It’s a big deal to go to the Sundance Film Festival. Yeah, the cynic in me knows that Sundance is a far cry from what it used to be. I realize that it’s strayed from its original mission to showcase independent films and has been largely hijacked by the studios that use it as just another marketing platform for their “art-house” fare.
Even so, it’s Sundance. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s the “Park City Experience” than just Sundance, however, because Robert Redford’s prodigy hasn’t been the only game in that wealthy Utah ski resort town for a long time. Like the Lutherans splitting off from the Catholics, the Slamdance Film Festival was formed in 1995 when a group of filmmakers whose films Sundance had rejected banded together to hold a concurrent, renegade film festival in a hotel ballroom. A myriad of offshoots quickly followed, including a couple, such as NoDance and Slamdunk, which achieved some level of respectability and acceptance within the indie film world.
All of this means that for a two week stretch in mid-January, the picturesque burg of Park City morphs into a mecca of desperate filmmakers plying their wares to a motley assortment of well-heeled Hollywood insiders racking up huge cell phone bills.
I’d been to film festivals before. My adopted home town of Austin, Texas is a hotbed of indie film in its own right and hosts two of the most respected festivals in the business in SXSW and the Austin Film Festival. It’s also the home of the genre-flavored Fantastic Fest, the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival (AGLIFF), the Austin Jewish Film Festival, and the Cine Las Americas International Film Festival featuring the best in Latin American and indigenous films.
As a longtime film journalist and filmmaker, I’ve been to all of them, but there’s nothing quite like the Park City Experience. For one thing, you can really “attend” a festival in your own town. You don’t really get to experience new surroundings, new restaurants, or new nightlife. Plus, you still gotta get up and go to work the next morning.
Park City is a total immersion experience, especially if, as in my first visit there, you’re wearing more than one hat. The first time I attended all the Park City “…dances,” I was writing extensively for one of the leading indie film publications and knew that my editor expected me to attend and write reviews for at least 5-6 films per day. Meanwhile, I was also there to promote a film I had co-produced that was premiering at Slamdance.
Often, the two tasks went hand-in-hand: Freezing in lines outside theaters while waiting for screenings offered numerous opportunities for shameless self-promotion, as did the seemingly endless shuttle bus rides from venue to venue.
Of course, the best-known venue, in fact what I would consider to be the epicenter of Sundance, is the Egyptian Theatre. This marquee-festooned old-style movie theater serves as the backdrop for nearly every news report that comes out of the festival. The Egyptian also occupies a prime perch at the top of Main Street, a steeply inclined 4-lane road that inexplicably remains open to motorized transportation during the festivals, even though the teeming mass of humanity jostling along its overcrowded sidewalks bustles along at a faster pace than the cars and trucks that stupidly attempt to navigate this grossly overburdened thoroughfare.
And then there are the Main Street Flyer Wars. Filmmakers can get highly creative with their marketing swag, but the single most important piece of promotional propaganda will always be the simple postcard-sized flyer which features full color artwork from the film on the front and information about the film, including its screening times and locations on the back.
It’s literally impossible to print up too many of these, as it’s the primary mission of any film’s producer, director, cast and/or crew member in attendance in Park City to plaster these everywhere. Bulletin boards set up for this purpose on Main Street are quickly layered four or five deep with these flyers, and the turnover is so fast that if shot in time-lapse, they’d resemble those electronic billboards that flip from ad to ad.
I simultaneously attended screenings at Sundance, Slamdance and at least four other offshoot festivals each and every year I made the Park City pilgrimage. Our film played Slamdance to a packed house twice before screening at both SXSW and AFF here at home and ultimately going on to a domestic video release, so mission accomplished on that front, while I lost countless hours of sleep cranking out my film reviews.
It’s been a few years since I’ve made the trip, and I’d love to get back to Park City for Christmas someday. The food’s not great, but remembering its quaint mountain beauty and the leftover Christmas lights twinkling in the January snow, I can just imagine that it would be a great place to spend the Holidays.
For one thing, all those annoying film people like me wouldn’t be there yet. They’d still be at home packing their bags for yet another Park City Experience.
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