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Based on a book of fiction, Push tells the story of an overweight, withdrawn 16-year-old Harlem girl named Precious, pregnant with a second child by her own father and abused at home by her mother (searingly played by comedienne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

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

Shooting I Love You Phillip Morrs for Bad Santa directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Xavier Perez’s biggest problem was the Louisiana rain and the summer light. In fact his toughest challenge never made it to the screen—a big shoot in Shreveport in the tank that conjured the storm in The Guardian. “It was pretty impressive,” says Perez of the tank and the logistics, “maybe it will be on the DVD.”

Two stocks: Kodak 5218 and 5229—one for the gentle colors at the beginning of the story and then a much more contrasty look as the true story of a love-crazed con (Jim Carrey) grows increasingly improbably in behalf of the beloved Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor).

As the light gets more contrasty, the camera movement gets increatingly dynamic, “frantic” is the word Perez uses for the feeling. But the angst was apparently all on screen. Perez credits the perfect collaboration with the directors; “we all had the same kind of mind and sense of humor.”

Premiered yesterday, continues Tues 9p.m. in Salt Lake at the Tower and at the Sundance Resort 6p.m. Saturday.

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

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

Davis Guggenheim started the filmmaking process for It Might Get Loud with an inconspicuous tape recorder. Sitting in hotel rooms across from Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White, he let conversation write the first draft of his documentary, laying down a map for the shooting that would unfold over the next 18 months.

It was a technique he learned “by accident” on An Inconvenient Truth as the best way to draw out Al Gore without the distraction of lights and cameras. For a different reason, cameras inhibit rockstars who are used to creating artifice and performance. But without an audience, all three could talk articulately and intimately about their lives, music and process. And with audio tape practically free, Guggenheim could roll indefinitely.

He then cut together a radio documentary-style outline; the conversations told the filmmakers where to go—to the house in Dublin where The Edge hid out with his songwriting demons and emerged with “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” to Headley Grange where Jimmy Page performed in a hallway where he once heard John Bottom play drums. more

Often, first time films are made of longstanding dreams and memories—full of details accumulated over decades, some of them seemingly trivial, some grand and impractical. Charming example: writer/director Eran Merav sits poolside at the Park City Marriott (in the fake and balmy outdoors that reeks of chlorine) and confesses that in his imagination there was nothing so “directorial” as a dolly shot. A big one, with four people riding on the rig sweeping up his vision onto a majestic film camera. “I would do 8 takes at least,” he says.

He’s only half ironic as he says it. The reason it’s charming—apart from the obvious—is that the confession comes as he talks of childhood memories and directorial aspiration nursed over years. Both came together for his first feature Zion and His Brother, which is in World Dramatic Competition here and premiered at the Egyptian last night. 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