Sundance 2009: Park City in Repose (Or: The Fest That Was)

Now nearly 10 days out from Park City and this year's anniversary edition of the vital US independent film mecca is beginning to come into sharper focus.  What we were sensing mid-week - the gathering word-of-mouth buzz that the fest was coming up short (at very least in comparison to 2008's remarkable lineup of WIRE, TROUBLE, MYTHS, POLANSKI, BETRAYAL, ANVIL and many others) has continued to play out as everyone returned from the high altitude.

News broke Monday afternoon on what will likely go down as the fest's biggest sale - a multi-layered deal for the Narrative Competition winner PUSH: BASED ON THE NOVEL BY SAPPHIRE that involved LionsGate, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey.  The $5.5 million deal was the result of some fancy footwork by sales rep kingpin Cinetic Media, as indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reported:

"'This a return to what Sundance is supposed to be as a market,” an enthused John Sloss from Cinetic told indieWIRE today, elaborating a strategy that included screening the movie at the Magic Johnson theater in Harlem days before it’s Sundance world premiere. Buoyed by an 80% definite recommend rating out of the Harlem showing, they battled an unfortunate first screening time that had PUSH playing against Antoine Fuqua’s BROOKLYN'S FINEST.

By awards night last Saturday at Sundance, Lee Daniels and Cinetic had enlisted the support of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, who watched the movie prior to the festival. They then spent the week putting together a deal, with the Lionsgate team at Cinetic’s New York office to close the deal. Winfrey will support the release through her Harpo Films, while this will be the first movie affiliated with Perry’s 34th Street banner."

The PUSH sale marks a business-side highlight for the festival, which began with a number of hot titles that didn't attract the attention or buyers that they had hoped.  Among these, the Micheal Cera/Charlene Yi-starring hybrid film PAPER HEART.

Most of the Sundance 2009 docs that were looking for a theatrical deal are still in the hunt.  Arthouse Films made deals last week for two documentary competition titles - ART & COPY and WILLIAM KUNTSLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE and to date, that's all she wrote.  Granted, many of the films already had a television home waiting for them (counts vary, but HBO seems to have had as many as 7 films amongst the two competitive documentary sections), but even many of those films were holding out hope for a theatrical run.

However, one must keep in mind that the biggest doc to emerge from Sundance 2008 - James Marsh's MAN ON WIRE, didn't close its deal with Magnolia until a couple weeks after the fest was over.  A number of films are said to be in ongoing talks with distributors, including RJ Cutler's THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE and Grand Jury Prize winner WE LIVE IN PUBLIC from director Ondi Timoner.  We will likely hear more about those films and others in the coming weeks.

Also worth watching are the films themselves - particularly whether (or should we say how much) some of them will change in the months to come.  Tweaks, both large and small, are nothing new following major festival premieres.  Last year alone, Oscar nominee THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON) and shortlisted film I.O.U.S.A. both underwent revisions between their Park City premiere and the eventual theatrical release.  In his Sundance summary on the Stranger Than Fiction blog, Thom Powers notes that one of the World Cinema award winners is already planning on heading back into the edit suite:

"(BIG RIVER MAN Director John) Maringouin told me after the awards that he’s still not finished. He intends to go back to the edit room where I expect he’ll make a strong film even stronger."

Agnes Varnum, who came to Sundance for the second time, offered a pointed (and on-point) critique of this year's festival, questioning the fest's reliance this year on films that already had a home:

"My impression of more recent years, before I attended, was that it was an over-hyped, corporate A-list party. But it isn’t really either of those things… for me. The work is solid. Too solid. While there are more filmmakers than I can name off the top of my head whose new work was presented and I was as eager as anyone to see, there were few surprises. As many others are saying, I appreciated the mellow atmosphere so I didn’t have to fight crowds or miss out on screenings I really wanted (except THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE) but there wasn’t any film that wowed me with its exceptionalism.

As a friend pointed out, why do we need to trek all the way to Sundance to see films made for HBO or American Experience or Sony Pictures Classics or Focus Features? This is work we will be able to see, despite Redford and long-time Sundance fellows’ comments to the contrary in the festival’s opening trailer shown before each screening. Sundance might once have been a spot where you could see work that you couldn’t see anywhere else, but with so many movies already poised for distribution, everyone will have the ability to see them in the coming year. That is a great thing for the filmmakers and audiences who will enjoy such well made films, but where is the heady experimentation or shock or freshly inspired work?"

Speaking of the Stranger Than Fiction blog, Raphaela Neihausen offered a number of excellent posts from Park City, which she attended for the first time.  Of particular note, she blogs about seeing 5 films in a day as well as a conversation between journalists Nicholas Kristof (subject of REPORTER) and Samantha Power (author of the book "Chasing the Flame", on which the documentary SERGIO was based).

Over at the IDA website, both Tamara Krinsky and Eddie Schmidt were blogging regularly during the festival.  Together, they offer a fairly comprehensive look at the festival, including the doc social scene, covering the ITVS/PBS reception, the IDA's own house party and the Cinema Eye nominations.

In one of her pieces, Krinsky noted something that we were hearing a lot of: even in the unseasonably comfortable weather, no one was excited about making the trek out to the new "home for docs", the Temple Theatre:

"On the plus side, the Temple is a great theater - good sound, right size, comfy seats - all of which make for a pleasant viewing experience. On the negative side, despite the fact that it’s technically in Park City, the Temple is geographically undesirable. And like a great boyfriend who lives on the other side of the country, no matter how cute he is, at the end of the day the relationship's just not going to work. The Temple is outside of the main drag, so if you’re trying to pack in multiple screenings, you’re more likely to choose films at venues that are closer to one another.

A lot of the docs are premiering at the Temple, and to me it kind of felt like they’d been ghettoed outside of the main fest. Sundance has always been a strong supporter of non-fiction, making sure to put the docs on par with the narrative features, so I hope they look into whether or not having so many docs at the Temple affects overall attendance."

Meanwhile, Documentary Magazine editor Thom White takes on the documentary competition title WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE, Tom DiCillo's doc debut about the Doors, a film that many folks I talked to had issues with:

"What irked me most about WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE is its abundance of factual inaccuracies, particularly in DiCillo's ham-fisted attempt (he wrote and delivered the narration) to yoke the artistic and commercial success of The Doors to the cultural zeitgeist of the era. One jaw-dropper: According to DiCillo, the Vietnam War ended in 1972, some three years before it actually did; in addition, the Kent State massacre occurred after Jimi Hendrix died, when it actually happened five months before; the youth, peace and love movement that partly defined the Sixties came to a symbolic end not at Altamont, which is never mentioned in the film, but at the Isle of Wight Festival, where fans tried to crash the concert by tearing down a fence (The Horror!); the demise of The Doors ushered in more insipid music from the likes of the Monkees, who had actually broken up-and gone off the air-- long before The Doors had."

In addition to her Sundance summary, Agnes Varnum also offers reviews of Eric Daniel Metzgar's REPORTER as well as the film that made Jeff Dowd and John Anderson come to blows, DIRT! THE MOVIE. 

Finally, over at the Indiepix blog, Danielle DiGiacomo kicks off a Sundance list meme (I was tagged, but between this and the 25 Random Things meme at Facebook, I think I've gone cold turkey).  Better sports than I are the aforementioned Aggie Varnum, Karina Longworth, Tom Hall, Scott Macauley, Ingrid Kopp and Yance Ford.

Comments

[John Dower]

Blimey - cheer up mate, you sound so depressed after your visit to Utah. Maybe I'm suffering from the naivety of being a Sundance virgin but I thought it was a fucking great festival.

I had a film there (Thriller in Manila) and every screening was virtually sold-out, and we had electric Q & A's. Our Salt Lake City Screening was on the first Saturday night. Myself, one of the exec producers, and the editor went down expecting a threadbare audience (they'll all be at X-Men 3 won't they?) ... and it was packed. There followed the most rousing, intelligent Q & A I've ever had on a film. I've been to several festivals and interest in your film normally fizzles out after the first screening. Quite the opposite here.

Yes we had already been bought by HBO but I 'aint gonna feel bad about that. In fact I feel incredibly honored. And is there really that big a difference in being bought just before the festival to just after it? It didn't seem to matter to our audiences.

I saw some rubbish films, some mediocre films and some great ones, as well as meeting some lovely folk and going to a couple of great parties - what more do you want from a festival? And our competition was won by an extraordinary film, Rough Aunties.

So there haven't been many deals. Well we are in the midst of a dreadful recession (and it isn't a filmmakers right to be bought). I think this is a great blog but you have spent the last few weeks forensically detailing all the fantastic docs of the last year. Maybe you have just been jaded by 'the greatness'. Give the new crop a chance.

jdxxx