Sundance: It’s Hip, Hot and Here to Stay

The Sundance Kid

By John Campbell and Stephen Hunt

It is virtually impossible to talk about Sundance without talking about Robert Redford.

It is Redford the star; Redford the filmmaker; Redford, Mr. Sundance - a man who always wanted to set himself apart from Hollywood. It is the star who became an independent producer in order to make different kinds of film, something that wasn't so usual at the time. It is the business man who made a success of it.

The start of it all is back in the '70s: With his friends, Redford takes advantage of the flower power and revolutionary state of the student population on American college campuses, and borrows money to buy small, unusual and even foreign films and creates an alternative system of film distribution using the universities. He and his friends hope to use the profits to help young directors and to show student films. Scorsese and De Palma will come from this. The foundation of Sundance starts here, during the peace and love era.

It becomes more concrete a few years later, when Redford falls in love with the beauty of Utah and buys a piece of land around Park City on which to build his house. With the fee he makes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he buys the whole surrounding valley to keep it from being destroyed by a real estate project. This is when Redford creates the Sundance Institute, intending it to be a safe haven for budding filmmakers and a place where creativity can blossom far away from the pressure, demands and control of Hollywood.

A few years later - in 1985 - he merges the institute with the pre-existing Utah/U.S. Film Festival and moves the event from Salt Lake City to Park City. It becomes the Sundance Film Festival, though not officially changing its name until 1991. It is the beginning of a beautiful adventure.

That first year, the festival received submissions of only 50 films. Today, the selection is fierce and merciless - thousands of films are submitted and many filmmakers start dreaming whilst waiting for the decision, hoping for their film to be part of the ultimate selection, an achievement in itself and something they know could change their lives forever. This year, 120 features will be screened from 2,613 films submitted for consideration, along with 82 short films chosen from almost 4,000 received by the Festival.

The once rogue and independent festival has, ironically, developed into a rite and a fixture of the establishment it once eschewed. Come the end of January, thousands of people plan to be in one place and one place only - Park City - with 20,000 others. Everyone in "the business" is there for the same reason: to look for their gem - the film that will create the buzz or the director who will make the headline; the one everyone will talk about.

Today, Sundance means 42 world premieres, nine North American premieres and nine U.S. premieres. Any chance to get to a screening is seized with both hands and defended to the death.

Twenty years later, it is the success story everyone knows, one of the most celebrated and talked about film festivals in the world - a must-see for film industry professionals, a film buff's dream and the ultimate dream for filmmakers looking to have their shot at the big time.

And Sundance is more than the institute and the film festival. It is also a TV channel, cinema chains and an online film festival (www.sundance.org) which will run from January 20, the start of the festival, through June 20, 2005.

But despite all the success, Sundance holds firm to its founding principles and retains the spirit in which it all started, aiming to reduce the gap that exists between independent cinema and Hollywood.

"Every year a new generation of American independent filmmakers reinvents independent film," observes Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival. "We're excited about discovering these films and filmmakers, and about presenting them to our audiences. The Festival continues to evolve and we work to remain connected to the global community of independent filmmakers even as social, political, and economic realities around the world are constantly changing. This year the Festival is screening some of the most artistically innovative films and inspired storytelling we have ever seen."

All that is indeed true. But in the end, the spirit there is of a kid and his simple dream.

"The idea is to create an environment where work and play are one, and the energy that arises from it, irreplaceable," says Robert Redford. "Paramount to this effort is the fact that this is all for and about the filmmakers: their labors, their loves, and the product that results."

May that spirit never die.

The Man Behind the Kid 

George W. has Karl Rove. Simon had Garfunkel. Scorsese had De Niro and

now DiCaprio. But there aren't many better teams - when it comes to independent film - than Redford and Geoffrey Gilmore.

Gilmore is the director of the Sundance Film Festival, 2005 being his 14^th year in the position and the 14^th year that the festival formerly known as the Utah/USA Film Fest has been known as the Sundance Film Festival. On his watch, Sundance has weathered the slings and arrows of burgeoning buzz (sex, lies, and videotape, Class of '89) outrageous commercial success (Blair Witch Project, Fest of '99), and highly-priced, bidding-war flops that went out into the world fizzling instead of sizzling (The Spitfire Grill, Fest of '96). Sundance has gone from obscure bastion for undiscovered talent to a cultural brand (see ‘Starbucks' in your Business 101 Macro Economics textbooks).

But the Sundance Film Festival didn't emerge from the carefully laid plans of founder Robert Redford and Gilmore one night over hot chocolate. Rather, it grew like a lot of films do, from somebody saying, ‘I've got an idea,' into the pre-eminent showcase of American independent cinema and one of the top four film festivals (along with Cannes, Venice and Toronto) in the world. But that doesn't quite sum it up; what Sundance has really done is to change the way we watch films. Thanks to Sundance - the festival and its developmental labs - whole generations, races, genders and sexual orientations have found ways to get films made - and, more importantly, seen in theatres and on televisions across the United States and throughout the world. Says Gilmore, "What we've done is open up the marketplace."

I'll say.

Back in 1978, however, it was still the Utah/USA Film Festival - not exactly a location ready to take its place in a sentence alongside Cannes. It was a small festival that struggled to find an audience. Mostly, it was a winter retreat for independent filmmakers who made films no one ever saw, since there were so few venues across the country that exhibited independent films.

Ever since Steven Soderbergh's low-budget independently-made, dramatic feature "sex, lies, and videotape" won Best Picture at Sundance in 1989, then found a distributor and made tons of money, Park City, Utah - in the third week of January - has been on the radar screen of every Hollywood executive.

Over the ensuing decade and a half, Sundance has become the brand best able to break a film outside mainstream film genres. The list of films Sundance first screened for the world reads like a Top 10 of critic's choices. Films like Reservoir Dogs, Gods and Monsters, The Piano, Blair Witch Project, In the Bedroom, Blood Simple, American Splendor, Shine, and Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me are just a few. Huge bidding wars frequently break out in Park City cafes for whatever low-key, quirky, offbeat film generates a lot of buzz - often films which turn out to be a little less heated at the box office than anticipated (such as The Spitfire Grill and Happy, Texas). But that doesn't concern the festival too much, where the relative commercial viability of its brand and the films it screens are seen almost as a diversion from its actual mandate, which is to consistently locate the edge of the filmmaking envelope. But that doesn't mean that the festival in any way turns away the former.

"Nowadays, Sundance does both independent and mainstream," Gilmore says. "The festival has created a crossover between the independents and studios. There was a time when very, very few people who worked in the independent film world ever crossed over to work in the studio world. Now there's a lot more of that sort of cross-pollination. On the other side, Brian Grazer and Imagine Films have a documentary in this year's festival. DreamWorks has a film here. The boundaries between independent film and the studios have blurred, and Sundance has been a large part of that."

One of the beneficiaries of this blurring of the lines has been the documentary film. It's no coincidence that as the Sundance brand has exploded over the years, we have experienced a golden age for documentary film making - and watching. This golden age has made a superstar out of Michael Moore, whose first film, Roger and Me, debuted at Sundance alongside sex, lies and videotape in 1989, before becoming one of the unlikeliest hit movies of that year. Flash forward to 2004, and many documentaries, including Fahrenheit 911, The Control Room, Outfoxed, Dig, Riding Giants, Nonny de la Pena's Unconstitutional, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me and others have received theatrical distribution - something that never happened in the supposed ‘golden age' of filmmaking, the 1970s.

What's new in 2005? The International Film Competition is a category in which the festival hopes to increase the profile of international films from around the world much the way they have increased the profiles of independent directors and documentary filmmakers over the past decade and a half. "We've shown international films since I've been here - as many as forty international films at a time," Gilmore says. "By creating the International Films Competition, we increase the platform for visibility of these films."

There have been attempts over the past several years to expand Sundance into the world of theatrical exhibitor, too, in effect to provide venues for the same films that play the festival every year and quite often struggle to find distributors willing to send their films out into the world. Though earlier attempts to open a chain of Sundance theaters fell apart in the face of budget constraints, Sundance isn't giving up. "It's still in the discussion stages," Gilmore says. "It's something we have a commitment to do."

In fact, the Sundance Festival has helped to shape the look and voice of filmmaking so much, it is possible to say that Robert Redford's lasting legacy will not be the movies he made but will be the films - and filmmakers, actors and producers - he shepherded via Sundance.

But with all the success has come celebrity, and there's no denying that Sundance will never be the small and intimate venue it once was. Though Gilmore agrees, he doesn't see the fame as obstructive to the original purpose. On the contrary, he says it is all good for the up and coming, and there is no need to try to downsize.