1999: The Year That Changed Movies

Naturally, the birth of every new world renders another one musty. The "indie versus studio" dogma may have dominated the first half of this decade, but that's old hat now. These days, it's wired versus tired. Miramax looked like Hollywood's maverick court of the Medicis in the early '90s, thanks to indie landmarks like Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and The Crying Game. But now that the major studios are waltzing with the avant-garde—Fox did Fight Club, Columbia did Go, Warner did The Matrix—Miramax's Bob and Harvey Weinstein are starting to look like the guards outside Buckingham Palace, marching in step with Oscar-friendly pageants like The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. "The Weinsteins are getting to a place like Sam Raimi is," says up-and-coming director Jude Weng. "They all want to become respectable now." When Aronofsky went to the Sundance Film Festival in 1998, [Pi] became Artisan's first acquisition. "I recognized that Miramax was sort of out of the business of doing films like [Pi]," he says diplomatically. "And I recognized that there was a vacuum, because I want to see films like that."

Artisan has rushed in to fill that vacuum, but so have the majors. "When there is that odd, quirky type of material, agents aren't afraid anymore to send that into the studio," says Columbia VP of production Andrea Giannetti. "Before, a lot of times we wouldn't even see it."

"Ten years ago, Being John Malkovich wouldn't have been set up somewhere," says Columbia's Strauss.

"Even five years ago," says Giannetti.

Which suggests that five years from now, we might wind up getting lost in a forest of cruddy shaky-cam movies narrated by puppeteers and dead people. "Always in Hollywood, it comes down to what's going to sell," says Weng. "I go to a lot of meetings, and people are always like, 'Oh, I'm looking for the next American Beauty, I'm looking for the next Being John Malkovich.' It's going to get tapped out. Like teen films were huge, and that got tapped out." Indeed, just because the Neo Turks have awesome technology at their fingertips doesn't mean they'll all be talented enough to do something awesome with it. "I think there's going to be this wonderful, explosive glut of mediocrity," Miller chuckles. "It's going to be horrible. You know, big ideas without a lot of preparation. The technology invites a certain carelessness, because it's easy to let your guard down and not be disciplined."

Then again, we might wind up with a masterpiece or two. "I grew up in Coney Island, with the Cyclone, which is one of the oldest-standing roller coasters in America," says Aronofsky, suddenly sounding more than a bit like one of those old-guard masters who came of age in the postwar boom. "I grew up on that. That was my main form of entertainment. And the one thing that taught me was, you've gotta keep the thrills coming." (Additional reporting by Daniel Fierman and Troy Patterson)