Sundance Film Festival

Oh no, you plead, not another blog about adventures in festival transportation! You have my promise this will be the last.

Tonight I decided to pack it in early and head back to the condo. I’m beat. Last night I’d jammed on electric guitar until 6 a.m. at New York entertainment attorney Jonathan Gray’s condo, a yearly tradition for which he supplies guitars and amps–always a Sundance highlight of mine. (This year Jonathan has legal credits in twelve Sundance dramas including Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, Against the Current, and Big Fan.)

At the Main Street bus terminal I waited and waited in a light drizzle for the No. 7 bus to Kimball Junction. A young man soon joined me. He wore a droopy dark jacket over a black tee with a huge white skull like Jack Skellington’s. A silver ring protruded from his lower lip and lanky black hair fell from his side part across his forehead. While waiting, I asked what films he’d seen. He loved World Cinema Dramatic Competition entry “Louis-Michel,” saying it reminded him of the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet who directed one of his two favorite films, Amélie. He had tickets to The Informers and Moon in the Premieres section, both of which he was anxious to see in the morning.

He wanted to know what I thought of Humpday, since one of its leads, Mark Duplass, is half of the mumblecore writer/director team (Baghead, The Puffy Chair) of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass. (Mumblecore is a character-based, often improvised low-budget digital genre associated with the ennui of 20-somethings, analogous to Emo in music.) I replied that the acting was pitch perfect, and that the other male lead, the charming Josh Leonard of Blair Witch Project, had mischievously managed to channel his inner Dennis Hopper. The young man grinned.

Humpday is about two straight guys who drunkenly agree to have sex with each other as performance art, then later, when sober, must convince themselves to go through with it. It was snapped up Monday by Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures in a novel distribution deal: a video-on-demand release next summer and a theatrical run a month later. (Very little has been picked up this year at Sundance, which the trade press has commented on all week.)

On the bus at last, we chatted about films and Sundance panel discussions until I reached my stop. I asked what he was doing here at Sundance. And here’s the punch line:

He’s a high school senior from Westport, Connecticut, who flew here on his own. He’d taken some filmmaking workshops at the Westport Art Center and is interested in filmmaking. As I handed him my business card (offering future advice if ever he wished it), I could tell by his shy, startled look this was the first business card he’d ever been handed!

All parties end. Especially when it comes to nonprofit arts foundations in the United States that rely on nongovernmental patronage to support independent dance, theater, film, etc. All it takes is a Bernie Madoff or a severe economic downturn…

Generational tastes shift as well. Democratic, even revolutionary, ideals of the activist ‘60s generation that gave impetus to the Sundance Institute in the first place have cooled over time, dinged by the Reagan and Bush eras, the culture wars, the aging and dying off of ‘60s activists themselves.

Who in 1985, the year the Sundance Institute launched its film festival, could have predicted the promotional reach of the Internet and Web? Does indie filmmaking any longer require validation, as it did 25 years ago? Is it still a movement or another marketing tool? Can the juggernaut version of the Sundance Film Festival survive indefinitely?

These thoughts swirled in my head all week as I traversed empty sidewalks and attended half-empty public and industry screenings that would have been packed a year ago (in spite of a writers strike and William Morris deserting the festival). The absence this year of swag and stretch limos didn’t faze me, but the disappearance of many industry stalwarts I’ve known over the years, including nonprofit staff, distributors, critics–many newly unemployed–programmers, producers, and cinematographers threw me for a loop. (Equally disconcerting were festival badges bearing the name Clorox—Clorox subsidiary Brita, in the water business, is a Sustaining Sponsor this year.)

The Sundance Film Festival is nothing if not a perennial gathering of the tribe—the paramount business convention of indie filmmakers in the U.S.

Which is why my conversation with the young man on the bus, too young to shave, was unexpectedly uplifting.

If the future of indie filmmaking (or whatever succeeds it) is in his hands, Sundance will thrive another 25 years easily.

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