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Based on a book of fiction, Push tells the story of an overweight, withdrawn 16-year-old Harlem girl named Precious, pregnant with a second child by her own father and abused at home by her mother (searingly played by comedienne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

The indie-film summit known as the Sundance Film Festival began Thursday and continues for ten days through next Sunday, a week from now–although you wouldn’t know it from Park City’s mostly empty Main Street. Not that there are tumbleweeds and doleful Morricone harmonica strains, but the clogging crowds are gone along with the stretch limos bearing the Parises, Britneys, and Lindsays of yesteryear. What joy!

No doubt the economy has taken a toll. Boisterous teen revelers and obvious hangers-on are in short supply this year. Also, a lot of left-coast industry types arrived to attend weekend festivities only to depart today—a trend that’s been building for several years, regrettably shifting the media’s attention away from the second week when important awards ceremonies take place. 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

Somehow the tiny budget for Paper Heart paid for trips to Toronto, Paris, and about 12 states including—to the best of DP Jay Hunter’s recollection—California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and New York, where the man shot 300 hours of Varicam footage in ten weeks. Not surprisingly he thinks Paper Heart’s lone editor Ryan Brown is a hero.

The film is in Dramatic Competition and premiered last night at the Racquet Club. Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec it tells a fictional story of Charlene Yi (the actress’/co-producer’s real name) through both a narrative thread and a documentary one. (The picture at right shows Jasenovec, Yi, and Brown). While Charlene’s story of skeptical love is fictional, her co-stars are not. Hunter says he shot the many interviews with non-actors—friends and acquaintances talking about love–in a narrative style using primes and very deliberate compositions, but that he also tried to shoot the narrative segments with the frankness of a documentary, “obeying the laws of reality.” more

Director Ryan Shiraki and I are patrolling the very gracious lobby of the Park City hotel looking for exactly what we found: two high backed Chesterfield-esque chairs in a quiet corner next to a high window near a tasteful fern. We settle in.

Shiraki is here (again) with Spring Breakdown, a “Girls Gone Wild” story with heart staring Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, and Rachel Dratch, who co-wrote with Shiraki.

Shiraki’s DP Frank DeMarco shot Hedwig and the Angry Inch a film Shiraki loved for its extravagant and pointed use of color—something he wanted for his own film. “I love the way that in certain scenes these isolated bright colors would pop out of the sea of gray and blue,” he says of DeMarco’s work on Hedwig. He explains that his movie deliberately kicks off with his three heroines singing a campy version of Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors” and that each has an hero color (Amy: yellow; Parker: red: Rachel: blue) that travels with them from morose to magnificent as they bust out with the college kids on Los Padres Island at Spring Break. more

Towards the end of our conversation at Filmmaker’s Lodge, editor Jason Stewart happened to mention that he was hyper-organized. I’d already figured that out.

Stewart cut the Robin Williams’ picture World’s Greatest Dad for Bobcat Goldthwait premiering today at the Library. Look at this photo on the right: it’s the meticulous storyboard that earned Stewart an initial look of bewildered suspicion from Goldthwait (“who wastes this kind of time?”). But Stewart says Goldthwait caught on after about five minutes and was soon converted to the Way of The Wall.

The idea is directly stolen from Walter Murch’s book “Blink of an Eye” (which Stewart read last summer), and other people do it. But as a 10-year-veteran editor it was Stewart’s first time and that’s what matters. He describes a modern twist on Murch’s process: he assembled about 350 still frames in the Avid to represent all the scenes and printed them out at Kinko’s; he built a wood and canvas frame to hold them and bought a jumbo box of bullnose clips to hang them up. When he gets to the part about using the Avid titling tool to label each still, I flash on those people who label all the stuff in their garage with P-touch machines (me). more

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.

No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.

Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!” as the lights dim.

Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here? more

Editor Monique Zavistovski was 8 months pregnant with her first child when she innocently agreed to cut Circus Rosaire. Director Robyn Bliley wasn’t a mother, so couldn’t have known just how optimistic Zavistovski’s commitment really was, or how central the Baby Chloe would become to post production. You’ll hear filmmakers talk about family—that’s how close things sometimes get making some films. But among filmmaker family stories, the making of Circus Rosaire, stands out. First, the documentary (screening at Slamdance) is about a family—the Circus Rosaire family, both human and animal. The director and DP Chad Wilson have been married for 10 years, in business together as the LA-based Progressive Productions for six.

Bliley had known the Rosaire family since she was 6 years old, so her five years of access to the family was an act of trust.

And then there was the edit. Bliley changing diapers in Zavistovski’s small apartment while the editor worked. When Zavistovski nursed Chloe, Bliley looked at cuts, or the three of them sat in front of the computer, Zavistovksi’s left hand around Chloe, right hand on the mouse. “Chloe didn’t sleep,” Bliley says, “she maybe napped a half hour a day—and that was my job, soothing her, begging her to sleep. She was so steeped in the sounds of the circus, the lions and tigers, the elephants, the monkeys, that those were some of her first words.” At a year old, Chloe sat rapt through the first screening, lulled by the familiar sounds of her own infancy. more

I overhear director Alex Rivera’s publicist telling him that my interview will probably focus on some technical aspects of the film. He seems to think he’s not the right person to address that topic. I’m thinking “ok not all directors are technical”’ Except it soon emerges as we talk that Alex cut Sleep Dealer himself on Final Cut Pro, built the animatic for the 400+ effects shots in After Effects and Photoshop, and even did a couple of final effects shots himself in AE (on his laptop). To him, that’s not technical. His fluency in editing and effects software is just how he gets the job done. No more technical than using Microsoft Word to write this post. more

When I meet John Lyons in the Filmmaker Lodge, on Saturday Death in Love has only been finished for four days; when they went to do the audio mix the previous weekend, 8 seconds were missing from the middle of the reel. That got fixed, and the film premieres tomorrow. So as nail biters go it was a medium one.

Lyons is here with two premieres, Boaz Yakin’s Death in Love and his first feature as an editor, Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace starring Julianne Moore. He cut Savage Grace first on his Avid Xpress Pro and thought he could live with digitizing at 28:1. “But when I saw it I was pretty sure Tom wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Lyons says. Post Factory loaned him a PC (HP) Adrenaline and he redigitized at 14:1. Kalin also cut—he used the Adrenaline, while Lyons cut next to him in the same room on the Xpress Pro on a G4 laptop. “We each cut half than flipped them,” he says.

With Death in Love, Lyons digitized on an OS9 Meridian at the Post Factory facility in NY. “It had been in storage and they threw it up in the reception area. I would digitize there then take it home on a Firewire Drive.” He cut on the same Xpress Pro system until Yakin told him he only had 7 weeks. “I bumped up to a software-only Media Composer.” Cutting in Yakin’s pool house (glorified garden shed) in Silver Lake, the 24-bit audio started to crackle for lack of ram and Lyons had to spring for a new dual core G4 or risk his director’s sanity. more