Sundance Film Festival

My blog is intended to be daily, but as German Field Marshall von Molke noted, no plan survives contact with the enemy, in this case the blitzkrieg of screenings, parties, panels, new equipment displays, music performances, and endless chance encounters that Sundance inflicts. Plus that all-night jam session in the basement of New York entertainment attorney Jonathan Gray’s condo. Not my fault they needed a bass player.

Speaking of sleep deprivation, not one but two Sundance films from veteran directors tackle the topic of sleeplessness: Alan Berliner‘s Wide Awake and Haskell Wexler‘s Who Needs Sleep? Berliner‘s film explores the personal consequences of insomnia, while Wexler‘s examines the dangers, even lethality, of sleep deprivation among film industry workers, especially those who routinely put in days of 14, 16, even 18 hours on the set, then drive home woozy.

Wexler, who‘s 80 and has been making Who Needs Sleep? for seven years, runs around with the verve and audacity if not boorishness of Michael Moore, taking on everyone from leaders of IATSE 600 (camera union) to OSHA in Washington, California OSHA, even producers like Darryl Zanuck Jr., who says matter-of-factly, “There is no such thing as civilized hours in the movie business.”

After the death of 2nd Assistant Cameraman Brent Hershman, who fell asleep at the wheel returning home in 1997 from the set of “Pleasantville,” an industry movement for a minimum 12-hour turnaround for crew gained widespread support. Despite successful signature drives, however, nothing has come of this effort.

Wexler‘s anger is palpable, as he all but suggests that long hours on the set killed his close friend Conrad Hall, who died exhausted in a hospital at the end of filming “Road to Perdition.” One of Wexler‘s more heartbreaking scenes is that of Wexler handing his small Sony handycam to Hall, who‘s being pushed down a hospital hall in a wheelchair. Hall weakly turns the camera on Wexler, who looks distraught. Wexler, in voiceover, calls it Hall‘s last dolly shot.

In fact Wexler begins his film with a palm-sized DV camcorder, which he parks on the dashboard of his car as he drives home late one night after a long, long day on the set. The camera shows Wexler driving drowsily, drawn and spent, anything but alert.

Wexler himself shot most of Who Needs Sleep? in DV (a PD150, I believe) and it shows. One of the more strikingly original scenes involves Wexler in a TV salesroom, wandering around with his DV camcorder while clips from earlier interviews reappear on various TV screens around him. Every crew member, producer, director, and production office should see this critically important film.

While at Sundance, Wexler inquired of Millimeter editor Cynthia Wisehart about the proper name of an HDV camcorder he wants to use next: Sony‘s pint-size A1, which is rapidly building a following. I used this camcorder myself recently in Pakistan, and I agree with the common refrain, “better than it has any right to be.”

During a public conversation at the Filmmaker Lodge on Main Street yesterday between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young — Demme‘s new film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold is premiering here — I noticed Demme slyly shooting Young and moderator Grant Boatwright (a veteran Nashville cat) with an A1 nestled in his lap.

Later in the conversation Demme announced he‘d spoken to Aaron Neville about making a documentary in New Orleans, and that he would travel there shortly with his new digital camera. Hmmmm, which camcorder might that be?

Demme, incidentally, himself shot the opening seven minutes of Heart of Gold in DV, mostly interviews of Young in elevators and cars. Demme said he intentionally wanted the opening shots to appear amateurish, or “homespun” in Young‘s words.

But Heart of Gold itself is shot in ravishing Super-16 by Ellen Kuras. Both Demme and Young agreed that film has a unique “warmth” that electronic capture can‘t match. (Young is known for his discerning use of analog recording over of digital.)

Young, incidentally, has been an indie filmmaker for years. He described to the audience how his livingroom had overflowed with stacks of 16mm film cans and a KEM flatbed while cutting Journey Through the Past (years ago, when he was still single). He even recalled devising his own grease-pencil system of marking and managing trims.

Demme then went out of his way to praise Young‘s most recent work, Greendale, shot entirely on Super-8, as a great film.

That homespun thing again.