To hear it now from Francis Ford Coppola, the same Hollywood studio system that released his magnificent acid trip of a movie, Apocalypse Now, would never today dare indulge such an extravagantly ambitious and vainglorious undertaking by a director. Even by one who had previously made a truck-load of money with the Godfather films. Vietnam by way of Joseph Conrad and TS Eliot hardly screams merchandising tie-ins or smacks of franchise spin-offs.

"I basically put up the ranch in order to finance it," the filmmaker tells Newsweek as the much-admired new version of his 1979 classic hit theatres in the US. "No one would really back me on such a project. But it was still a little easier back then. Today big corporations own all the distribution. These companies are all struggling to get their stock price up, so they want to make films that will be successful in the short term. Nobody would touch a film like Apocalypse Now."

As it happens, Coppola is not alone in decrying the coldly calculated mindset that seems to have beset the studio monoliths now that film has slid from the top of the creative totem pole towards the bottom of the conglomerate food-chain. "To tell you the truth, the system makes me sick sometimes," Ewan McGregor was also quoted as saying this week. "They put actors on to A, B and C lists, according to how much money each person can make for the studio, and I just think: How dare you do that' We're not a bunch of letters to make you money - we're people", the Scottish actor told the Mail on Sunday's magazine even as starts to limber up for another Star Wars episode, entitled, appropriately enough, Attack Of The Clones.

As a by-product of this relentless drive towards bottom-line efficiency, there is growing suspicion that multiplex audiences are being gradually deprived of some of the greatest pleasures to be derived from cinema: that element of sheer surprise, that thrill of being taken somewhere new, of being plunged into the heart of darkness. The overall box office keeps growing, of course, but fundamentally as a result of wave upon wave of teenagers in search of a quick hormonal fix. How long, one wonders, before this audience too bores of all this pre-fabricated pap and push-button pyrotechnics, and turns elsewhere for exhilaration'

In this light, the recent appointment of such a film-literate enthusiast as Bingham Ray to run United Artists from its new location in New York has a particular piquancy. UA, after all, was the studio that released the original Apocalypse Now 22 years ago and, boy, have things changed since then. The teen-seeking B-movies that were once the preserve of independents like Roger Corman are now being re-configured as big-budget thrill-rides by the major studios; in the meantime, the independents have started to win Oscars with the kinds of adult-skewed projects that only those big prestige-seeking studios were once in a position to make. Tellingly, it is Miramax Films that is now distributing Apocalypse Now Redux; not UA.

When UA was first formed, way back in 1919, as a film artists' distribution collective by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, it was said that the lunatics were finally running the asylum. Today, it is a certain level of lunacy that is dangerously short supply across the filmmaking landscape. As a product of an American independent culture that grew up in radical opposition to the Hollywood studios before itself becoming absorbed into the system, Ray has a real chance of restoring UA's credentials as a filmmaker-friendly venue for single-minded storytellers like the Coppola of old.

Now, whether the word "independent" can be properly applied to his new-look UA or, for that matter, Miramax, Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics, has become something of a redundant issue; their role is more akin to those within the equally corporate-minded music industry who act as a vibrant (and necessary) 'alternative' to mainstream pop-culture.