How Sundance sold its soul

On a bracing, brilliantly clear day in Park City, Utah, last week—the sort of day when simply stepping outside into the mountain air sets the tear ducts working in a primitive and automatic rejection of the preposterous cold—two expensively dressed middle-aged women were struggling their way uphill on Main Street, the city's central corridor lined with tourist shops and faux-western storefronts. They stopped short on the crowded sidewalk in exasperation, their lungs gulping against the rarefied atmosphere.

"Maybe we should cross the street and start walking back down," said the taller of the two, in a genteel Southern accent.

"Oh no," said the other. "You can't see people's faces." Owing to the angle of the sun, it seemed, only an uphill trajectory would guarantee well-lit views of their fellow pedestrians. So they marched onward.

Sundance is not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors—many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance poses in opposition toThe advantageous light was required for purposes of identification: The pair was on a gawking circuit of Park City, which was alive with celebrity during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and, like birders on the trail of a long-billed Murrelet, they were not prepared to let a Jeremy Sisto or a Sienna Miller anonymously scamper by in shadow. And they were not alone. Aside from the more than 1,100 credentialed members of the press who descended on Park City over the previous ten days to document the comings and goings of the glitterati during the festival, which concluded on Sunday, it seemed that virtually everybody in Park City who was not a bona fide celebrity was primarily engaged in the art of locating bona fide celebrities, eyeballing them, and calling independent witnesses on their cell phones to commemorate said eyeballing. Of course, it wasn't a banner year for high wattage stars in Park City—no Brad Pitt, no Tom Cruise, no Julia Roberts—so some poor saps had to settle for an Ian Ziering sighting or two. One cab driver—a Middle Eastern fellow named Omar who comes in from Salt Lake City every year to charge Hollywood-types $15 for three-quarters of a mile rides—was reduced to boasting that the previous evening he had driven The Ten director and "Stella" alum David Wain in that very cab! ("He's Jewish, right?" Omar said, to my bewilderment. "I think he's a Jew.")

The relative quality of available celebrity notwithstanding, the organizers of Sundance were on a relentless campaign this year to promote the notion that the festival is about art and cinema, and that the attendant clusterfuck of swag lounges and Hummer limos and party girls dressed up like Eskimo hookers are contrary to its principles. The Sundance Institute executive director Ken Brecher, in a welcome letter printed in the festival's 296-page guide (fat with ads from American Express and Delta), pledged his allegiance to "Robert Redford's commitment to authentic artistry" and "the transformative power of storytelling." The oft-repeated motto was "Focus on Film," and it was intended to gently remind the festivalgoers who focused too much on getting laid or being seen that Papa Redford was watching, and that he was prepared to turn this festival around and go straight back home if everyone didn't pipe down and take in a Dutch documentary about three Chechnyan friends—and don't you dare skip out on the Native Forum reception at the Legacy Lodge, either.

The Sundance Film Festival is about independent cinema in much the same way the quadrennial Republican and Democratic national conventions are about democracy. Which is to say, the Sundance Film Festival is not about independent cinema. It is about status, and money, and self-regard; it's an annual industry junket and trade show. The 400 or so major screenings, mind you, are not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors—many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance disingenuously poses in opposition to—eagerly searching out the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Little Miss Sunshine.

Credentials are the currency of Sundance, and they are governed by an arcane and slightly terrifying bureaucracy of privilege that only a Stalinist could loveThis is not to say that I hold Redford and the festival's organizers personally responsible for the drunk, um, aspiring actress who flashed me and 500 or so other festivalgoers, Mardi Gras-style, from a balcony overlooking Main Street on the festival's third night. Much of what happens in Park City is beyond the control of Sundance. But the festival's arch posturing against commercialization, with Redford inveighing against the swag lounges on Main Street designed to get luxury brands onto the pages of Us Weekly, is too much to take in the face of the omnipresent logos of festival sponsors Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, and AOL. And the dismissive sniffing about "celebrity coverage," which Sundance's chief press handler, Levi Elder, accused me of contemplating when I applied for credentials, becomes petty and egregiously hypocritical when one considers the fact that the fest is programmed deliberately with films featuring stars—Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Mandy Moore, John Cusack—who are trotted out at screenings to stand on fake, tented-off "red carpets" to be photographed in front of backdrops festooned with those aforementioned corporate logos.

The most readily apparent falsehood about Sundance that crashed into reality upon my arrival was the notion that there is anything remotely pleasant about being in Park City. When Robert Redford founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, according to the festival's self-generated lore, he chose the name based not on the character he played in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but on the way the sun dances over the Wasatch Mountains. I was prepared for remote mountain living—quaint lodges, stone hearths, rugged roads—far removed from the poisonous warrens of Los Angeles. But the only thing the sun dances over in Park City is a dismal, ever-creeping sprawl of ugly brown apartment buildings, vinyl-sided tract housing, and parking lots. It is less a resort town than a suburb of Salt Lake City.

Amid all this despoiled nature, with brown-grey snow lingering everywhere, there is little for festivalgoers to do other than obsess about their relative status. In Interview, one of the festival films—which stars Steve Buscemi as a seasoned journalist and Sienna Miller as a troubled Lohan-esque starlet (based on a movie by the murdered Dutch director Theo Van Gogh)—the logic of celebrity is described at one point in binary terms: there are somebodies, and there are nobodies. But of course reality is slightly more complicated. At Sundance, there are in fact 36 lines of demarcation that separate nobodies from somebodies. That's how many varieties of credentials the festival issues, so as to calibrate with the utmost precision the various kinds of access and comforts accorded to attendees and ensure that no one gets any more consideration than they are actually worth.

Credentials are the currency of Sundance, and they are governed by an arcane and slightly terrifying bureaucracy of privilege that no one I encountered truly understood and that only a Stalinist could love. There were four different press passes, for instance, with varying levels of access to which the holders of each are entitled, in a system apparently designed not for efficiency so much as to sew envy and mistrust among the press corps.

The envy is engendered by the fact that almost everything one wishes to do at Sundance—get into a movie, a party, a press conference—involves waiting for some period of time in a crowd of angry people outside in the bitter, relentless cold. Better passes translate, roughly, into less waiting. And for the press, the arbitrary, merciless decisions of publicists—150 credentialed publicists were in attendance—tended to induce a state of what psychological researchers call learned helplessness. Waiting outside for admittance to a press conference one afternoon, among a throng of perhaps 30 other journalists, I was rescued, Schindler's List-style, by a publicist who burst from inside the building, surveyed the crowd (or, to be precise, our badges), and selected three of us who were allowed to come inside. I never learned why, but decided from then on that good things would happen to me if I meekly made sure I was always in eyeshot of a publicist. And when they shined upon you, all the bitterness you previously felt about the better-credentialed prima donnas would melt away, and any sense of solidarity with your freezing, milling brothers and sisters in the cold would dissolve into condescension. See you, suckers!

Much of the waiting time in Park City was for the benefit of getting into the big movie premiere parties, which were often closed by the fire marshal within minutes of starting, after which point the bouncers would only let people enter on a one-out, one-in basis. So even if you had a spot on the guest list, you had to wait in the cold and hope you could reach someone inside important enough to usher you past security ahead of the line. (One hopeful partygoer in line outside the Entertainment Weekly party spotted one such person through the window, and proceeded to bang on it like a 21st-century Benjamin Braddock, screaming, "Text me! I texted you!")

There's a fine line between discovering the innovative films and hoping they find an audience, and picking the films most likely to find an audience and calling them innovativeThe parties themselves are as tame as can be: Gaggles of the aforementioned Eskimo hookers dancing listlessly to an endless thump-thump-thump-thump and drinking the hop-flavored soda that passes for beer in Utah. What celebrities the eagle-eyed partygoer could spot (Jeremy Sisto was everywhere) looked unhappy and bored.

But what about the movies? The films? The art? The cinema? The rank inauthenticity isn't limited to the optics surrounding the festival. There were some wonderful films on display—Grace Is Gone, John Cusack's tear-jerker about a father whose wife is killed in Iraq, is sure to benefit from a The English Patient-magnitude Oscar campaign for Cusack from the Weinstein Co., which bought the film. And Teeth, about an abstinence promoting teen who has teeth up her cooter, was an audience favorite. David Gordon Green's Snow Angels, starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale, is a devastatingly slow build (one of the best films of the festival, it naturally hasn't been picked up). But none of them come close to justifying the smug, self-satisfied vibe on display.

To quote Brecher again, "the mission of Sundance never shines more clearly than when we sit together in a darkened theater." So one has to wonder how that mission was advanced by the screening of the challenging, genre-bending masterpiece known as Saw at Sundance in 2004. Saw is in a lowbrow class all its own—even a Sundance imprimatur convinced no one that it was anything other than stupid and savage. More insidious is the pomp with which thoroughly middlebrow fare gets screened. Who can forget the endless debates about the ethics and aesthetics of filmmaking that followed the divisive premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, or the "authentic artistry" of Moonstruck in 1988? Such films may well be worthy and wonderful, but works of art they are not—and irrespective of the independence with which they were produced, these are not movies that would have been lost to history but for Redford's brave decision to stand by them. They were all lousy with commercial potential, and one suspects they were admitted to the festival not because they represented the very best of independent film but because the festival's programmers needed films that would sell. Sundance's cachet and significance derives from its power as a marketplace, and without a steady track record of launching films like Reservoir Dogs or Sex, Lies, and Videotape or The Blair Witch Project, it is nothing. But there's a fine line between discovering the innovative films and hoping they find an audience, and picking the films most likely to find an audience and calling them innovative.

It seemed that virtually everybody in Park City who was not a bona fide celebrity was primarily engaged in the art of locating bona fide celebritiesJust look at Little Miss Sunshine. The pride and excitement over the film's success was palpable at Sundance—it had earned a record payday of $10.5 million from Fox Searchlight as the breakout hit at last year's festival, and went on to earn nearly $60 million in the states and notch a best picture Academy Award nomination. It's a textbook example of why Sundance is ostensibly a vital, important institution: It found this quirky, lovely little film and gave it a chance to succeed. Except Little Miss Sunshine is about as quirky as xXx: State of the Union. It's a Sundance genre picture, manufactured with the same empty, production-line cynicism as a Jerry Bruckheimer film, except where studios call for a shower scene with the heroine, Sundance calls for an indie-rock soundtrack. And where studios demand Third Act explosions, Sundance calls for a comically dysfunctional family that somehow rights itself. And where studios demand a happy ending, Sundance demands, well, a happy ending. There's been a Little Miss Sunshine in virtually every Sundance going back for years—there's youthful angst, coming of age, miscommunication, and, usually, a long shot of a sad high-school kid riding a bicycle down a suburban street. This year it was Rocket Science, the coming of age tale about a high-school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating stutter and learns something about himself. It's a perfectly good movie, but it's exactly what would happen if Brad Grey called CAA and said, "Gin me up a Sundance picture." Last year it was Little Miss Sunshine. The year before, it was Thumbsucker, the coming of age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc., and The Squid and the Whale, the coming of age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc. Before that it was Garden State. It goes all the way back to Reality Bites in 1994. Some of these are fine films, but they are the products, in their own way, of the same lack of imagination and marketing-driven choices that, according to Redford et al, are slowly destroying Hollywood.

And Sundance presents them to audiences, and the Academy, in a big red bow with Redford's "authentic artistry" seal of approval. Would Little Miss Sunshine have been received so warmly, and heralded as such an inventive picture, had it not been through the Sundance mill prior to its release? Or would more critics have recognized it, as did Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, as a collection of characters that are "walking, talking catalogs of screenwriter index-card data"?

It wasn't until my last day at Sundance, when I was able to secure access to the Fred Segal swag lounge, where just minutes before, Teri Hatcher, Adam Brody, and Crispin Glover—yes, Crispin Glover—had been pocketing $600 shoes and $30 T-shirts, that I learned the true slogan for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. "Focus on Film" works fine for the rabble, but it is in the restricted-access, important-people-only dens like the Fred Segal lounge that the actual information is handed out. And it made so much sense when I heard it, standing next to a line of whimsical T-shirts based on a children's books series by Roger Hargreaves: "We need an extra-large for Justin Timberlake's mother—Now!"