Hollywood’s loss, in terms of the general narrowing of the horizons of possibility at the heart of the studio-led machine, was to be the gain of a newly consolidating form of independent production and distribution that was beginning to take shape during the 1980s, and into which some of the inheritance of the Renaissance was carried. The term ‘independent’ has had rather different connotations at different periods in the history of American cinema. In the 1930s, for example, it signified ‘something less than trash’. In the late 1950s and early 1960s it might have suggested both the innovations of the ‘American.
