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ОглавлениеSundance
He materialized all at once in a crowded room, his eyes wide and next door to desperate, his grip on my shoulder firm, even insistent. “See my film,” he said, quiet but intense. “Change my life.”
At any other film event in any other city, that moment with a young director might have seemed unreal, out of place, even threatening. But this was the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the flagship of the burgeoning American independent film movement and a dream factory for the modern age, where, as Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, “You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star.”
It happened to Kevin Smith after his Clerks debuted here in 1994: “When I came to Sundance, I was a wage slave. And then, twenty-four hours later, I had a filmmaking career.” It happened to Ed Burns, now known as one of the stars of Saving Private Ryan and a director in his own right but then working as a grunt at “Entertainment Tonight” until The Brothers McMullen screened at Sundance: “Nothing has been the same since. The lights went down, the movie starts and the audience starts laughing. And then afterwards, agents, production companies, and distribution companies — right then and there — the bidding war begins.”
It happened to Steven Soderbergh, whose unheralded sex, lies and videotape took the audience award and went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, gross $24 million, and create a directing career that blossomed with the Julia Roberts-starring Erin Brockovich. It happened on a bigger scale to the modest Blair Witch Project, which cost $100,000, sold for just over $1 million after a midnight screening, and ended up grossing $140 million and putting its formerly scruffy trio of filmmakers onto the covers of Time and Newsweek and into the carefully groomed center of a high-gloss ad for Dewar's scotch. Such is the power of Sundance.
That one particular festival held every January in a ski town thirty something miles from Salt Lake City—a tourist-dependent hamlet “somehow both pristine and fake” (in critic David Denby's words) that likes to boast about having five hundred realtors and more chefs per capita than Paris, France — should have this kind of a transformative gift has been lost on absolutely no one.
While 250 films applied for the festival's dramatic competition in 1995, that number had more than tripled, to 849 films looking for but sixteen places, by the year 2000. Documentary entrants shot up from 220 in 1999 to 347 in 2000, a jump of 57 percent for the same sixteen spaces in just twelve months. The twenty-nine slots in World Cinema attracted 450 hopeful films, with directors who got in happy to make the trek from as far away as Bhutan and Tajikistan, two of the remoter parts of Asia. Perhaps most impressive was that but sixty short films were chosen from an almost terrifying 1,928 applicants.
“I meet people in so many walks of life and they're always grabbing a camera,” says festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, both heartened and unnerved by that torrent of cinema. “People used to go to a garret and paint. Now it's ‘I'm a filmmaker.'” Adds Steven Soderbergh, who ought to know, “making a movie has sort of crept up on being a rock star on the fantasy list for most people.”
For a town with a population in the area of 6,000, the growth in attendance — it's now estimated that more than 20,000 show up annually—has been equally unnerving. The festival expanded from 15,750 seats sold in 1985 to 135,922 in 1999, an increase of almost 900 percent. And that doesn't count the great numbers of people who take advantage of the area's ever-increasing supply of condominiums built for skiers to show up without tickets on the increasingly unlikely chance they will stumble onto some.
At the 2000 festival, for instance, people stood on the waiting list line for the world premier of American Psycho for four hours without getting in (they can count themselves lucky), and other ticketless individuals have been known to show up with sleeping bags at the festival's outdoor box office as early as a frigid 3:50 A.M. to wait for released tickets. As the crowds increase, it's closer to truth than hyperbole when master documentarian Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, The Thin Blue Line) waspishly says he prepares for trips to the festival by “spending seventy-two hours in a meat locker with people I don't like, and all of them have cell phones.”
If further proof is wanted of this festival's preeminence and influence, it can be found in the ever-growing number of competing/complementary events that take place in Park City at the same time as Sundance, attempting with some success to latch onto whatever individuals can't procure tickets and won't be bothered with standing on those interminable lines.
Very much first among equals among the alternatives is Slamdance, founded as a salon de refusés by four directors whose films were turned down by Sundance and who initially grandly called their event “Slamdance ‘95, Anarchy in Utah: The First Annual Guerrilla International Film Festival.” Helped by the scorn of Sundance Institute president Robert Redford, who grumbled about “a festival that's attached itself to us in a parasitical way,” Slamdance has grown into something of a venerable institution itself, with over 2,000 films applying for slots and road show versions traveling to New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., London, and even Cannes. Not bad for a fest that was, to quote Redford again, “born out of rejection.”
Aside from Slamdance, some of the more prominent rivals include No Dance, “acclaimed as the world's first and only DVD-projected film festival,” and Slamdunk, which made a name for itself showing Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney documentary amid the mounted heads at the local Elks Hall after Sundance canceled its screening due to threats of legal action. More amorphous but very much present are such entities as Lapdance, DigiDance, Dances with Films, and Son of Sam Dance, which turned out to be a Toyota van with a projector attached to its roof. Even author Ken Kesey got into the act, claiming tongue-in-cheek that he was “going to organize the Slim Chance Festival. You will have to have received a number of rejections to qualify.”
Though it lasted only one year, Slumdance is one of the more fondly remembered alternatives. Set up in a 6,000-square-foot basement that was once a Mrs. Fields cookie factory, Slumdance was started by a hang-loose group who called themselves Slumdance Programming Vagrants and managed 150 submissions before opening night. As their press release headline nicely put it, “Slumdance Stuns Movie World by Existing.”
The Slumdance gang literally outfitted their basement like a mock slum. You entered through a mission area that served free soup, past a Tent City (individual video areas designed like hobo housing) and entered the Lounge, the main screening area outfitted with projectors, couches, and sleeping bags. Around the corner and behind a curtain was a set of concrete steps leading nowhere in particular. Not surprisingly, it was dubbed the Stairway to Acquisitions.
Equally inventive were the mock festivals dreamed up by the local alternative newspaper, the Park City Ear. One year it was Sleazedance, “a combination of exhibitionism and porn,” which planned to show features like Jeremiah's Johnson in “a lime-green Volkswagen Vanagon with tassels on the headlights.” This gave way to Skindance, the name changed for “credibility,” which highlighted Anna Lands the King, Adult Toy Story 2, and The Talented Mr. Strip-Me. With Sundance showing films like American Pimp and Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, there were days when you couldn't tell Skindance from the real thing.
What all this means is that Sundance has become more than just the mother ship for the American independent movement, more than the premier showcase for films that don't march to Hollywood's drum. Because the festival and the independent scene grew up together, because they nurtured each other and made each other strong, Sundance has become America's preeminent film event and, says Lory Smith in his Party in a Box history of Sundance, “arguably one of the most influential film festivals in the world.” This is a highly unlikely situation for a part of the world where ten feet of snow can accumulate in ten days and a town that had hardly any movie theaters and none within walking distance of each other. Though careful planning has allowed the festival to pretty much keep pace with its growing importance, it was happenstance more than anything else that put it in Park City in the first place.
If anything made this town a good match for the festival, it's a rambunctious history as what “Walking through Historic Park City” calls “one of the largest bonanza camps in the West,” the source of enough silver, lead, and zinc to create the fortune of William Randolph Hearst's millionaire father George. At its zenith Park City boasted sixteen houses in its Red Light District as well as twenty-seven saloons, one of which was robbed by George “Butch Cassidy” Parker. And from 1926 on, it had its own movie theater, the Egyptian, apparently a replica of Warner's Egyptian in Pasadena and, to quote “Walking through” again, “one of only two Egyptian revival-style buildings in Utah.”
Though I experienced a lot of Sundance history, I wasn't there at the beginning. As detailed in Smith's book, the festival started in 1978 in Salt Lake City and, though immediately interested in films made regionally outside the studio system, it had to go through several incarnations and numerous name changes — from the U.S. Film Festival to the Utah/U.S. Film Festival to the United States Film & Video Festival to the Sundance/United States Film Festival to Sundance — to get to where it is today.
It was director Sydney Pollack, or so the story goes, who suggested to the powers that be in 1980 that “you ought to move the festival to Park City and set it in the wintertime. You'd be the only film festival in the world held in a ski resort during ski season, and Hollywood would beat down the door to attend.”
Involved in the festival, almost from the beginning, was local resident Robert Redford, who had purchased land in the Wasatch Mountains as far back as 1969. Redford, related by marriage to Sterling Van Wagenen, the festival's first director, was chairman of its board of directors and the key figure in eventually having his cultural-minded, multidisciplinary arts organization, the Sundance Institute, take on the festival in 1985 and eventually change the name in 1991. Lory Smith, one of the festival's founders, claims in his book, “We were on the cusp of success whether Sundance had become involved or not,” adding “Sundance seemed determined from the outset to rewrite the festival's history as well as its own — to make it seem as if they had rescued a small-time festival from obscurity.” Still, it's undeniable, as Smith himself reports, that Sundance's involvement “catapulted the festival into the stratosphere of press and public attention,” which is where I found it.
My first festival visit was in 1986, when I didn't know enough to bring a heavy coat, skiers still looked down their poles at outnumbered movie interlopers, and the state's beverage consumption laws, once almost Talmudic in complexity, had changed enough to allow the local Chamber of Commerce to boast that “Utah's newly revised liquor laws are almost normal now.”
Though it had been in Park City for five years, the event itself still had some of the sleepy spirit that Errol Morris remembers from showing his pet-cemetery themed Gates of Heaven at the 1982 festival, only the second to be held in Park City. “There was a snowstorm, I was staying in a godforsaken condo and I only had a small idea where it was located,” Morris remembers. “I had to hitchhike back there, and I was picked up by people who'd been in the theater and had hated the movie. They asked me what I thought, and since I had no alternative means of transportation, I said I, too, was extremely disappointed.”
I didn't attend Sundance on a regular basis until the 1992 festival, by which time I'd acquired a reliable winter coat, and American audiences, increasingly let down by the unadventurous, lowest-common-denominator nature of Hollywood production, were acquiring a taste for what Sundance was providing, films that the festival itself amusingly caricatured in a clever, albeit self-satisfied thirty-second spot that began every screening at the 1996 festival.
A project of an ad/film class at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, the spot opened on a unusual assembly line, with impassive workers taking identical cans of film and pushing them through slots of the same size, again and again and again.
But wait. Here's a film that doesn't fit. Alarm bells go off, a crack emergency team appears and thrusts the oversized can into a yellow box marked “Sundance International Film Festival.” “Where do they take it?” someone asks as the offending item disappears inside a departing truck. A coworker gives a laconic, one-word answer: “Utah.”
Almost every year of its existence, Sundance has managed to discover at least one memorable dramatic film. Aside from the features already mentioned, debuts included The Waterdance, In the Soup, Four Weddings and a Funeral (its American premier), The Usual Suspects, Living in Oblivion, Big Night, Ulee's Gold, Girl fight, and You Can Count on Me. And that's only the dramatic features.
On the documentary side, things were even stronger, and Sundance soon got a deserved reputation for being the country's top nonfiction showcase. The momentum for Hoop Dreams, perhaps the best, most influential documentary of the past decade, began here, as it did for Crumb, Theremin, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and Unzipped. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed its rules for becoming a documentary finalist in 2000, a rule partially inspired by Hoop Dreams's previous exclusion, six of the twelve features selected had appeared at Sundance in 1999 and a seventh was set for a Slamdance premier.
Though the concept soon became a ruinous cliché, Sundance in fact often was the place where you could see talent early. Here was Ashley Judd in Ruby in Paradise, her first major role, easily the friendliest person in town. Here was Quentin Tarantino in a Q&A session after the premier of Reservoir Dogs brazenly telling a viewer upset about the violence, “I don't have to justify it, I love it.” And here was Trey Parker, in Sundance with the slashingly irreverent animated short The Spirit of Christmas, talking about improvising the obscene dialogue with codirector Matt Stone in his basement while his mom was making fudge upstairs. And there was this little series called South Park in the offing as well.
Because of what it stood for, Sundance became a prime spot to hear the war stories of filmmakers who were almost literally burning to get their projects completed, who talked about overcoming their difficulties with the kind of messianic zeal that In the Soup director Alexandre Rockwell had in mind when he said, “It's great to meet filmmakers who are as crazy as I am and as desperate to make their films.” For example:
Todd Solondz, whose Welcome to the Dollhouse won the Grand Jury Prize in 1996, reminisced about his first brush with fame, when his NYU short film Schatt's Last Shot created a fuss. When he told his then-agent he just wanted to meet some of these new people, she started crying on the phone, and when he was cornered by a trio from another agency, “one of them got down on his knees and begged. You read about things like this but it's true, it happens.”
Soon Solondz had simultaneous three-picture deals with two different studios who crazily bickered about the release order of these unmade films. “It turned out the only thing I liked about these deals was telling everyone I had them. I wasn't interested in any of the pictures that came my way, and none of my friends could sympathize: ‘Poor Todd, he has these two three-picture deals.'” He ended up leaving the movie business for a job teaching English as a second language (a profession he wrote into his next feature, Happiness), and whenever anyone asked him about his previous life, “I said I'd been working as a computer programmer, which ended conversation right there.”
Writer-director Toni Kalem, whose A Slipping-Down Life portrayed a woman fixated on a rock singer, told an appropriately obsessive tale about how her film ended up in the 1999 festival. Herself an actress (she was Gianelli in Private Benjamin and has a part in The Sopranos), Kalem said she'd been interested in turning the Anne Tyler novel into a film for nearly two decades (“since I pilfered the book from Random House when I worked there as a secretary”) and originally wanted to play the starring role herself.
“Other people buy houses or buy cars, I had a ‘Slipping-Down Life' habit,” Kalem explained. “I took acting jobs just to pay for the option. I had horrible, horrible moments when I thought someone else would do it; I once took the red-eye to New York to save my option. Everyone said, ‘Toni, you've done enough, let it go.' But I said, ‘If I can't do it my way, I'll keep optioning it; I'll come up here in a walker if I have to.'”
Marc Singer, the director of Dark Days, the most talked-about documentary in the 2000 festival and the winner of the audience award, the freedom of expression award, and half of the cinematography award, had a back story as strong and compelling as his on-screen material.
More than five years in the making, Dark Days deals with the people who live in Manhattan's underground train tunnels. A former model, the British-born Singer not only lived underground with his subjects for two years, he used them as his entire crew. More an advocate for the homeless than a filmmaker, he conceived of Dark Days strictly as a way to earn money to get these people above ground and rented his first camera without even knowing how to load it. “I just wanted to get them out,” he said simply. “They deserve better than that.”
If Sundance had a turning point event in recent years, something that showed just how important a Park City debut could be for a project, it came in 1996. That's when the Australian Shine, the Scott Hicks directed film about pianist David Helfgott, a child prodigy who descended into madness, debuted as an out-of-competition world premier. It's not only that the film's first two screenings led to frenzied standing ovations; that was not unusual for Sundance. It's that everyone recognized that, as a throwback to the best kind of Hollywood movies, able to move a mass audience without insulting it, Shine was almost sure to be a multi-Oscar nominee. (It in fact got seven, including best picture, and won the best actor Oscar for star Geoffrey Rush.) More than that, it was deliriously up for grabs.
“I'm too old for this,” one not-very-old acquisition executive said to me in the midst of the chaos that erupted around Hicks when the second screening ended. Other executives, however, were less ambivalent. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, who'd maneuvered his company to preeminence in the independent world by not letting films like Shine escape him, thought he had a deal with Pandora, the company handling Shine's overseas sale, but it was not to be.
Against considerable odds, Mark Ordesky of Fine Line Features spearheaded what he called an “in-the-condo, in-the-room, nobody-leaves-or-the-deal-is-off” negotiation to bag the film. Weinstein was beside himself, threatening to sue to get the North American rights and loudly and publicly berating Pandora's representative in a Park City restaurant. Miramax and its parent company Disney ended up with the rights in certain key overseas territories, but Robert Redford had the last word. “We do very simple things to provide entertainment here,” he said at the festival's awards show. “We leave it to the snow and to Harvey Weinstein.”
The much-publicized fuss over Shine put a spotlight on how and why Sundance, which had changed considerably over its short life, had metamorphosized. Ever since Redford's Sundance Institute had taken over the festival, the putative specter of the evil empire of Hollywood and the movie establishment had hung over the event. Every year, agents and development executives made the trek to Park City in greater and greater numbers, paying up to $5,000 for coveted Fast Passes to the entire festival and prowling the occasionally snowy streets on a lonely mission to discover the Next New Thing. As veteran independent director Victor Nunez, a two-time winner of the Grand Jury Prize (Gal Young ‘Un in 1979, Ruby in Paradise in 1993) put it, “Sundance has always been a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the recognition is wonderful. On the other, that sword has always pointed west, and festival success is the calling card to making it into the establishment world.”
The more certain Sundance films broke through commercially, the more distribution companies came and bought without looking back, conveniently ignoring other Sundance films that had proved to be over hyped and overexpensive once they got down to sea level. Executives might take annual vows of abstinence, but no one remembered overpriced box office disappointments like House of Yes, Slam, Hurricane Streets, Happy, Texas, The Castle, and The Spitfire Grill when something hot and new appeared on the horizon.
All this fuss attracted the media and those who understood how to use it. “Sundance is actually an old Indian word that means publicity; few people know that,” actor Eric Stoltz tartly informed Us magazine, and Sony Pictures Classics codirector Tom Bernard told the New York Times that “Sundance has the biggest concentration of press in the country. It's better than a junket. We get interviews and stories placed on our movies we couldn't get if we weren't at Sundance.”
Both Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein are masters at handling the media. When Weinstein announces his annual party, journalists rearrange their schedules so as not to miss it. In 1995, he hosted an event at the pricey Stein Erickson Lodge at which Redford himself, in effect Sundance's uncrowned king, decided to make a rare social appearance.
As soon as Redford arrived, Weinstein, shrewd as well as gracious as a host, brought him over to a table where critics and journalists from Newsweek, Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times were sitting. Redford nodded to everyone, and, since there were no more chairs, immediately went down on one knee to have a more intimate chat with one of the most powerful critics there. Observing this tableau was Weinstein, never without words or unwilling to use them. “So Bob,” he said in a voice loud enough to make the actor blush, “that's how you get those good reviews.”
Though it still believes passionately in championing striving young filmmakers, Sundance itself, not immune to all the success that surrounded it, has become established and institutionalized enough to have an annual budget of $8.5 million. With a fleet of Mercedes M-Class vans as “official vehicles” and a catalog as fat and glossy as an issue of Architectural Digest, Sundance increasingly exudes the prosperity and success that go with its place in the film universe.
The festival catalog is as weighty as it is in part because of advertising from the festival's 125 sponsors, carefully organized into categories called Leadership, Major, Supporting, Official, and Festival. Corporations that would do credit to a Super Bowl telecast (Mercedes-Benz, AT&T, Apple, Blockbuster) lined up with less likely suspects like the San Miguel, Agua Calienta, Pechanga, and Viejas California Indian tribes and the makers of Altoids, which gave away so many mints one year that, their intrepid publicist announced, “If all of the Altoids were dropped from a helicopter over the festival center of Park City at the same time, they would blanket the area to a depth of 2.37 inches.” With a festival audience both young (57 percent are between eighteen and thirty-five) and well funded (38 percent earn over $100,000), is it any wonder that the institute has expanded operations to include the Sundance Catalogue, the Sundance Channel, and Sundance Theaters?
Though people could and did argue over whether all this was good or bad for the festival, the fact that it brought increasing numbers of visitors to town (enough, apparently, to have spent over $25 million, including lodging and transportation, during the 1999 event) was undeniable. Cell phone usage during the fest rose 550 percent over the town's normal rate, and restaurants were booked a month ahead of time, with one establishment demanding a $60 food minimum per person as the price of reserving a table.
Sundance tries hard to cope with this influx, training “crowd liaison” personnel and fine-tuning the festival's different sections, their locations, even the event's invaluable but increasingly complex shuttle bus system. And, at the most basic level, this may be the only festival that regularly adds theaters in a Sisyphean attempt to keep pace with its audience.
Starting with the venerable Egyptian, a tiny triplex called the Holiday Village, and an assembly room in a hotel, Sundance added a 500-seat theater in the town's former high school (which now houses the local library), tacked on one more in a different hotel, and spearheaded local voter approval for the Eccles Theater, named after a local philanthropist, a 1,000-seat structure (which doubles as a performing arts complex when the festival is not in session) that opened in 1998 and promptly filled up.
