Independent cinema's time may finally have come. Just ask writer/director John Walsh, creator of the new film "Ed's Next Move." Actually, this quirky romantic comedy is not really new at all. Shot over a period of four weeks in October1994, for a modest budget of around $85,000, it is the unique and intimate story of a young rice geneticist's New York escapades. Now you won't see that sort of story coming out of the Hollywood culture machine.

I've gotta admit, I'm a sucker for New York movies - films that accentuate the magic of all the possiblilties that a big city holds. New York is truly a wonderous place and an excellent background for "Ed's Next Move." While I wouldn't want to live there, it's a nice place to vacation... if only for a few hours.

No big budget, big stars, big breasts, explosions, or car chases. It does have a bit of incidental violence and swearing, though. "Ed's Next Move" also has a pretty pleasant soundtrack, although I doubt we'll be seeing San Francisco band Ed's Redeeming Qualities on MTV anytime soon. "Pleasant" really sums up this film. The acting is bad, but endearingly so. The dialogue is occasionally too expositional, but the spirit is there and that bodes well for Walsh's future.

That's actually one of the things I enjoyed most about this film. Even though it occasionally falls flat, it feels like it was written, not put together by large committee. As someone who is struggling with the difficult art of writing a screenplay, I can attest to its complexity. "Yeah, it's painful... writing sucks," explains Walsh. "Writing is the hardest part of a movie - much harder than directing. This is when you're coming up with the ideas, the basis of everything. Once you're on set, you at least have the blueprint. You have a script, so you at least know where you're going. When you sit down with that blank piece of paper, you have no idea where you're going."

Walsh recently started working with a partner to stimulate his creativity. "We both write," he says. "I'm sort of the person who's in control because we're writing it for me to direct. She writes scenes... I write scenes... we brainstorm together on structure. It sort of forces you to want to meet and do it every day, so it helps you if you're undiscliplined like me. And it's just good with comedy to spark off of other people's ideas."

There were little tweaks made in the script as the movie was committed to film, but Walsh didn't find it difficult at all to relinquish his vision to the actors. "That's actually the most exciting part," Walsh elucidates. "Inevitably, if you're working with good people, they bring something to it that you never could've imagined. There's a frustration sometimes in communicating your ideas and wanting to get something from them that they can't quite see - that's the challenge of directing - finding the right language to communicate to an actor or a production designer in order to get them to produce the effect that you want."

Walsh's continuing fascination with the art of communication is what drives "Ed's Next Move." You can see a lot of Walsh himself up there on the screen. Does that make him uncomfortable? "I think it was tough to watch it by myself, before I showed it to an audience," he says. "I would tend to look at all the flaws. Once you show it to an audience, they don't know what you were expecting to make and they just accept it for what it is."

We've seen a lot of independent producers and directors succeed lately - Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Ed Burns - they've all garned critical praise and large box office returns on small investments. Walsh believes that there is a future for independent film... and not just as a jumping-off point for Hollywood's future directors: "I think with video, television, with cable, and all the foreign markets, there's actually extraordinarily good reasources for independent filmmakers to go find money. Ten years ago filmmakers didn't have anyone but the studios to go to for money."

Movies no longer have to make a lot of money in the U.S. to be financially successful. Walsh mentions "Denise Calls Up," a movie I'd never heard of. "It won a little prize at the Cannes Film Festival and didn't make much money here at all. But it went to France and made about two million bucks - which in France is a lot. So that guy got money from a French company to make his next movie. I think he filmed here... it was in English. So they wanted his next movie. I think it's great that there's all these other sources of money to make these less mainstream pictures."

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