Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan
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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.
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