Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan

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СКАЧАТЬ top nonfiction showcase. The momentum for Hoop Dreams, perhaps the best, most influential documentary of the past decade, began here, as it did for Crumb, Theremin, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and Unzipped. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed its rules for becoming a documentary finalist in 2000, a rule partially inspired by Hoop Dreams's previous exclusion, six of the twelve features selected had appeared at Sundance in 1999 and a seventh was set for a Slamdance premier.

      Though the concept soon became a ruinous cliché, Sundance in fact often was the place where you could see talent early. Here was Ashley Judd in Ruby in Paradise, her first major role, easily the friendliest person in town. Here was Quentin Tarantino in a Q&A session after the premier of Reservoir Dogs brazenly telling a viewer upset about the violence, “I don't have to justify it, I love it.” And here was Trey Parker, in Sundance with the slashingly irreverent animated short The Spirit of Christmas, talking about improvising the obscene dialogue with codirector Matt Stone in his basement while his mom was making fudge upstairs. And there was this little series called South Park in the offing as well.

      Because of what it stood for, Sundance became a prime spot to hear the war stories of filmmakers who were almost literally burning to get their projects completed, who talked about overcoming their difficulties with the kind of messianic zeal that In the Soup director Alexandre Rockwell had in mind when he said, “It's great to meet filmmakers who are as crazy as I am and as desperate to make their films.” For example:

       Todd Solondz, whose Welcome to the Dollhouse won the Grand Jury Prize in 1996, reminisced about his first brush with fame, when his NYU short film Schatt's Last Shot created a fuss. When he told his then-agent he just wanted to meet some of these new people, she started crying on the phone, and when he was cornered by a trio from another agency, “one of them got down on his knees and begged. You read about things like this but it's true, it happens.”

      Soon Solondz had simultaneous three-picture deals with two different studios who crazily bickered about the release order of these unmade films. “It turned out the only thing I liked about these deals was telling everyone I had them. I wasn't interested in any of the pictures that came my way, and none of my friends could sympathize: ‘Poor Todd, he has these two three-picture deals.'” He ended up leaving the movie business for a job teaching English as a second language (a profession he wrote into his next feature, Happiness), and whenever anyone asked him about his previous life, “I said I'd been working as a computer programmer, which ended conversation right there.”

       Writer-director Toni Kalem, whose A Slipping-Down Life portrayed a woman fixated on a rock singer, told an appropriately obsessive tale about how her film ended up in the 1999 festival. Herself an actress (she was Gianelli in Private Benjamin and has a part in The Sopranos), Kalem said she'd been interested in turning the Anne Tyler novel into a film for nearly two decades (“since I pilfered the book from Random House when I worked there as a secretary”) and originally wanted to play the starring role herself.

      “Other people buy houses or buy cars, I had a ‘Slipping-Down Life' habit,” Kalem explained. “I took acting jobs just to pay for the option. I had horrible, horrible moments when I thought someone else would do it; I once took the red-eye to New York to save my option. Everyone said, ‘Toni, you've done enough, let it go.' But I said, ‘If I can't do it my way, I'll keep optioning it; I'll come up here in a walker if I have to.'”

       Marc Singer, the director of Dark Days, the most talked-about documentary in the 2000 festival and the winner of the audience award, the freedom of expression award, and half of the cinematography award, had a back story as strong and compelling as his on-screen material.

      More than five years in the making, Dark 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 СКАЧАТЬ