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The Sundance Film Festival is an over-hyped Hollywood party replete with schmoozing agents, desperate bidding wars and Paris Hilton photo ops.
That both of these declarations are true suggests the dual nature of Sundance, which Thursday kicks off its 2007 edition in the cozy ski burg of Park City, Utah (population 8,000).
It’s an event that draws ambitious little guys and Tinseltown movers and shakers, stirs them together in a fairy-tale setting of falling snow and stretch limos and offers a preview of the films we’re likely to see the next two years.
“Every year there’s a new filmmaker breaking out who without this festival never would have been noticed,” said the Missouri Film Office’s Andrea Sporcic, who’ll be attending her seventh Sundance fest. “A film like Little Miss Sunshine would never have been recognized if not for Sundance.”
For its first 15 years it was known as the USA Film Festival, a moderately successful regional event that began in Salt Lake City and in 1981 moved to the more culturally copasetic environs of Park City. There it was taken over by actor/director Robert Redford’s acclaimed Sundance Institute, which cultivates independent films and plays. After that, the January event built an unstoppable buzz.
At first Sundance was an unpretentious affair. Filmmakers worldwide submitted their made-on-a-shoestring titles, awards were handed out, elbows were rubbed, everybody left feeling good.
But early on the film industry realized that each Sundance crop would introduce two or three films that could be bought cheap and marketed to moviegoers hungry for something other than the slick emptiness of most big studio releases. The first example came in 1989 when Steven Soderbergh’s shot-on-video Sex, Lies and Videotape won the Audience Award and went on to become a sleeper hit in America’s art houses, launching Soderbergh’s career and those of his stars, Andie MacDowell and James Spader.
In recent years such box-office hits as Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State and Super Size Me all debuted at Sundance. That’s where the national media first heard of them. And the festival’s eager audiences of hard-core moviegoers would return to their homes to rave to anyone who would listen about the great movies they’d seen.
But with success has come second-guessing. Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly‘s chief movie critic, has said that increasingly Sundance is showcasing films with such big names and solid financial backing that the word “independent” doesn’t apply.
Gleiberman has also written about the Sundance “bubble effect,” in which certain films generated a frenzy among festival goers and were fought over by competing distributors. The problem, Gleiberman writes, is that many of these festival favorites become real-world flops. They are “bubbles, destined to burst.”
The classic example of a Sundance bubble movie is Happy, Texas, a comedy about two escaped convicts posing as the coaches for a small-town Texas beauty pageant. Festival audiences in 1999 went nuts for the movie, which was bought on the spot by Miramax for a reported $6 million. When it finally hit theaters nine months later it earned tepid reviews and ended up deep in the red.
Disillusionment with Sundance led to the formation 13 years ago of the Slamdance Film Festival, an “alternative” event that runs concurrent with Redford’s big confab but features movies that are angrier, scuzzier and more countercultural.
Even Sundance’s solid supporters admit it has become more commercial. In her seven years as a festivalgoer, Sporcic said, she has seen ever-greater numbers of corporate sponsors and slumming celebrities.
“What rubs people the wrong way about the Hollywoodization of the fest is that Park City is a small town,” said Russ Simmons, a Kansas City film critic and a regular Sundance attendee. “It’s become inundated with famous faces, people who don’t even go to the movie screenings. It’s party central, and that attracts lots of people who just want to see famous faces.”
That may be off-putting, Sporcic said, but it doesn’t nullify the festival’s accomplishments.
“The first year I went I left knowing I’d want to go every year for the rest of my life,” she said. “For people who love movies and are seeking out new talent, this is still mecca.”
Kevin Willmott, the Lawrence, Kan., filmmaker who took his mini-budgeted film C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America to Sundance in 2004, said the fest is invaluable in getting a low-budget film in front of a large audience.
“For a genuine independent filmmaker Sundance is a huge deal. The day they announced that C.S.A. had been accepted by Sundance I got about 100 phone calls from agents and other folks.”
Willmott said he didn’t mind the fest’s bustling celebrity scene. “It’s cool. It adds to the overall vibe of the festival. And Sundance has evolved so that Hollywood now assists the true independent. It’s a bit of a compromise—the celebrities give the fest a special mystique, and hopefully that’s something the little scrambling filmmaker can take advantage of.”
At the festival Willmott was able to sell C.S.A.—depicting what life would be like if the South had won the Civil War—to IFC Films.
“What Sundance really gives you is the best environment in which to sell your film. All the distributors are there, and they see your film with an enthusiastic audience. The other way is to send a video to an agent’s office where it goes through the pipeline, and you never know if anybody actually watched it.”
Sporcic said that for knowledge of independent filmmaking, Sundance is essential.
“I’m looking for up-and-coming moviemakers. I’m trying to meet them, talk to them and persuade them to make their next film in Missouri. That’s a side of Sundance most people don’t recognize.”
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TO LEARN MORE:
The Sundance Festival runs through Jan. 28 in Park City, Utah.
The Sundance Channel will air Festival Dailies, live updates and recaps throughout the event. For a schedule, go to sundancechannel.com.
For more about this year’s films, go to festival.sundance.org.
