Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-makers in Recent American Cinema

In creative terms, Hollywood has come to be regarded as a spent force, increasingly given to producing undemanding action spectaculars ... Extravagant, spiralling budgets ensure that the studio committees invariably take low-risk creative decisions ... Yet at the same time the American cinema has been revitalized by the growth of the 'indie scene' - as burgeoning cinematic culture distinguished not only by the ability of young film-makers to work wonders on a low budget, but by the stylistic freshness and thematic originality of their movies ... ' Stranger than Paradise' is a ground-breaking study of some of the most talented, audacious and influential film-makers to have worked in the American cinema through the 80s and 90s ... and they've made it all the way to Cannes ... Some, such as Jarmusch, Hartley and Haynes, have remained wholly independent of Hollywood; others, like Lynch, Sayles, Wang and Sonderbergh, have alternated or combined personal projects with work for the studios; still others, like Lee or the Coen Broothers, have used the Hollywood system to bring their own special vision of of the world to a wider public; while the wunderkind Quentin Tarantino, playing new variations on traditional genres, is both taken up by Hollywood and also transforming it ... While these film-makers - to whom the book devotes individual chapters - are clearly very different, distinctive talents, they all display a robust sense of creative independence ... Reluctant to bow to the compromises favoured by mainstream Hollywood, each qualifies as an auteur ... Individual artistry, however, never exists in a vacuum ... Accordingly, the book locates their achievements within the maverick tradition of American film-making, drawing connections with Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, Roger Corman, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese ...