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. more

Today was Obama Day, and first-time director Lee Daniels was wishing the packed audience at the Eccles Theatre, Sundance’s largest, a happy one. Daniels, better known as producer of Monsters Ball and The Woodsman, with characters and situations drawn from the disenfranchised (a racist prison guard, a guilty interracial affair, a paroled child molester) was introducing his latest, Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, easily one of Sundance’s most talked-about dramas in competition.

Based on a book of fiction, Push tells the story of an overweight, withdrawn 16-year-old Harlem girl named Precious, pregnant with a second child by her own father and abused at home by her mother (searingly played by comedienne Mo‘Nique, who will surely win awards). Without spilling the plot, through creative writing Precious achieves a degree of selfhood, and the film ends in as much emotional uplift as possible given the circumstances. more

Yesterday I touched upon some of the reasons the air has been let out of Sundance’s balloon this year. And ballooned it has, for a decade. Today walking Main Street’s uncrowded sidewalks, devoid of the usual hypesters and scenesters, I’m thinking that this year’s soft attendance is a gift. And a sign that the Festival might want to recalibrate.

When the Sundance Institute took over the Festival 25 years ago, American independent films were 16mm, low-budget, and all but locked out of the box office. While chances of theatrical success remain as remote today as ever—admittedly there have been giant strides for documentary, Michael Moore’s body of work for example, or those penguins—digital technology with its protean reach, low entry cost and endlessly rising quality has at least leveled the playing field as far as production goes. more

Many of the reviews of Thriller in Manila (which premiered in World Documentary Competition last Friday) mention the fact that it transcends expectations for a sports documentary (it revolves around the third Ali-Frazier right in Manila in 1975).

The credit for this of course goes to director John Dower, editor Nicholas Packer, DP Stephen Sanden and the team. But it also goes to Andrew MacKenzie, the producer at UK’s Channel 4 who provided the money. At least that’s how Dower explains it with a kind of wonder in his voice, as if still can’t believe he got to make a documentary with enough money. Money that bought a precious thing: pre-production.

Actually calling it pre-production doesn’t really describe it. Dower talks about going to the north Broad Street neighborhood in Philly, with no set plan, hanging out at Frazier’s boxing gym with the fragile, ferocious and mistrustful fighter. Dower walked the streets, met the now-gray-haired friends and witnesses, interviewed the fight participants including Ali’s acerbic doctor. He moved into the story. This is of course not unheard of in documentaries—but it is rarely budgeted for. more

John Hindman didn’t have to go the normal route of getting funding for his independent film before the acquiring the cast. Actor Jeff Daniels signed on to play the title charatcer, Arlen Faber, after reading Hindman’s script and before the money was even there. “If it weren’t for Jeff taking a chance on me–a nobody–I would just be a guy who wrote a screenplay,” he says.

Arlen Faber is the story of a reclusive writer who surfaces on the 20th anniversary his best-selling religious self-help book, and is competing in the dramatic competetion at Sundance this year. It also co-stars Lauren Graham, Olivia Thirlby, and Kat Dennings. more

“Sarah and I wanted to fit dad’s life into a single unified theory,” says Emily Kunstler who co-created the film William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe with her sister Sarah about their notorious lawyer/father. “We wanted all of his clients to be innocent, and all of his cases to be battles for justice and freedom.”

William Kunstler was a radical lawyer and civil rights activist. He represented Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists in the South during the early 1960s, but gained national renown for defending the Chicago Seven (originally Chicago Eight) against charges of conspiring to incite riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

He represented Black Power activists, inmates in the 1971 Attica rebellion, Native American activists charged after the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and others. In the 1980s and ’90s, after he represented accused rapists, terrorists, murderers, and members of organized crime, he was dubbed “the most hated lawyer in America.” more

DP Patrick Murguia is touristing around Main Street recovering from the long journey from Mexico City; he’s enroute to the Eccles to be very early for the premiere of the independent film he shot for Antoine Fuqua. We grab a corner of the cramped lobby at the Marriott Summit Watch and as he talks the many distractions fade away.

Murguia recalls standing in the streets of New York, while Fuqua laid out a shot plan. From his gestures I’m seeing a dynamic, nearly 360-degree lighting extravaganza, the kind of muscular, operatic command of space and action that Fuqua does so distinctively. “He actually wanted to make something very simple,” Murguia says of Brooklyn’s Finest, which stars Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, and Don Cheadle. “Most of the time he got that, but sometimes it’s in his nature to go a little over the top,” the DP says with a little grin. I think it’s an understatement. Why else would Trevor Goth, writing in the program notes, talk about the “roving cinematography,” the “intensity and complexity,” the “complete command of the cinematic language,” and the “visceral and emotional punch” of a master at work. Simple I suppose for Fuqua.

Murguia is a sought-after commercials director and has shot features for his friend Rodrigo Prieto; he started working with Fuqua when Oliver Stone suggested him for Escobar. That project stalled in pre-production so when Fuqua went to work on Brooklyn’s Finest the relationship continued on that film. more

I’m having Asia flashbacks as DP Brent Huffman talks about the big white elephant mall in Guangzhou, the largest mall in the world and an unaccepted failure of surreal proportions. For face-saving reasons, the Chinese government cannot abandon the unfinished (and nearly unoccupied) mall/amusement park with its construction hazards, enormous indoor rollercoaster (dubiously welded), oversized Teletubbies, and population of semi-employed workers and moms looking for something (unsafe) to do with bored toddlers. Which apparently includes launching them onto a river inside human-sized balloons filled with about two minutes of oxygen, to cavort to the point of mild asphyxia before they’re towed back in

How could this not be the subject for a documentary short? Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall premiered last night in the Documentary Shorts program; as the title suggests, it is one segment of Sam Green and Carrie Lozano’s envisioned series on global expressions of utopia. more

Michael and Mark Polish make their third trip to Sundance with Manure, a new surreal comedy that takes place in a “heightened reality” simliar to Northfork, their 2003 Sundance entry. This one stars Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, Kyle McLachlan, and Ed Helms and concerns manure salesmen in the 1960s.

The entire film was shot indoors on a soundstage and relied heavily on a stylized production design to create more

Robert Siegel, recently nominated for a WGA award for The Wrestler, talks with Digital Content Producer contributor Eric Melin about bringing his directorial debut Big Fan to the screen as a first-time director. The film, starring Patton Oswalt as an obsessed New York Giants fan who gets beat up by the team’s star player, was filmed on a low budget using Red Digital Cinema’s Red One camera.

“Digital is a great thing for first-time directors,” Siegel says, “but I also wanted it to look a certain way– have that grainy, gritty vibe.” more