Sundance Film Festival

Overcast again. Blues skies aren’t forever.

A slow day. Overheard a klatch of industry veterans planning a Walmart release of the DVD of a festival film, a well-regarded but talky interview-style doc. Can’t see how it could appeal to a mass-market crowd, Walmart’s or otherwise. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere, the high altitude of Park City that causes Sundance’s storied reality dissociation. Over the years savvy buyers have learned to take a deep breath and count to ten (or ten days) before agreeing to a hype-inflated deal at Park City. Many have been burned in the past by acquisitions vibrant with Sundance buzz that sputter months later when introduced to the public.

Perhaps that’s why this year there have been so few acquisitions, at least so far. It was expected to be otherwise, what with the writers’ strike supposedly opening new doors to indie-produced work. What happened? The quality of work seen here isn’t likely the problem, since it has been remarkably and consistently high this year. Could it be the economy, stupid? Hard to tell. A bit like predicting the weather here.

I also overheard an expression I should have known but didn’t: elevator pitch. It seems an elevator pitch is a fast 30-sec. spiel you have at-the-ready if you meet a powerful film executive in an elevator. Being an East Coast filmmaker type, my pitching skills are rusty (I intend to keep them that way). A 30-sec. pitch has as much appeal to me as the 10- and 15-sec. commercials that spray us like machine gun fire during breaks in network programming. It strikes me, however, that elevator pitches (there’s even a Wikipedia entry) could explain the vapidity and sameness of so many green-lighted industry films.

Take, for instance, a film I saw this morning: Donkey Punch, made in South Africa with South African actors but calibrated for commercial success in this market. Add seven rich, beautiful kids on a giant yacht, beaucoup drugs, few articles of clothing, and voilà! An accidental murder during rough sex which climaxes in panic and begets further murder and mayhem. What fun! Naturally only one of the seven survives the ordeal. Knives, flares, a rope, an outboard motor, even suicide play a role in dispatching victims.

Donkey Punch joined several Sundance trends this year: top-notch acting, top-notch production values including cinematography, and origination on motion picture film (not digital).

I haven’t taken a poll or made a list to prove what I’m about to say, but it’s my impression on the basis of the Sundance films I’ve seen so far that film remains as popular a medium for shooting indie dramas as it ever was. I’ll go further: I suspect the number of dramatic films invited to this year’s Sundance that were shot on film is up.

I didn’t attend every technology presentation here, but it’s also my impression that there weren’t the “film is dead, viva digital video!” panels of years past. In fact, I didn’t hear this issue discussed anywhere at Sundance this year.

Has the film vs. digital controversy subsided, or have we simply come to our senses and decided that one doesn’t eclipse the other, that the universe of creative filmmaking is large enough to embrace both, and emerging digital cinematography too?

(I talked with a Technicolor executive here about postproduction of Soderbergh’s pair of Che Guevara biopics starring Benicio del Toro, shot with the 4K RED digital cinematography camera, but promised not to write about what I learned.)

As mentioned in previous blogs, admirable image quality seems to be a common denominator at Sundance this year—regardless of origination medium or postproduction path.

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