PARK CITY, UTAH -- The buzz begins in early January, percolating across various Los Angeles and New York City screening rooms. It's there that press and various movie industry types piece together their first impressions of Sundance films.
Already there have been countless stories of heartache and success. Not every Sundance submission can make it here. For hundreds of hopeful filmmakers, their personal Sundance experience never even gets off the ground.
But the tension builds quickly for those lucky enough to make the Sundance 2000 cut. It's TWA 105, Newark to St. Louis, final destination: Salt Lake City. At 30,000 feet, high above the clouds, the spin-doctoring begins in earnest. What have you heard about Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein's medical condition? Have you made dinner reservations yet? Have you heard the news? The Sex Pistols are going to perform a reunion concert.
The networking bounces aisle to aisle and cell phone to cell phone with ferocity. Not that the flight attendants are sympathetic to their Sundance-destined passengers.
"For those of you with cell phones, make sure that the power is off and stays off throughout the entire flight," one flight attendant announces matter-of-factly. "Turn your cell phones off!" Over the subsequent 10 days that will comprise Sundance Film Festival, circa 2000, it's the one phrase I hear over and over again.
Sundance 2000 begins in surreal fashion. In my six trips to the festival, I've never seen the red clay of the Wasatch Mountains. East Coast flights were delayed by a New York City snowstorm, but Park City is surprisingly balmy. It's an unsettling sight: a snowless Sundance.
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Calista Flockhart
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In the late-night hours of the festival's first night, statistics are compared in the aisles of a Park City supermarket: 113 features, including 17 premieres, will play in front of 190 filmmakers, 750 media reps and more than 1,000 festival volunteers. It's no wonder Park City is bursting at the seams. More than two dozen of the festival films have distribution deals intact, but first-time attendees such as Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and Greg Harrison (Groove) arrive with common goals: promote your film, generate buzz, then close a big-money distribution deal. It's what the Sundance myth is all about.
For Farhad Yawari, promoting his film Dolphins is a one-man job. Yawari's film, about a young mental hospital patient whose goldfish bowl is the source of her watery dream world, didn't make it into Sundance. So Yawari took Dolphins to the competing Slamdance Film Festival. Yawari doesn't have the benefit of a publicist like his Sundance peers. Things are more low-budget on the Slamdance side of Park City.
Yawari doesn't care. He canvasses Main Street here, putting flyers into everyone's hands, banging the drum to get anyone to view his movie. His grass-roots promotion is a joy to watch compared to Sundance's high-powered deal-making.
The problem is that Park City passed an ordinance forbidding the passing out of leaflets along Main Street. Yawari is quickly arrested, taken away by Park City police. The report is sobering.
"Farhad was arrested for soliciting to network," Slamdance press liaison Margot Gerber announces.
What's the price of the Park City dream? For Farhad Yawari, it's freedom itself.
Blair Witch Hauntings
A filmmaker doesn't need a Sundance connection to get his film out to audiences, although it helps. Most of the cinematic class of Sundance 2000 won't ever break the festival bubble. But that's a sobering statistic for another day.
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Mary Harron
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Sundance is about shaking up the world of independent cinema over its 10-day life. It's about asking and answering its own core question: What is American independent film?
Concentric circles of activity swirl around the makeshift screening rooms here. Deal makers powwow with promotion-oriented tub thumpers and career-minded networkers. There is little room left for ordinary consumers to watch the movies.
"It was important to me to show the film in a big audience," What's Cooking director Gurindar Chadha tells an opening night audience at a Salt Lake City performance hall. "I didn't want to have execs sit in an empty screening room and watch it."
What's Cooking sets its story on four Los Angeles families -- Latino, Jewish, African-American and Vietnamese -- over Thanksgiving. It's a film that flaunts its commercial intentions openly. While What's Cooking's ensemble storytelling can claim some funny moments, its drama fails to collect its various plots into a cohesive whole.
Sundance 2000 is trumpeting its diverse lineup. Approximately 40 films here are helmed by women filmmakers. What's Cooking fits the profile perfectly: Chadha, a British-Indian filmmaker best known for her 1993 drama Bhaji on the Beach, made Los Angeles' ethnic diversity the core of her family drama
What's Cooking, like all Sundance films, hopes to make a sale. There is no guaranteed recipe for financial success. You wade through the hotel rooms-turned-publicity offices, press suites and media centers of the Shadow Ridge Resort. Here is Sundance's epicenter of buzz. Looking for the latest gossip? Just follow the trail of empty Evian bottles.
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Holly Hunter gets mobbed
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Manufacture hype, construct rumors, then stamp it out like a cheap cigarette lighter. Or maybe a wool scarf, a ski hat, matchbooks or any of the countless giveaways that pile atop Shadow Ridge tables. To the first-time observer, Sundance might be mistaken for a tacky flea market.
Filmmakers who look to last year's The Blair Witch Project can be forgiven for wanting to repeat Sundance's greatest success story. It's what the Sundance myth is all about: a low-budget film that catches everyone by surprise and seals a festival distribution deal on its way to commercial success. If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big.
"I'm Bob Redford," Sundance founder Robert Redford says before introducing Stanley Tucci's latest film, Joe Gould's Secret. "I want to reiterate something we've said year after year after year that gets lost in the sea of hype and whatever. This is for the filmmakers. That's the whole point."
Redford's plea gets lost in the applause, camera flash bulbs and the inevitable festival buzz. It does every year. The 1,000-plus audience settles down to watch Tucci's tale about New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (played by Tucci himself) and his famous relationship with a Greenwich Village eccentric named Joe Gould (Ian Holm).
It doesn't matter that Joe Gould's Secret is a disappointment. Tucci's film came to Sundance with a distribution deal intact. The cell phones ring into the opening credits, and the auditorium's darkness is shattered by the glow of countless Palm Pilots. You have to admit: Few places embrace high technology as lovingly as the Sundance mob.
Brushes with Celebrity Greatness
Nothing promotes a Sundance movie like a pretty celebrity face. You can squeeze publicity just about anywhere. Paparazzi surround the likes of Jodie Foster, Julianna Margulies, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman on their way into screenings. A hotel ballroom becomes a makeshift photo studio. TV cameras make full use of the snow-capped mountains and the wide-open skies. Everything is so photogenic.
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Ethan Hawke
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Lights are set up. Make-up artists keep busy primping Calista Flockhart's famous ringlets of blonde hair. Flockhart has taken a break from TV's Ally McBeal to promote the ensemble-female drama Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her. She smiles gamely under the glow of camera flash bulbs.
"I really like the environment up here," Flockhart says with a smile. "It seems really fun. It seems like a community."
The media rush is relentless. An Entertainment Weekly photographer gets to work. The flash bulbs pop, and Flockhart, paired with her Things You Can Tell colleagues Holly Hunter, Valeria Golino, Amy Brenneman and Kathy Baker, showboats for the camera. Who knew a hotel ballroom could be so glamorous?
Sundance comes with its own fashion accessories. I've never seen so many pairs of Prada boots in one place. "Fluff Mommas" (furry snow boots) are de rigeur. It's tough to look glamorous and maintain Sundance's frantic pace. The lesson is that looking good will help sell and promote one's picture.
Celebrity excitement turns into celebrity confusion in the lobby of a Park City hotel. A Sundance staffer with a large orange sign that reads "Driver" walks up to me and asks, "Aren't you director Kevin Smith? I'm your ride."
I decide that Smith is the best-looking of all the veteran Sundance filmmakers. I'll make a point to tell him so before the week is through.
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Keith Gordon
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Psycho Killing
Interviews take place in an out-of-the-way condo. Information is not forthcoming. Simply finding the condo turns out to be a chore. Though an underground parking garage, up three flights of steps, push your way past TV cameras and photographers into the small living room.
American Psycho, based on the notorious Bret Easton Ellis novel about a young Wall Street psychopath, is the first "event" picture of Sundance 2000, and director Mary Harron and star Christian Bale have some explaining to do. Earlier that morning, someone passed out during a screening of the film. Sending someone to the hospital wasn't the impact they were hoping to make.
"This is an '80s satire with some violence versus a very violent film that happens to be a satire," Harron says.
American Psycho's Jan. 21 premiere was typical Sundance chaos. An onrush of crowds. A packed lobby where it's impossible to move. This is movie screening-turned-rock concert. And the assembled press waits. We wait for tickets. We wait for a publicist to shoehorn us inside the theater. Inside, away from the frenzy, the start of the movie is almost a letdown.
On the screen, Bale dances a jig as American Psycho's bloodthirsty Bateman. He kicks up his heels with boyish glee. He reaches for a stylish transparent rain slicker and a gleaming ax. In one quick swoop, his apartment floor becomes a puddle of blood.
American Psycho came to Sundance with the best buzz money can buy. It's the first "must-see" movie of Sundance 2000. But the jabs at high-living 1980s are surprisingly flat. The humor never reaches a high-point. The violence is never thrilling. The capacity crowd is surprisingly subdued. "Event" pictures at Sundance are not supposed to be this mediocre.
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And then there's always the mountains.
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Harron always knew it would be a tough film for certain audiences to embrace. She confirmed her fears at a public forum the following day.
"The moderator asked this crowd of people, which of them had seen the movie, and everyone raised their hands," she says. "Then he asked which of them liked the movie: Only four hands went up."
Surprise Me
In a hotel ballroom that's been turned into a makeshift screening room, away from the Hollywood publicity machines and paparazzi photo ops, one revels in the films themselves. It's here you make the cinematic discoveries that determine the level of artistic success for each Sundance edition. Director Julien Temple's frantic mix of pop culture history and quick-edit hipness turns The Sex Pistols documentary, The Filth and the Fury, into an entertaining roller-coaster ride.
Soft Fruit, an Aussie dramedy from writer/director Christina Andreef, keeps its tongue firmly planted in the side of its cheek for this tale about a dysfunctional family coping with a mother's death. The result is storytelling both funny and touching.
An afternoon screening of You Can Count on Me turns into the festival's most satisfying surprise. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's film is about two orphaned siblings (Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo) who reconcile their different lifestyles as adults. It becomes the type of rich discovery that more than makes up for Sundance's logistical headaches.
An emotionally moving film like You Can Count on Me is why you wade through crowded press screenings. It's why you fidget on stiff metal chairs on makeshift platforms. It's what Sundance is supposed to be about: discovering a great film.
Crimes and Misdemeanors Revisited
Rumors, buzz and scuttlebutt continue. They are an unstoppable Sundance trio. Marketplace gossip eventually becomes confirmed fact. Sony Pictures Classics buys the Hip Hop film Groove for $1.5 million. Artisan, the force behind The Blair Witch Project, acquires the Blow-Up Pictures' competition film Chuck and Buck. There is mounting interest in Karen Kusama's Girlfight and the romantic-comedy Happy Accidents.
Snowfall has finally brought some mystery back to Park City. It's a welcome sight.
"I'm told this is Sundance, but I didn't recognize it without the snow," says director Alan Rudolph, here at the festival with his screwball comedy Trixie.
It's under this cleansing snowfall that Farhad Yawari returns to Main Street armed with a new fistful of flyers. His film still has some Slamdance screenings left. He refuses to let anyone stand in his way of attracting an audience.
Park City is a film-eat-film battlefield. It's reassuring that Yawari hasn't given up the fight.
Sundance 2000 closes Sunday with its annual awards ceremony. Look for a complete wrap-up in next week's CityBeat.
