Wealth & Money Quote by Griffin Dunne

There is a quiet demystification in Dunne's memory of the '80s: the indie scene, as we now brand it, wasn’t an identity so much as an accident of accounting. By insisting he and Amy Robinson “weren’t aware” of an independent film community, he’s puncturing the retroactive mythology that everyone making smaller, weirder movies back then was self-consciously part of a movement. The label came later, once Sundance, Miramax, and a whole vocabulary of “indie” prestige hardened into a market category.

The most revealing tension is in the sentence’s hinge: low-budget, yes, but “distributed through studios.” Dunne is describing a liminal era when the money was tight but the pipes were still centralized. You could scrape together a modest production, but you still needed the studio apparatus to put it in theaters, to make it legible as a real movie. That’s not the rebellious outsider narrative audiences love; it’s a practical portrait of creators negotiating within the system, not storming the gates.

His phrasing also signals how “independent” became as much a branding story as a production reality. If your film’s financing constrained you, you might look indie on paper. If a studio distributed it, you weren’t culturally positioned as indie. Dunne’s intent is to reclaim that complexity: artistic ambition didn’t always arrive with a manifesto. Sometimes it arrived with a budget ceiling and a studio contract.