Though I experienced a lot of Sundance history, I wasn't there at the beginning. As detailed in Smith's book, the festival started in 1978 in Salt Lake City and, though immediately interested in films made regionally outside the studio system, it had to go through several incarnations and numerous name changes — from the U.S. Film Festival to the Utah/U.S. Film Festival to the United States Film & Video Festival to the Sundance/United States Film Festival to Sundance — to get to where it is today.
It was director Sydney Pollack, or so the story goes, who suggested to the powers that be in 1980 that “you ought to move the festival to Park City and set it in the wintertime. You'd be the only film festival in the world held in a ski resort during ski season, and Hollywood would beat down the door to attend.”
Involved in the festival, almost from the beginning, was local resident Robert Redford, who had purchased land in the Wasatch Mountains as far back as 1969. Redford, related by marriage to Sterling Van Wagenen, the festival's first director, was chairman of its board of directors and the key figure in eventually having his cultural-minded, multidisciplinary arts organization, the Sundance Institute, take on the festival in 1985 and eventually change the name in 1991. Lory Smith, one of the festival's founders, claims in his book, “We were on the cusp of success whether Sundance had become involved or not,” adding “Sundance seemed determined from the outset to rewrite the festival's history as well as its own — to make it seem as if they had rescued a small-time festival from obscurity.” Still, it's undeniable, as Smith himself reports, that Sundance's involvement “catapulted the festival into the stratosphere of press and public attention,” which is where I found it.
My first festival visit was in 1986, when I didn't know enough to bring a heavy coat, skiers still looked down their poles at outnumbered movie interlopers, and the state's beverage consumption laws, once almost Talmudic in complexity, had changed enough to allow the local Chamber of Commerce to boast that “Utah's newly revised liquor laws are almost normal now.”
Though it had been in Park City for five years, the event itself still had some of the sleepy spirit that Errol Morris remembers from showing his pet-cemetery themed Gates of Heaven at the 1982 festival, only the second to be held in Park City. “There was a snowstorm, I was staying in a godforsaken condo and I only had a small idea where it was located,” Morris remembers. “I had to hitchhike back there, and I was picked up by people who'd been in the theater and had hated the movie. They asked me what I thought, and since I had no alternative means of transportation, I said I, too, was extremely disappointed.”
I didn't attend Sundance on a regular basis until the 1992 festival, by which time I'd acquired a reliable winter coat, and American audiences, increasingly let down by the unadventurous, lowest-common-denominator nature of Hollywood production, were acquiring a taste for what Sundance was providing, films that the festival itself amusingly caricatured in a clever, albeit self-satisfied thirty-second spot that began every screening at the 1996 festival.
A project of an ad/film class at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, the spot opened on a unusual assembly line, with impassive workers taking identical cans of film and pushing them through slots of the same size, again and again and again.
But wait. Here's a film that doesn't fit. Alarm bells go off, a crack emergency team appears and thrusts the oversized can into a yellow box marked “Sundance International Film Festival.” “Where do they take it?” someone asks as the offending item disappears inside a departing truck. A coworker gives a laconic, one-word answer: “Utah.”
Almost every year of its existence, Sundance has managed to discover at least one memorable dramatic film. Aside from the features already mentioned, debuts included The Waterdance, In the Soup, Four Weddings and a Funeral (its American premier), The Usual Suspects, Living in Oblivion, Big Night, Ulee's Gold, Girl fight, and You Can Count on Me. And that's only the dramatic features.
On the documentary side, things were even stronger, and Sundance soon got a deserved reputation for being the country's 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