The Sundance Hustle

The first rule of Sundance is that you talk about Sundance. A lot. More than 20 years have passed since Robert Redford’s institute for upstart filmmakers absorbed the annual responsibilities of the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and incessant chatter of industry and media types continues to circulate around the intimate resort town, full of sound and fury. It started, arguably, when the scraggly 26-year-old director Steven Soderbergh skyrocketed to national acclaim after the success of sex, lies, and videotape at the festival in 1989. Echoing the revitalized American cinema of the early ’70s, small movies suddenly appealed to studios. As the legend goes, Sundance became a launch pad for aspiring craftsmen eager to dive into the whirlwind of fame.

Then came the inevitable backlash: Accusations that the supposed artists’ ghetto was more Hollywood than Hollywood itself; the commercialization of the gathering, marked by ugly party rampages and shameless celebrity ogling, mangled the notion that the festival harbored creativity. The 2006 critical and commercial victory of festival pick-up Little Miss Sunshine suggested to some optimists that the original spirit of the fest lived on; others deemed the movie a mediocre entry that outshined more deserved titles.

However you choose to perceive the situation, Sundance fights an uphill battle to retain its pride. So when Redford, unironically sporting a “Focus on Film” pin, inaugurated the 2007 festival with a press conference, he adopted a rigid tone. “I just want to remind people that—despite what the festival’s becoming in a larger sense—in our mind, we programmed it like a festival, not a market,” he said.

This assertion seemed to tick some people off. Stripping the festival of its market status was a “foolish comment,” complained the Hollywood Reporter. For Tony Safford, senior vice president of acquisitions at Fox Searchlight and former program director of the festival—and one of the players in last year’s milestone purchase of Sunshine—Redford’s distinction was a distraction. “Over the course of several years, beginning with sex lies and videotape, this has become a vital [marketplace],” said Safford. “To ignore that—even to say that it’s not the festival’s intent—I think is disingenuous.” A more vituperative reaction came from David Poland, founder of the popular website Movie City News, ranting about Redford in a video blog entry shot in the middle of the madness on Park City’s Main Street. “You know what, Bob? It’s a market,” the pejorative Poland declared. “Do you know what would happen if it was just a festival? The Little Miss Sunshine van would still be here, because they wouldn’t even have sold the damn movie. The truth of the matter is, you still program a lot of shit, you still program a lot of commercial crap. ‘We’re not a market!’ Bullshit.”

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One week earlier and 2,000 miles northeast, Marco Williams dined at an East Village café looking jaded. A gentle soul sporting lavish dreadlocks and an unflagging sense of creative purpose, Williams represents the softer side of Sundance’s off-kilter trajectory in the post-Soderbergh era. His debut documentary, In Search of Our Fathers, premiered at Sundance in 1992, the same year Quentin Tarantino invaded the scene with Reservoir Dogs.

Williams, whose early career saga is recounted in Billy Frolick’s 1996 nonfiction tome What I Really Want to Do is Direct, still does. But his hopes of permeating the Hollywood perimeter have taken a backseat to several honorable documentary projects and teaching gigs—first at the North Carolina School of the Arts, now at NYU. “All these young guns were telling everyone to see my documentary,” he recalls, referring to Tarantino and his ilk. “The buzz everywhere was with this film. It didn’t get jack shit.”

His current festival offering, Banished, presents a wrenching account of African-American families forced to flee their communities in the aftermath of the Civil War. Arriving at the festival with a PBS deal in place, Williams had different expectations than he did during his first Sundance encounter. “This time around, I don’t really expect it to get an award,” he said. “Would I like it to get an award? Look, I don’t enter a competition to lose.”

Turns out Williams’ intuition was dead-on: Banished performed well for Sundance audiences and garnered critical acclaim in Variety, but the festival jury—and the distributors—aimed their attention elsewhere. For what it’s worth, a Sundance prize alone doesn’t imply large viewership. This year’s recipients of the Documentary and Dramatic Grand Jury Prizes, Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala and Chris Zalla’s Padre Nuestro, left the festival without distribution.

The most substantial champion was probably Grace is Gone, a low-key offering from first-time director Jim Strouse. The movie stars John Cusack as a blue collar conservative whose wife dies during military service in Iraq. It won the festival’s Audience Award and was quickly purchased by the Weinstein Company for $4 million shortly after its premiere. Word on the street was that former Mirimax titan Harvey Weinstein had Oscar plans for Cusack’s dour turn.  “Harvey came the most aggressively,” Strouse said confidently, a day after the purchase. “[He] understood it in a way that made me think ‘[he’s] someone who’s gonna put a lot of might and a lot of experience behind it.’” In other words, expect the awards campaign later this year.

Other big winners on the distribution end of things suggest readymade marketing strategies: The demented kid who ruins his family in Joshua (It’s Bad Seed meets Rosemary’s Baby!), purchased by Fox Searchlight for $3.7 million; horror schlock about a carnivorous vagina in Teeth (Revel in ridiculousness!), co-purchased by the Weinstein Co. and Lionsgate for $2.5 million; the strangely lyrical Zoo, a quasi-documentary about Washington residents who have sex with horses (Relax; it’s primarily comprised of gorgeous forest footage), acquired by THINKfilm before the festival started. The biggest purchase occurred when Paramount Vantage plunked down $7 million for the family adventure yarn Son of Rambow (the title is an intentionally misspelled swipe at the ’80s franchise).

In light of these developments, Williams’ predictions were practically prophetic. “I think most of the distributors there are looking for the things that are most obvious,” he said.“Americans don’t go to the movie theater to watch films about race relations. You come to appreciate that it’s a market.”

***

Festival or market? It’s a question weighed down with pomposity, signifying nothing. On one frosty morning on Main Street during the fest, energetic starlet Parker Posey devoured a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (an official Sundance sponsor) and highlighted the exasperating ambiguity of such a turgid query. “I’m here with two digital movies and both of them were shot for a million dollars,” she said with a grin, referencing her roles in Zoe Cassavetes’ debut feature Broken English and Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim, both screening at the festival. “Conceptually, studio films have to be so much more broad. Movies are a big part of America.”

She took a breather, another bite, and continued. “It’s a worldwide market. The movies are bigger … Like The Queen. I love The Queen. It’s such a great indie movie. But then we have stuff like Babel and Children of Men—but those have big budgets. I wouldn’t call them independent.” 

Trying to make heads or tails of independent filmmaking within the context of Hollywood politics leaves many members of the industry befuddled and satisfied simply enjoying the festival swag. Cassavetes, who came to Sundance having already arranged distribution for Broken English with Magnolia Pictures, has a keen perspective on the scene, likely due to her heritage: Her father, John Cassavetes, was the famed actor who funded his adventurous filmmaking endeavors out of his own pocket, virtually kick-starting New York’s thriving independent film scene.

“It was amazing to watch all that going on as a child in the house, hiding under tables and observing,” the director said. “People need their films to be seen, and they need to sell them. There’s a certain energy and excitement about it. As long as you keep your head on straight, I think it's all good.”

***

Cut to a midday meeting on the outskirts of Park City. Williams, fresh from a productive Q&A session following a screening of Banished, met two of his former students from North Carolina at the local Marriot—David Gordon Green and Craig Zobel, both directors with films in the festival. Green, a 31-year-old indie success story best known for his 2000 debut feature George Washington, was in town accompanying his most ambitious and tragic achievement, the sprawling drama Snow Angels. The movie centers on a decayed relationship between two fragile characters embodied by Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. It could be Green’s most unhindered vision, now that he’s in the planning stages for his first studio-funded movie, an action-comedy called The Pineapple Express—a departure for Green in terms of subject matter and budget.

Zobel, a colleague of Green’s since they were students, has directed his first feature, The Great World of Sound. A poignant mixture of hidden camera aesthetics and scripted sequences, Sound tells the story of two desperate music producers roped into a scam that requires them to force musicians to pay their company upfront. The filmmakers placed a real ad in the newspaper and conducted genuine auditions, threading them into the movie’s larger narrative. Staggeringly mature and involving, Sound was one of Sundance 2007’s hidden treasures. Neither film found a distributor during the festival.

Sitting across the table from his ex-disciples, Williams remains the concerned mentor. “You’ll get a distributor, right?” he asked.

Green shrugged. “You see all these overnight sales, and you’re like, ‘oh well,’” he said. “I tracked [the sales] pretty successfully during the first three days. Then I started to get phone calls, and I was like, ‘Is this about—no, I guess it’s not about that.’”

Zobel echoed the sentiment. “It’s a hard business,” he said. “I came here and was like, ‘I’m not going to think about [distribution] at all,’ and then, last night, I was totally thinking about that.”

The three also discussed the risks of choosing to become a filmmaker, rather than a film worker. “Within the film world, if you step away, it’s hard to get back in,” said Williams. Zobel agreed. “It was horrifyingly scary to say, OK, I’m going to stop working and try to make this movie,” he said. For Green, the danger is a tendency toward greed. “When you acquire responsibility and get really comfortable with money, why go out on a limb?” he said. “I try my best to say to directors, ‘just stay in the fucking middle,’” added Williams. “Otherwise …” He stopped for a moment, a distant look in his eyes. “Otherwise, you could be very disappointed.”

***

Three days after the festival ends, its constituents still sound groggy. Steve Buscemi, the popular character actor who starred in two entries this year—Tom DiCillo’s Delirious and Interview, which Buscemi wrote and directed based on the original version by the late Theo Van Gough—didn’t find a distributor for either of the productions. “Talking about all this stuff just doesn’t hold a whole lot of interest for me,” he said.“I was certainly hoping that we would get [distribution] while we were there, but I wasn’t expecting it. There’s not going to be a Little Miss Sunshine every year. If that’s attracting buyers, I just hope they go in with a little more open mind.” 

Bucking the distribution game, the real champion of the festival might be Chris Zalla, director of the Spanish language drama Padre Nuestro, the story of a Mexican immigrant who poses as a New York resident’s long-lost son. The film, Zalla’s directorial debut, took the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category, stirring Zalla to deliver an acceptance speech that ran over nine minutes. “When we got into Sundance, we said that we were at mile 12 of a 26-mile marathon,” Zalla said, back in his element after returning to New York. “After we won the Grand Jury Prize, we said we were probably at mile 16. The whole distribution and marketing side of a movie,” which hasn’t concluded yet for Padre, “is still a very real part of that journey.”

Speaking from the business angle, Safford expressed satisfaction with the purchases Fox Searchlight made at the festival, admitting his professional limitations. Asked to explain his company’s decision to pass on Snow Angels—the sort of passionate work that screams for acclaim—he said, “I think it’s very, very good filmmaking. I thought it was one of the better-made films out there. It’s just so unrelentingly bleak. It’s about depressed people in a bleak environment with unhappy lives. Jesus Christ. How do you get ‘em to go to that?”

And if this year’s purchases don’t make bank at the box office? “We’ll never know until it’s too late,” said Safford. “It’s a little like believing in god.”