Indie Memphis: Two Decades in the Dark

The inside story of the turbulent history of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

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Memphis is a speck on the map, but it’s amazing how influential it’s been in the arts,” says Dr. James Patterson. In the early 1990s, the physician and avid art collector co-founded a nonprofit organization called Delta Axis. “We set about trying to highlight the culture of the Delta, and to start communications through the region. We had shows starring regional, national, and international artists.”

Delta Axis’ specialty was curating art exhibitions in unexpected places long before the term “pop-up shop” entered the popular lexicon. So in 1998, when University of Memphis film student Kelly Chandler got a group of would-be Memphis filmmakers together in The Edge coffee shop to show their films on a sheet hung on the wall, Patterson took notice. 

“Indie Memphis was us applying what we were doing with the visual arts to film,” he says.

Chandler’s affair attracted around 40 people. The festival’s only income came from the sale of vodka-infused Jell-o shots. Attempts to contact her for this story were unsuccessful, but all evidence suggests that she found the experience difficult. 

“The film scene we have in Memphis is because of Mike McCarthy and Craig Brewer, Morgan Jon Fox, Natalie Entzminger, and James Patterson. All these different people who were just sort of doing it, not really knowing what we were doing. And it was not for the money!” 

— Les Edwards

“It’s really easy to start a festival. It’s not so easy to keep one going,” says Les Edwards, who has, at various times over the last two decades, been a volunteer, board member, and executive director for Indie Memphis.

Chandler turned the operation of the festival over to Delta Axis. Natalie Entzminger and Patterson organized the Memphis Independent Film Festival in the summer of 1999, screening films in the basement of Memphis College of Art. Once again, their emphasis was on work by local artists. 

“We basically showed everything that existed that year,” says Patterson. “At the same time, the digital revolution occurred. People didn’t have to use film any more, so the number of people who were making films increased.”

At some point around the turn of the century, the festival got a theme, The Soul of Southern Film, and a name change. “I was on the organizing committee early on,” says Edwards. “I remember someone presenting several potential names, and Indie Memphis was one of those. We all said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’”

By 2000, the audience was numbering in the hundreds at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Edwards was a volunteer. “Natalie was in charge, and it was really well organized. She knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she had James as the spiritual advisor,” he recalls. “It was kind of amazing to me. There was catered food, and a party with a band at Palm Court in Overton Square. … I was selling tickets, working from morning to night. But I kept hearing talk about this movie called The Poor And Hungry.”

Edwards begged off his shift and snuck into the screening of the film directed by a young Memphian named Craig Brewer. “It was sold out,” he says. “I recall people standing in the aisles. I saw that movie, and it was a game changer for me. There was something going on here in town.”

The Poor and Hungry won the Narrative Feature competition, and went on to win big at the Hollywood Film Festival, besting films with 100 times its budget. It put both Brewer and Indie Memphis on the map. “The film scene we have in Memphis is because of Mike McCarthy and Craig Brewer, Morgan Jon Fox, Natalie Entzminger, and James Patterson,” says Edwards. “All these different people who were just sort of doing it, not really knowing what we were doing. And it was not for the money!” 

In 2001, the festival got a new sponsor, TimeWarner Cable. “I think we had $15,000, a huge sum of money for us,” says Edwards.

Indie Memphis moved to Beale Street, setting crowd records that would stand for years. The guest of honor was Albert Maysles, legendary director of documentaries such as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens.

“People have these great memories of this romantic Beale Street festival, and how cool that was,” says Edwards. “It was packed with people. But from where I stood, it wasn’t like that.”

During a screening of Lee Lee’s Kin at the New Daisy Theater, “The beer man came, and he propped open the doors, letting in sunlight. His job is to bring the beer in, and he doesn’t give a damn about anything else going on. I’m trying to talk to this guy, and he’s a lot bigger than I am, and he’s having none of it. … We were taking bars and turning them into movie theaters, That’s really expensive and hard to do.”

Three months after the festival, the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. “All of a sudden, the world is different,” says Edwards. “We lost sponsors. We can’t find any funding. James Patterson steps up as he always does to backstop the funding, and we hired Lisa Maniscalo to run the festival, and she hired Will O’Loughlen as her assistant. So it looked like things were going to be fine, until Lisa comes down with leukemia. She has to back out, and Will ran it.”

In 2002, the festival moved to Muvico, a giant multiplex in the Peabody Place mall. Indie Memphis 2003 featured the debut of Morgan Jon Fox’s raw, social realist drama Blue Citrus Hearts, and Bubba Ho-Tep, a horror comedy starring Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley. The films were better than ever, but the crowds stayed away. 

“We were competing against beautiful weather. Nobody came. I thought we had lost our mojo,” says Edwards. “There were special moments, but it lost its festival feel. We were questioning if we should keep doing this. It’s a lot of work. But once again, James kept it going.”

It would not be thelast time the festival was pushed to the brink, but it bounced back quickly. In 2006, there were a record seven local features. “And all of them were good,” says Edwards.

Local films that year included comedies Grim Sweeper by Edward Valibus’ Corduroy Wednesday collective, Mark Jones’ Fraternity Massacre on Hell Island, and The Importance of Being Russell, a special effects tour de force by director Sean Plemmons starring cable-access TV legend John Pickle. The Bridge by Brett Hanover was the first-ever feature film about the Church of Scientology. But when Scientology officials got wind of the film’s existence, an army of well-heeled lawyers descended on Memphis and forced the film to withdraw from the competition. Hanover was 16 years old at the time.

As the festival was in progress, word came down that Muvico, the festival’s home of five years, was in trouble. “We had always wanted to be at Malco,” says Edwards. “In the early days, Malco didn’t have the ability to host a film festival. Now they were able to do that. I met Jimmy Tashie [Malco executive vice president] at Boscos. Here we had done this film festival as his competitor for many years, and now that they’re going out of business, we needed to come to him. I’m thinking this is going to be a very awkward conversation. But Jimmy, being Jimmy, said, ‘Of course! We would love to have your festival.’”

In 2007, Indie Memphis found a newhome at Studio on the Square, where it took up all five screens for the entire weekend. Edwards, who had been the de facto director for five years, was facing festival burnout. Producer Bob Compton pledged $100,000 to hire the festival’s first-ever full-time director, and a national search was on. Erik Jambor, a founder of the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, was hired in March 2008. “It was a major turning point in the festival,” says Edwards.

“I had only been to Memphis one time, to see U2 at the Liberty Bowl,” says Jambor. “It was just when things were taking off anew in Overton Square. The first thing I got taken to was the groundbreaking for Playhouse on the Square. Congressman [Steve] Cohen was there. It made me feel like the festival was connected. What we wanted to do was to build a community that went beyond the filmmakers who had been participating for a decade.”

Educating the wider public was a constant challenge. “People just don’t know what to expect at a film festival if they have never gone,” explains Jambor. “Even now when indie film is a category on Netflix and Amazon, people don’t know what a festival is. If you’ve never been, you think it’s only for filmmakers or industry people. ‘I’m just a film fan. What am I supposed to do at this festival?’

“What we’re trying to do in festivals like Indie Memphis is to get an audience excited about films and get them to come to see films they might never have a chance to see again,” says Jambor. “I would go speak to different groups, and people just didn’t know what it was. It started to slowly spread out of the core group, and now it’s gotten exponentially bigger.”

By 2010, Indie Memphis was host-ing gala screenings at Playhouse on the Square. In 2011, Duncan Williams, Inc. became the festival’s presenting sponsor, increasing the budget dramatically and bringing in films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

“That was a big year, because we finally had films that people were reading about in the New York Times, or hearing about on NPR,” says Jambor. “We’d get people to the festival, and while they’re there, they read the program, meet some filmmakers, and then go see something they didn’t know about by a filmmaker who lives down the street.”

Jambor made a point of connecting the once exclusively local festival with the national film industry. “Once someone comes in and sits on a jury, they have a great time, and they want to come back,” he says.  “That’s how Brandon Harris got involved originally. He came down with his film Redlegs. He stayed involved, and now he’s programming the fest.” 

Indie Memphis continued to expand in scope and reach. But the festival gods are fickle, and in 2014, disaster struck. That year, the festival was larger than ever, but attendance faltered. “I think there were a whole lot of factors. Halloween falling on a Friday night turned out to be much different than when it was on a Wednesday or Thursday,” says film producer Ryan Watt. “And on top of that, there was awful weather the whole weekend. It was just a bad financial year. But as an attendee who didn’t know about the financials, I had a great time. It was one of the best festivals ever.” 

Jambor resigned, and Watt, a longtime volunteer who had just joined the board, was appointed interim director to try to stabilize the ship. “I fell in love with it,” Watt says. “After three months, I asked the board to throw my name in the hat to take over full time.”

In 2015, Indie Memphis became the first major event held in the Orpheum Theatre’s new Halloran Centre, where films screened on weeknights before moving to Overton Square for the weekend. Attendance in 2016 topped 11,000 ticket buyers. 

Watt is now busy planning Indie Memphis’ twentieth-anniversary celebration. “Every great city needs a great film festival. It’s one of those cultural attractions that you expect in a real city,” he says. “But beyond that, beyond entertainment, it has a real value to the artists and the film community here. It’s very rich, and it keeps getting recognized outside of the Memphis area. People here don’t realize what we have.” 

“Every great city needs a great film festival. It’s one of those cultural attractions that you expect in a real city.” 

— Ryan Watt

Jambor, now a consultant who programs for the Bend, Oregon, film festival and serves on the Indie Memphis jury, says the Memphis film scene is unlike any other. 

“Everyone works together and helps each other out,” says Jambor. “That’s a huge thing that I haven’t seen in other communities. There’s still competition between different groups of friends, but it seems like a pretty inclusive environment. … It’s so important for Memphis that Craig Brewer stays involved in the community. It’s not like he was here, got famous, and left. He was just at the Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival, engaging young kids who only know him from Footloose.” 

After two decades of involvement, Edwards attended his last board meeting last July. “I think film festivals still have a place. They’re as important now as they’ve ever been,” he says. “It’s a venue where people can go, sit together, and experience something that they can never experience anywhere else.”