Tonight’s awards ceremony handed out 26 awards to feature-length films. You can peruse the list here

This year 118 features were programmed from 21 countries, including 42 first-time directors. U.S. submissions of feature-length films totaled 1,905. An additional 1,756 features were submitted from outside the U.S.

That makes a total of 3661 features submitted, or 230 days of screening if viewed in their entirety. How does Sundance manage it? more

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

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. more

Park City basked in the afterglow of Obama Day as rising temperatures caused snowboarders to come off the slopes at noon to strip off layers of clothing. A pleasant day to ride around in buses—something you do a lot of here, stuck at bus stops anxiously eyeing your watch as your next film begins, or strap-hanging aboard a menagerie of sluggish Festival shuttles and Park City buses that pick their way through branching back streets, stopping at resorts you never knew existed.

It was bad enough years ago when the main theater circuit was the Egyptian on Main Street, the Holiday Village multiplex near Albertson’s, and the makeshift auditorium in the Prospector. With luck—meaning the shuttle-bus gods deemed to smile on you—you could dash between them in 20 minutes. Or jump in your car and zoom off, which I did often. more

Park City basked in the afterglow of Obama Day as rising temperatures caused snowboarders to come off the slopes at noon to strip off layers of clothing. A pleasant day to ride around in buses—something you do a lot of here, stuck at bus stops anxiously eyeing your watch as your next film begins, or strap-hanging aboard a menagerie of sluggish Festival shuttles and Park City buses that pick their way through branching back streets, stopping at resorts you never knew existed.

It was bad enough years ago when the main theater circuit was the Egyptian on Main Street, the Holiday Village multiplex near Albertson’s, and the makeshift auditorium in the Prospector. With luck—meaning the shuttle-bus gods deemed to smile on you—you could dash between them in 20 minutes. Or jump in your car and zoom off, which I did often.

Then came the Olympics. Park City built a bus terminal behind Main Street to accommodate the crush. One consequence is that Main Street buses no longer stop along Main Street, adding additional walking time to wherever you need to go on Main. Building new bus routes for the Olympics meant that festival shuttles no longer stopped in front of the Holiday Village cinemas either. Instead, you must now debus (is that a word?) in front of the Yarrow Hotel and make a mad dash across the Yarrow’s parking lot, hurtling into the Holiday Village cinemas breathless and snow-encrusted if you slipped on the ice.

Cars were banned from Main Street too, and were now towed from the Yarrow’s and Albertsons’ parking lots. The message was clear: don’t bring cars into Park City during Sundance. Your alternatives? Those jolting buses, or scarce cabs with price-gouging habits that would embarrass Bronx livery drivers.

To make matters worse, a couple of years ago the outlying Park City Racquet Club, familiar from years of Festival awards ceremonies, was added as a theater, and this year a new synagogue, even farther afield, became the latest festival screen. As bus routes elongated to accommodate these new venues, the rambling Theatre Loop took longer and longer—both to arrive and to get anywhere. (To get to the new Temple theater, you take a bus to get to another bus that shuttles you there.) So much for seeing more than a handful of films each day at Sundance.

What I’m really getting at, however, is that Sundance makes for strange busfellows. (Is that a word?) You spend so much time trapped on them, you end up eventually bumping into all your friends and making plenty of new ones too. (How years ago I met Ted Schilowitz, now “Leader of the Rebellionâ€?—his card actually says this–of RED Digital Cinema.)

Extemporaneous exchanges among riders form a sort of coffee klatsch on wheels, sprinkled with endless overheard conversation, much of it anonymous and terribly frank, about actors, films, and filmmakers.

No wonder Sundance bus rides have become the de facto Festival grapevine, easily overtaking the official Daily Insider newspaper. How ingenious of Sundance to bring us all together in this truly democratic way!

Today, for instance, I met a Miami-NYC producer (Sundance veteran with past films at the festival) on a bus detouring past the Park City Resort Center, who said he’d just come from Slamdance where he’d seen Finding Bliss, a lark about an idealistic film school grad who jams her foot in the industry’s door by editing porn, and Weather Girl, about a Seattle TV meteorologist who flips out on-camera when she learns her boyfriend–the morning anchorman—is a cheat.

“It rounds out the festival experience,� he said, to attend a Slamdance screening, and “it makes you feel like you’ve been to an indie festival.� I inquired and he replied that the Slamdance screenings he’d attended were “packed.�

How long, I mused to myself as the bus rattled on from stop to stop, before Sundance invites Slamdance to officially join the party, much as the Berlinale did to what is now its long-established experimental Forum section, or Cannes did to Director’s Fortnight, both of which were born during the tumult of 1968 as anti-festivals to overturn the established festivals they were ultimately folded into?

Back to reality: Sometimes riding the bus you hear more than you want to.

Young woman, mid-20s, Valley-style upspeak:

“I have the best Facebook story? So this girl I went to school with? When I was in first and second grade? She got in touch with me by Facebook. I hadn’t seen her since the first or second grade. We were friends then. And she got in touch with me because her father had been in the witness protection program and she couldn’t get in touch with anyone. But now she can. You know, I’m from New Jersey.�

Now there’s a Sundance storyline, free for the making.

.

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

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

I started going to New Frontier on Main before it was called that, when it was just a warm, dark basement full of chilly festivalgoers and digital cameras and editing software. There were some classes, panel discussions, and no cell phone reception unless you went out the door and into the mall atrium (which now has signage announcing it as the “Cell Phone Atrium�).

Inside, it’s slicked up too—veering away from any trade show booth vibe and towards nightclub/art installation. One of the first big developments was to bring in the online shorts a few years ago; one of the most fun ways to warm up is to sit at one of the computers in the moody lighting and browse the shorts. From there you can move on to the video art installations, check out the irresistable “Artists and Scientists” segments, play with the “editing gloves”, and then choose from the Microcinema panels; some from Sony, Avid, and Panavision on technie stuff, plus issues-based panels with a timely focus on distribution. Oh, and you can see the entire Sony XDCAM lineup in one place. 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