoceros Eyes, is nearing completion.
Kliot calls films made by the "mini-majors" -- studio subsidiaries like Miramax, Fine Line and Focus -- "watered-down movies -- not films with a true independent vision." He thinks companies like Blow Up, InDigEnt and Madstone can give audiences something edgier, just as the Italian neorealist movement did in the late 1940s.
The neorealists, Kliot said, "ripped the cameras out of the studios, which were controlled by the fascists, and took them into the streets."
"When we started Blow Up, we said, 'We will be a studio,'" Kliot said. "We own the means of production. We'll produce our movies, finish them ourselves, finance them ourselves and give our directors final cut."
Blow Up and InDigEnt have survived and found a niche; other digital ventures have not. The production company Greene Street Films folded its digital filmmaking division. Next Wave Films and its Agenda 2000 production arm closed shop earlier this year.
So far, it seems, the digital studios are more anomaly than trend.
"We won't be dismantling the Hollywood studio system," Kliot said. "But I hope we can (be) an injection in the arm of independent filmmaking."
Danish for Digital Film: Dogme
