Sundance: Get it Together, Indie A-Holes
What part of 'extinction event' do you not understand?
If this column has a mission, it’s to try and be the one corner of Hollywood that says what its author actually thinks rather than positioning or carrying water for this or that source or interest. For better or worse, even when my instinct is completely out to lunch — as it no doubt often is — I can look any reader in the eye and say I have never published a syllable here that I didn’t in my heart believe to be the truth.
Which is why writing today’s column was so hard. Because I write it with the deep, almost religious affection for Sundance and all I’ve gotten to be a part of for more than 20 years of festival going. As much as Sundance can be blind to its own paradoxes — for all the hassles, the burdens, the silliness of the circus — I’ve always come away with so much to love every year.
For all its contradictions, you still squeeze onto the shuttle bus and see super-agents shoved in next to retirees and volunteers, all asking, “What’ve you seen? What’ve you liked?” More than four decades after this event exploded out of the sleepy little U.S. Film Festival and the then-cloistered arthouse world of the 1980s, every year you still get to witness the Sundance dream: A little filmmaker no one has ever heard of shows up with a movie no one knows anything about that blows the rafters off the auditorium and changes their life forever.
No other festival does anything close to that, or has the proven track record of doing it year in and year out for closing in on half a century.
Which is why the sense that we might be on the brink of losing that produced deep melancholy among festivalgoers this year. And the sense of what that loss would mean both to Hollywood and independent film struck real terror in their hearts.
But frankly, not as much terror as there should be.