“And please turn all your cellular phones to `off’ and put your beepers on `vibrate.'”
Thus began every screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — with some
spoken variation of this silly reminder just prior to the dimming of the house
lights. This is what it has come to in this festival’s 11th year of operation,
during which time it has earned bragging rights as the country’s most
prestigious competition and display of the best of American independent
filmmaking. With its ever-growing popularity and success, the 11-day-long event
now seems less a festival than a three-ring circus. In this market atmosphere,
screenings are attended as though they are product demonstrations, meetings are
scheduled within the framework of meals, and promotional activity is disguised
as ingenuity and largesse. It is here in Park City, Utah that cell phones are
as indispensable as warm boots, as much fashion statement as power tool.
Here in the snowy mountain tops, where the 8,000-foot-high peaks bend phone
signals as though flush with kryptonite ore, cellular phones seem more
ubiquitous than tubes of lip moisturizer and rumpled tissues. Instantly, they
define their bearers as “players,” and the only position of greater power is to
have a circle of assistants who do all the beeping and dialing for you. It
sounds like sour grapes, I know; and it also sounds clich�. Hardly a
report I’ve yet read about this year’s festival fails to mention the cellulars
as a key motif. And never forget that just because all the reporters say a
thing’s so, it doesn’t mean that their observations are free of hyperbole and
bias. But it does point to a growing observation of the marketplace the
Sundance Film Festival has become.
What might once have been a scouting expedition for distribution and
acquisition executives in search of diamonds in the rough, undiscovered
beauties, or visions of future greatness now seems more a shopping expedition
— buyers don’t intend to come home empty-handed, the only question is: How
much? In recent years, independent filmmaking has become an increasingly bigger
business, with significant, and potentially large, box-office potential and
financial return. The Sundance Film Festival has also played a very large part
in that development. This growing sophistication is also seen amongst the
filmmakers marketing their wares and the audiences consuming the final product.
Independent filmmaking has increasingly become an identifiable and quantifiable
entity, as its cachet grows all the while.
Eleven years ago, Robert Redford and some associates began the first Sundance Film Festival (originally
called the U.S. Film Festival) to recognize and celebrate independent
filmmaking, to give it a home and an audience, and to ensure its vitality and
future. Central to Sundance were concepts of things such as the “individual
filmmaker,” “artistic vision,” the gritty romance of low-budget production, and
the purity of work accomplished outside the Hollywood system. Underlying these
sincere notions, however, was the generally held, bottom-line belief that the
word “independent” was merely a classy euphemism for another, more damning
word: “uncommercial.” Yet a few of the indie success stories from those years,
such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), prove that the Cinderella model was never far from imagined
possibility.
Then came sex, lies, and videotape, the movie that changed the ground
rules forever. Steven Soderbergh’s low-budget indie won the Audience Award
(based on popular vote) at Sundance in 1989 and prompted an unprecedented
bidding war amongst distributors anxious to sign it. A then-fledgling company
named Miramax came out the winner. Later that spring, sex, lies, and
videotape also picked up the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and
then proceeded to do phenomenal business during its theatrical release. Its
success not only helped establish Miramax as a leading independent distribution
company, it also established Sundance as the unequivocal mother lode. The
success of many other independent films since then — such as My Own Private
Idaho, Howards End, Slacker, The Piano, and Pulp
Fiction — only fuels the ongoing search for hidden treasure.
Perhaps in response to recent complaints that the Sundance lineup included too
many films that already had representation and/or distribution in place, 1996’s
schedule seemed to showcase more films that had not yet been picked up… at
least, not officially. That would help explain this festival’s heightened sense
of a marketplace atmosphere, the illusion that everyone had descended — with a
cellular — upon this tiny resort community in order to close a deal (and,
perhaps, ski).
Deals were made and announced daily. New record sums were set. In a heavily
reported coup, Fine Line Features paid nearly $2.5 million for the Australian
movie Shine, about a musical prodigy and the father who passes his
neuroses on to the next generation. The purchase figure set a new sales record
and the deal also spited the leading indie distributor Miramax Pictures (now
owned by Disney), who thought they had a lock on the picture. After a couple
days of press scandals and public shouting matches, it was announced that
Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista, would distribute Shine with
Miramax in most of Europe, while Fine Line would retain North American rights.
Of course, if one looked for history in regard to this tug of war, the trail
might start at 1995’s Sundance Festival when Miramax snatched away the Isaac
Mizrahi documentary Unzipped from an unsuspecting Fine Line.
In very short order, $2.5 million began to look like loose change. Before
things were over, the astonishing sum of $10 million was paid out to one of the
festival’s big crowd-pleasers, Care of the Spitfire Grill, a melodrama
starring Alison Elliot, Ellen Burstyn, and Marcia Gay Harden, and directed by
Lee David Zlatoff. In only two days, the festival’s previous record had been
quadrupled by Castle Rock Entertainment for a film that went on to win the
Audience Award (based on popular vote) for dramatic feature.
Other factors affecting what was shown at the festival, no doubt, are related
to offshoot Sundance Institute enterprises like the Screenwriters Lab and the
Directors Lab. At least a half-dozen of the projects cultivated at these
workshops were shown at the festival and proved to be popular with audiences
and distributors. Pie in the Sky by Bryan Gordon and starring John
Goodman already had New Line Cinema in place as distributor; others, like Lisa
Krueger’s Manny and Lo starring Mary Kay Place was picked up by Sony
Classics; Nicole Holofcener’s well-liked Walking and Talking by Miramax;
and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Sydney, starring Philip Baker Hall, Gwyneth
Paltrow, and Samuel L. Jackson, by the Samuel Goldwyn Co. Many other Institute
projects are currently in production or various stages of national release (the
recent Devil in a Blue Dress and the soon-to-be-released Bottle
Rocket and Feeling Minnesota). Also due for premiere in select cable
TV markets on February 29 is the Sundance Channel, a 24-hour, commercial-free
network that will show titles from American and international independent
films. Rick Linklater’sBefore Sunrise is scheduled for its inaugural
evening.
Slamdance, a feisty upstart now in its second year of operation, also seems to
be exerting a noticeable effect on the priorities of Sundance programmers.
Originally a presentation of films rejected by Sundance, the Slamdance festival
runs concurrently with Sundance with screenings scheduled at a local hotel.
Sundance officials are definitely not amused by the counter-programming, but
its presence calls into question definitions of “independent” filmmaking,
budget and representation issues, and the mysteries of the selection process.
Still, when Sundance darling Steven Soderbergh has a film which he produced —
the hilarious and wonderfully acted Daytrippers — playing at Slamdance
rather than Sundance, entree to the big leagues is clearly more than a simple
matter of who you know. Slamdance describes itself as “a festival by filmmakers
for filmmakers” with “a focus on first features.” This year, over 450 features
were submitted for Slamdance consideration, and a total of 25 were shown.
Ironically, at that rate, Slamdance should soon face a new round of competition
from disgruntled and rejected applicants. For festival-goers, the inclusion of
Slamdance screenings adds an element of pure gluttony to an already
heartbreaking schedule of determining which movies to see and which to exclude
on any given day. Knowing that there’s no physical way to see it all, the
choices become more a process of elimination than inclusion.
It is no accident that Sundance organizers repeatedly characterize 1996’s
presentations as “edgier” and “more cutting edge.” Without so much as saying
anything directly, they clearly have heard the rumblings and seen the
projections on alternate screens (a film programmer’s version of “the writing
on the wall”). Two of the evident strengths of this year’s schedule were the
number of films featuring strong female characters and melodramatic content, as
well as the quality of the documentaries. Whether these generalities are due
more to strategic planning or coincidence is a matter for conjecture. Overall,
Sundance received over 700 submissions this year, approximately 500 features
and 200 documentaries. Those numbers represent an increase of approximately 30
percent from the year before, which itself had experienced an additional 25
percent increase from the year preceding that. About 120 films were selected
for the festival; in competition were 18 features and 16 documentaries. New to
this year’s program was a showcase titled American Spectrum, which presented
out-of-competition screenings of films by 20 first-time independent
directors.
Texas-related filmmaking was well-represented in Park City. One of the first
movies to be picked up for distribution (by First Look, which also handled the
successful The Secret of Roan Inish) was johns, a movie about
Santa Monica Boulevard hustlers and their personal relationships that stars
David Arquette and Austinite Lukas Haas (Witness, Rambling Rose),
who clearly comes into his own with this picture. Two popular audience hits
were the Dallas-bred-and-lensed movie Late Bloomers by Julia and
Gretchen Dyer, a light-hearted drama about two women who discover their love
for each other over basketball and PTA meetings; and Dan Ireland’s The Whole
Wide World, which was shot last summer in central Texas and stars Vincent
D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard, the pulp writer who created Conan the Barbarian,
and tracks his poignant romance with Novalyne Price, who is played most
engagingly by Renee Zellweger. Austin was represented at Slamdance by Steve
Bilich’s Ruta Wakening, which features a veritable panoply of Austin
downtown figures who intersect via coffee and angels.
Have I mentioned snow? And wind, for that matter. Oh, hell, let’s not pussyfoot around. The correct
word for what I need to describe is: blizzard. Actually, blizzards.
That’s blizzards, as in more than one, and even more than two. When you get
right down to it, it was more than three or four but, hey, you stop counting
after a certain point. I mean, why bother counting things like 92mph wind gusts
— especially if you have any intention of going outside?
Locals were saying that it had been at least 50 years since Park City had
experienced anything like this current white-out. “Perfect ski conditions”
trumpeted all the newscasters. At least perfect for those crazy enough not to
mind all the wind and near-zero visibility. So, adding to the approximately
9,000 film fest attendees crammed into the cozy resort community, ski nuts
poured in on top of everything else. Transportation became hellish; the
festival shuttle buses were overwhelmed by the population mass combined with
the sheer difficulty of getting around. All those cellular phone toters were
also invariably driving rented cars and, meanwhile, the snow just kept
coming.
I could go on and on here about the weather. But the only point that really
needs to be made, however, is that in January, blizzards in Utah are about as
common as cedar fever in Austin. You work around it or get out. Yet weather
conditions cut back on the feasibility of seeing as many films as one would
have liked. And the ever-growing number of visitors made the ability to score
tickets into a modern art form. Standing in lines waiting for tickets, waiting
for buses, and insurmountable commute times for implementing fallback plans —
all these remain, for me, key memories of Sundance ’96. All these are problems
that will continue as the festival size rampantly outgrows its infrastructure.
Yet I also remember the excitement and camaraderie of strangers huddling
together hoping to find magic in the dark.
This article appears in February 2 • 1996 and February 2 • 1996 (Cover).
