Sundance Film Festival

Yesterday all you heard about here in Park City, at every bus stop and bar stool, was the critic who poked the producer’s rep in the schnoz.

In fact, the first email I received yesterday morning from a filmmaker friend said, “aren’t you glad Jeff Dowd doesn’t know about you?”

Dowd, a/k/a The Dude, a/k/a the Big Lebowski, apparently chased Variety’s John Anderson into a restaurant after Anderson indicated his dislike for Dirt! The Movie, a Documentary Competition film that Dowd is repping.

When Dowd wouldn’t let Anderson eat his dinner in peace, returning with Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling from The Howard Stern Show to reinforce his cause, Anderson started swinging. (You can read about the details here)

If you read Mondays’s blog, you know I didn’t much like Dirt! either. (“Documentary competition? What were they thinking?”).

Dowd’s passion often gets the best of him, but his heart is in the right place. I wish instead he were repping The Cove, a Documentary Competition rival which depicts a covert episode straight out of Mission Impossible (or Ocean’s Eleven—choose your comparison). Your mission, should you choose to accept: to document the slaughter of bottle-nosed dolphins in a secret cove near the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.

All concerned—various Japanese ministries, town officials—deny the slaughter takes place, so the man who first trained bottle-noses for the ‘60s TV show “Flipper”–and who still blames himself for the subsequent popularity of trained dolphins in lucrative Sea World-type shows–recruits a small army of specialists—divers, surfers, electronics experts–to infiltrate the cove under cover of night and plant an arsenal of tiny HD camcorders (think Canon HV30) in fake rocks, underwater, even aboard an aerial blimp. Much of this furtive caper is captured with infrared cameras, adding an edge-of-your seat thrill as Japanese police give chase in the dark.

Their success, however, is heart-rending: we see the cove turn bright red as bleeding dolphins thrash about in their final agonies. It’s too much to watch.

The Japanese whaling industry is the bad guy here, so I couldn’t overlook the crowning irony that this exquisitely photographed film was made possible by Japanese technology, particularly the Sony optical-disc XDCAM PDW-F350 HD camcorder we see in several shots taken surreptitiously by others.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I wasn’t yet aware of any Sundance films shot with the RED ONE digital cinema camera. Well, I stand corrected. Sundance films shot with RED include the Polish brother’s Manure (DP’d by the extraordinary David Mullen), DP and now director Fraser Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Dan Eckman’s Mystery Team, Emily Abt’s Toe To Toe, and Robert Siegel’s (writer of The Wrestler) Big Fan. The last two are in the Dramatic Competition.

And at Slamdance, Jordan Galland’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead was shot using RED ONE.

(Thanks to DP Jendra Jarnagin for setting me straight.)

I went to the Yarrow’s theater to catch a press screening of Manure only to be denied the pleasure. Manure had apparently been withdrawn at the last minute. Rumor had it that the title itself was being reconsidered.

While spinning my wheels in the Yarrow lobby wondering what to do next, I bumped into Denise Kasell, there also to see Manure. A former director of the Hamptons Film Festival, Denise is the new executive director of The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass., a leading Northeast art house cinema with four screens.

Denise had arrived two days before the festival began to attend the Sundance Institute’s Art House Project “Convergence,” a conference at the historic Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City that drew owners and operators of 51 independent art houses and nonprofit screening venues from across the country, plus bookers, filmmakers, and producers like Ted Hope, whose closing remarks addressed possible new distribution models for indies in the next few years.

At present 18 theaters are officially members of the project, including the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn, the Jacob Burns north of New York, the Enzian in Orlando, the Hollywood in Portland, the Michigan in Ann Arbor, and of course Denise Kasell’s Coolidge Corner in Brookline.

Established in 2006, the Art House Project is perhaps the Sundance Institute’s most important and timely new initiative, because no one doubts that art houses whether for-profit or nonprofit are a critically endangered species.

Sundance’s John Cooper put it best in his opening remarks to the Convergence (I’m paraphrasing): “Art houses are the real heroes, who do for 365 days a year what we do for 10 days a year.”

Since every community blessed with an active local art house wants to preserve it, the Sundance Institute will reap lasting gratitude from art house audiences across the country if the Art House Project succeeds.

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