Castonguay, James. “The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 65-85

[N.1]: Intermediality refers to the convergence, interaction, and connection—economically, culturally, aesthetically, and so forth—among various media. 80

I conclude this section by arguing that the popular reception of the film and discourse among fan communities reflect standard Hollywood models of cinematic consumption rather than resistant practices. 66

. . . before concluding with an examination of its mythic status as an independent film that threatened to undermine Hollywood’s blockbuster paradigm. Building an argument presented in the first half of the essay, I conclude that the political economy of BWP creates a false impression of the film as counter-hegemonic. 66

Whereas “reality TV” programs like The Real World and Survivor introduce the codes of fictional narrative realism into their primarily documentary form, BWP incorporates conventions associated with the genre of documentary into its primarily fictional form, including a long tradition of cinema (and video) verité techniques, the “objective” interactive interview, and a home camcorder aesthetic. 66

These critical reactions thus comprise an integral part of the film’s political economy, pointing to the ways in which BWP became a site of critical and cultural contestation concerning, among other things, the aesthetic hierarchies, generic boundaries, and dominant methods of film production and distribution in the 1990s. 68

BWP parodies became a subgenre in their own right, from videos on the Web, VHS releases, and film shorts to promotional parodies for programming on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and ESPN. MTV’s Video Music Awards offered a parody of BWP parodies in which Chris Rock and Janeane Garofalo are unable to shoot their own Blair Witch parody because they keep stumbling upon other crews in the woods trying to do the same. 69

Although some viewers were duped into believing that the film was an actual documentary, these posts and thousands like them provide evidence for the existence of active and creative spectators rather than passive, uncritical consumers. 70

Instead of viewing these uses of the Web by Blair Witch fans as examples of progressive interactivity, I see them instead as forms of inter-passivity in which Internet users actively embrace the pleasures of consumerism and celebrate the profit-driven practices of Hollywood film production and distribution. And while the intertextuality and popular reception of BWP are important to the film’s meanings, these fan discourses provide evidence that Blair Witch spectators are subservient to Hollywood’s practices rather than resistant to its logic of market capitalism. 72

In order to better understand BWP’s political economy, however, I would argue that it becomes necessary to shift our concern from intertextuality to intermediality. I prefer the term and method of intermediality to intertextuality because text-based studies tend to ignore the structure and role of the media industry in the meaning-making process. A focus on intermediality is also better suited to an analysis of the political economy of film because it lends itself to a consideration of patterns of media concentration and ownership. At the same time, the concept also allows us to historicize the production and reception of BWP within the context of what is different about or specific to newer media. 73

Finally, because early film technology and the conditions of production limited the length of most early films and thus precluded the possibility of lengthy narratives, filmmakers and exhibitors often relied on newspapers to provide the narrative contexts and subjects for their films, making the print medium in many ways the “primary text” and transforming cinema into a visual newspaper. Like the print media in the 1890s, the Web provided an elaborate narrative context for BWP spectators that became an integral component of the film’s reception. 73

Of course, Hollywood has long produced “the low-cost independent feature targeted for a specific market and with little chance of anything more than cult-film status” (Hollywood 30) alongside its blockbuster films. These low-cost films are useful to Hollywood because they allow the industry to experiment with new forms and genres and to explore options for future projects. In the 1990s, large film studios acquired smaller formerly independent studios (e.g., Disney acquired Miramax in 1992, and Ted Turner bought New Line Cinema in 1993 [now part of AOL Time-Warner]), thus creating different divisions or studios for developing, acquiring, and marketing blockbuster and lower-budget “independent” films. 76

Indeed, even the words that greeted the visitor on the original official Blair Witch Web site (and used in promotional material) read like a “high concept,” “twenty-five words or less” Hollywood pitch satirized by Robert Altman in The Player (1992): “In October of 1994, the student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.” 77

It is telling in this regard that Sanchez and Myrick told the Austin Chronicle that they were more concerned with the film’s being “cheesed out” rather than “sold out” by the distributor, Artisan Entertainment (Savlov). 77

The current unprecedented level of concentration of media ownership means that fewer and fewer voices are being represented through the mainstream media, making it extremely difficult for newcomers or “independents” to have access to the established media outlets to express their viewers and distribute their artifacts. And although Telotte presents the Internet as “a medium that . . . threatens, much as television did, to supplant the film industry,” the history of media institutions outlined in this essay is one of conglomeration and convergence rather than the supplanting of one medium by another. 80

My analysis of The Blair Witch Project suggests that in the end the political economy of BWP may ultimately function to propagate a myth of independent cinema by falsely suggesting that this film disproved the rule of New Hollywood’s hegemony in an age of unprecedented media conglomeration. 80