Sundance

      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