Indie filmmakers are using the Internet to sell their movies. They don't have to spend much money on prints and theatrical distribution; they sell their movies online directly to their target audience, and pocket a hefty cut of the revenues.

John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines, which was released in November 2001, kicked off a new cycle of war films that so far has included: Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, Gregory Hoblit's Hart's War, and Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers. One can also add to the list the highly acclaimed TV series, HBO's Band of Brothers, produced by Tom Hanks and Spielberg. In June, MGM will release John Woo's eagerly awaited WWII saga, The Windtalkers, which was pushed back from last year.

The emergence of a new cinematic force or movement is not a coincidence: The arrival of promising directors goes in cycles and Hollywood sets the context in which those cycles occur.

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.

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.