It’s Business Not as Usual at Sundance Fest : Emphasis Shifts From Dealmaking to Finding Talent

Something odd but telling happened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Harvey Weinstein, co-head of Miramax Films, known on the independent distribution circuit for his aggressiveness, went home to New York empty-handed. While Miramax often outbids its competitors for movies at these festivals and frequently beats others to the punch even before the 10-day event gets under way, this year the highly respected marketer and distributor of such break-out specialty films as “The Crying Game” and “The Piano” left Sunday without acquiring a single work.

Surprisingly, this didn’t put Weinstein in a funk.

At an exclusive, invitation-only cocktail party Miramax threw earlier this week at Deer Valley’s posh Stein Eriksen Lodge for the six movies it screened here, Weinstein said he is less interested these days in acquiring finished movies than he is in supporting the production of non-mainstream fare.

He is not alone in this strategy; consequently there are fewer and fewer hot films available for distribution at Sundance.

“This year’s festival is a reflection of how the business has changed,” observed Tom Rothman, head of 20th Century Fox’s 5-month-old specialty film division Searchlight Pictures. “It’s a very healthy time for distinctive American independent films, and a great number of them are now able to find financing in advance, so many more are coming to the festival with distribution already set.”

The recent commercial success of such independent movies as “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” which grossed about $50 million in the United States, “The Crying Game” ($60.7 million domestically) and “The Piano” ($39.3 million domestically) has done much to make even mainstream Hollywood sit up and take notice.

“It says that more distribution entities are willing to take risks today,” Rothman said.

Rothman, in fact, took a risk last fall when Searchlight gave 26-year-old filmmaker Edward Burns completion money to finish his movie “The Brothers McMullen” in exchange for a guaranteed right of first refusal. The risk paid off when the movie became one of the hottest titles here and Searchlight grabbed it.

Fox is Hollywood’s most recent major studio to launch a specialty film division, joining Universal, which co-ventured with Polygram to form Gramercy Pictures; Sony Pictures Entertainment, which recruited the former Orion Classics team to start Sony Classics; and Disney, which bought Miramax. Rothman, Weinstein and their distribution counterparts agreed that since most of the pictures are now owned before they reach Sundance, the primary purpose in coming here is to seek out the next generation of filmmakers.

“Hands down, this is a more important market for talent now,” Weinstein said.

Independent distributors are not the only ones coming here to scout new talent for future movies.

Jane Goldenring, a senior vice president of production at Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, said she came “because I get to meet people in the independent world that I don’t usually get to meet as a studio executive.”

Goldenring’s colleague, Chip Diggins, who also was here, was praised by British director Peter Chelsom at the screening of his movie “Funny Bones” for championing his dark, un-Disney-like comedy.

Agents, show-biz attorneys and managers, publicists and journalists swarmed over the festival like locusts, transforming the cozy, snow-laden mountain village into Park City, Hollywood. There are more development executives and assistants and assistants to assistants here this year.

And, cellular phones and four-wheel-drive vehicles are accessories as mandatory to the Hollywood-ites as trendy ski jackets and fleece-lined boots.

“I found myself walking down Main Street talking on a cellular phone and I thought, ‘What a Hollywood cliche!’ ” admitted New Line Pictures marketing president Chris Pula.

At lunch at a Main Street deli, a top executive panicked when he discovered his cellular phone was missing from his bag. “Hey, can I borrow your cellular to find my cellular?,” he asked a producer seated with him.

With attendance apparently hitting an all-time high, estimated by festival officials at 7,000, screenings were jampacked as always and people were turned away in droves. “It’s been way too crowded this year and unfortunately it’s kept a lot of people out of some very good films,” said a studio executive. “I couldn’t get half the tickets I wanted.”

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The party scene here, always a zoo, was more out of control this year, with at least one over-attended condo party shut down by police.

One of the hottest tickets was Palomar Pictures’ cocktail party for the Brian Wilson documentary “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” More than 300 people packed the popular Riverhorse Cafe, where Wilson and the film’s director, musician Don Was, performed four Beach Boy songs with Danny Hutton (of Three Dog Night) and Wilson’s longtime collaborator Andy Palin.

Even Sundance’s normally elusive Robert Redford showed at the party and the preceding screening of the well-received documentary.

Redford, who in 1981 founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute and spearheads the festival from behind the scenes, was much more visible this year at parties and screenings than in the past. Asked why he was making a rare appearance at the Miramax cocktail party, Redford told The Times, “I’m here to support Harvey (Weinstein) because he’s very supportive of independent filmmakers.”

Saundra Saperstein, media director of the festival and marketing director for the Utah Film Commission, said there were more than 300 registered press this year compared to fewer than 200 in 1994. “And we turned down another 100,” she said.

There were TV crews here from such countries as Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan and Latin America.

Sundance’s $1.5-million budget was underwritten this year by such corporate sponsors as the Gap, Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz.

One of the independent movie world’s most revered filmmakers, John Sayles, here with his latest work, “The Secret of Roan Inish,” recalled that 15 years ago when his breakthrough movie “Return of the Secaucus 7” took a top prize here, the festival was one-tenth the size.

“This is now a national and international festival, not a local or regional festival as it was when it began (in 1978) as the U.S. Festival (the predecessor to Sundance).”

While he readily acknowledged the “zoo aspect” of Sundance, Sayles said all of the media attention and recognition from Hollywood only “adds excitement . . . it’s good for filmmakers.”

As Miramax’s Weinstein put it: “As far as I’m concerned, this is Sundance’s graduation year.”