Indie comedies have differed radically from those produced by Hollywood. Mainstream comedies of the 1980s were largely defined by Ivan Reitman, who has shown keen instincts for commercially viable material.

Perpetually reborn in American cinema, noir enjoyed a major revival in the 1980s, in the work of David Lynch and the Coen brothers. And it is even more apparent in the 1990s, in the films of Tarantino and his offshoots. The reason for the continuous fascination may be simple: noir strikes responsive chords of fear, anguish and desire indigenous to American life. Noir's brutal frankness in dealing with the primal subjects of sex, greed, and death is as relevant today as it was in the 1940s.

Jonathan Demme's work set the tone for a number of idiosyncratic comedies. Eccentric personalities in seemingly ordinary locales served as premise for a number of films, both indie and mainstream: Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, Bruce Berseford's Crimes of the Heart, based on Beth Henley's stage play, and David Byrne's True Stories, co-written by Byrne, Henley, and Stephen Tobolowsky. Henley's comic characters, in both Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest (filmed as Miss Firecracker by Thomas Schlamme in 1989), are marked by wild individuality, a trait more applauded in the South than in other regions.

The independent cinema is a grass-roots movement supported by an extensive network of organizations. While limited funding remains a pervasive problem, guerrilla filmmakers on both coasts draw on the Independent Feature Project (IFP and IFP/West), the Association of Video and Filmmakers (AVF), the Black Filmmakers Foundation, several nonprofit media centers and indie-friendly labs and vendors.

No single festival can accommodate the indie explosion. In 1985, about 50 independent films were made in the U.S.; in 1998, the number is estimated to be over 1,000. Sundance is the mecca for indies, but, inevitably, many directors aren't invited to the “holy land.” The competition is so tight that decent films are bound to be rejected. On 1995's snub list were: John Fitzgerald's Self Portrait, Shane Kuhn's Redneck, and Dan Mirvish's Omaha: The Movie. When Sundance failed to show interest in their low-budget features, instead of taking no for an answer, they created their own festival.