Sundance’s Growing Pains : Movies: As the Utah festival gets more popular, it is struggling to find the proper balance of independent filmmakers and industry deal-makers.

Every year, as more and more people try to squeeze into it, the Sundance Film Festival becomes increasingly reminiscent of that tiny automobile that held an infinite number of circus clowns. This year, though, the festival is threatening to do what that little car never did, and that is burst at the seams.

Opening tonight with a Salt Lake City screening of the Mike Newell-directed “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and continuing through Jan. 30 in nearby Park City, this vibrant showcase for the best of American independent film has been selling tickets at a rate that staggers even its organizers.

Selling out this year for the first time ever are all four categories of Park City passes, and this despite the full-time use of a 500-seat auxiliary theater (the festival’s biggest) at the Library Center that added 22,000 seats to the number available. “The demand has far outstripped the supply,” says weary festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who noted as well that when tickets for local residents went on sale at Salt Lake City, the line was three-hours-plus in length. “We’ve reached the point where it’s gotten to be more than painful.”

Not only painful, but also tricky for the festival to maintain its feisty, free-spirited reputation, to preserve a balance between such potentially conflicting constituencies as struggling independent filmmakers and the deal-hungry denizens of Hollywood who traditionally come along for the ride.

Certainly no concession to box-office viability is noticeable in the 32 films (16 dramatic, 16 documentary) competing for the festival’s various juried prizes. Frequently first or second films by largely unknown directors, as a group the competitors have a tone that Gilmore characterized as “unconventional and experimental.” Only two, “Fresh,” written and directed by Boaz Yakin (Miramax) and the black-and-white “Suture” (Goldwyn) have distribution deals in place.

Where the festival’s increasing popularity is reflected, however, is in the films that have elected to have their world premieres at Park City in out-of-competition slots. Not only do no fewer than nine of these films have distributors, but four of them will also go out with major studio labels attached, including the Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke movie “Reality Bites” from Universal, “Threesome” from TriStar and the Coen Brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy,” starring as mainstream a personality as Paul Newman.

That film does have a legitimate independent pedigree, the Coens’ “Blood Simple” having won an award at an earlier festival. Similarly credentialed is Matty Rich’s “The Inkwell,” to be distributed by Disney. Rich, who turned heads at Sundance with his gritty “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” has set his latest and considerably softer film, “The Inkwell,” in new territory, the upwardly mobile African American enclave that vacations in Martha’s Vineyard.

Other notable films with distributors include the Eric Stoltz/Mary-Louise Parker starring romance “Naked in New York” and a pair of lively British films. “Four Weddings,” the opening night film, is a stylish and witty lunatic farce about two people (Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell) who can’t seem to decide if they’re made for each other or not, while “Backbeat” breezily relates the story of the Beatles.

Perhaps the smartest film at the festival, showing out of competition because it premiered elsewhere and is Canadian in the bargain, is a singular work about quite a different kind of musician. “Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould” deals with the eccentric classical pianist in a way that is both challenging and accessible, restless and subtle. Continually inventive in its ability to visualize music, this look at an ironic perfectionist is close to perfection itself.

Equally worthy, and also showing out of competition, are a pair of the remarkable Asian films that made a splash at Cannes, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s moving and controversial “The Blue Kite” from China and Tran Anh Hung’s elegantly beautiful “The Scent of Green Papaya,” the first Vietnamese film submitted for Oscar consideration.

What attracts all these films to Sundance is a continuing increase in two of the festival’s constituencies. One is the press, with more than 200 film journalists worldwide set to show up and outlets like Premiere magazine, which used to content itself with covering the festival once it ended, starting the race weeks ago.

Also on the rise are the buzz people, the industryites who come up to get a jump on the next new thing. This year, all for the first time, the venerable Directors Guild of America will be hosting an “invitation-only party” for young directors, cellular phones will be available for rental and an Executive Business Center, complete with fax and a message center “answered by real people,” will set up shop. All the comforts of home.

Though slightly dazed by what it has wrought, the Sundance organizers are attempting to cope. In addition to that new theater, a new shuttle system is being inaugurated to move people more efficiently and the lively closing night awards ceremony has been moved to a larger location.