Indie hero Tom DiCillo asks Roger Ebert why his movie failed

After his last movie, “Delirious” brought in only $200,000 at the box office, a dejected Tom DiCillo, “a legend in the indie film world” reached out to Roger Ebert for answers.

“To give you some indication of how disoriented I feel at the moment,” he wrote, “I am getting no real, tangible feedback from anyone. And so I’m kind of struggling on my own to make sense of how a film I put my soul into, that Buscemi put his soul into, a film that generated such strong, positive reviews, had no life in the market.”

Ebert’s most telling response was to the question of whether independent filmmakers have any chance of surviving this opening-weekend-takes-all era of distribution. “I don’t know. Maybe DVDs and Netflix and Blockbuster on Demand and cable TV and pay-per-view and especially high-quality streaming on the Internet will rescue you and your fellow independents.”

While waiting for the release of “Delirious” to video, I recommend another of DiCillo’s movies, the delicious “Box of Moonlight” (1996).

(via Metafilter)

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