The Festival Is Seen as the Major U.S. Film Showcase, but It Hasn’t Gone Hollywood--Yet : Sundance Keeps on Rising

The festival that everyone said couldn’t get any bigger just did.

The new edition of the standing-room-only Sundance Film Festival, which opens its 11-day run tonight with Kenneth Branagh’s sentimental comedy “A Midwinter’s Tale,” is no longer just the showcase of choice for independent film. It is also increasingly seen as the preeminent American film festival, period, and it has the numbers to prove it.

Upward of 10,000 interested parties perennially descend on this tidy skiing metropolis, with the demand for tickets inevitably rising every year. And the number of ravenous journalists clambering to attend in 1996 has been, says one staffer, “just unreal, even weeks after the deadline.”

Hoping to cope with this torrent, the festival has opened a new 200-seat theater in a local hotel, its seventh 10 a.m.-through-midnight screen. And construction is about to begin on a voter-approved 800-seat theater/performing arts complex that will be the town’s biggest venue yet.

Also increasing almost geometrically are the number of films jousting for a spot in the festival’s most prestigious events, its 18-film dramatic competition and 16-film documentary section. According to Geoffrey Gilmore, the festival’s director of programming, some 700 features were submitted, which almost doubles the entries of just two years ago.

To help cope with this onslaught, the festival is inaugurating a new section this year, called “American Spectrum,” which will showcase 20 films by mostly first-time directors that for one reason or another did not make the cut for the competition.

With a grand total of 117 films (including a record 55 world premieres) being screened in all the festival’s sections, the advance jockeying for media attention, complete with phone calls, faxes, press releases and screenings, was more intense than ever this year. A movie called “Scorpion Springs” distributed handsome scorpion paperweights, while another group of filmmakers sent out cheery holiday greeting cards “Wishing you ‘Synthetic Pleasures’ in 96!”

The intensity of the hubbub has even spread to the Slamdance ’96 International Film Festival, an alternative Park City event that didn’t even have a stable location last year and dubbed itself “Anarchy in Utah ’95.”

Described by Variety as “a ragtag group of guerrilla filmmakers,” Slamdance is back this year, considerably more organized and a dozen films strong (total budget for all 12 less than a million dollars) with a publicity firm, screening room, lounge and even a World Wide Web site to call its own.

Paradoxically, at the same time all this is happening the festival is attempting to counter the perception that the dread minions of Hollywood are encroaching on its turf. Even its Premieres section, where the bigger ticket items usually go, has only two films (TriStar’s “If Lucy Fell” and MGM/UA’s “It’s My Party,” directed by Randal Kleiser) with major studio distribution attached.

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The biggest American names in this section (except for Al Pacino, who wrote and directed “Looking for Richard,” a meditation on Shakespeare’s “Richard III”) are Hal Hartley with “Flirt” and Robert M. Young with “Caught,” both pillars of the independent community.

And the dramatic and documentary competitions exude an almost complete sense of mystery, forcing festival-goers to practically consult a Ouija board when planning their schedules. For only a few films, like the excellent documentary “The Celluloid Closet” from New York and the surprising and off-beat “Welcome to the Dollhouse” from Toronto, have reputations based on successes in other festivals.

Other competitive films include new works by filmmakers previously successful at Sundance, like the dramatic “Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day” by “The Hours and Times” director Christopher Munch. In the doc area, Susan Todd and Andrew Young (“Children of Fate”) return with the Mardi Gras-themed “Cutting Loose” and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, makers of “Brother’s Keeper,” investigate Satan worship in the heartland in “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.”

For those festival-goers willing to forgo the lure of the hot film of the moment, some of the most interesting films at Sundance look to be in the expanded World Cinema section.

These include “Angel Baby,” a highly praised item from Australia; Iran’s “The White Balloon,” a big winner in Cannes; Mexico’s “Midaq Alley,” the most successful Latin American film of recent years, and two excellent short features (“Madagascar” and “Love Me and You’ll See”) from Cuba to accompany the fine “Guantanamera” (from the directors of “Strawberry and Chocolate”) in the Premieres section.

And time should certainly be made for the life and work of one of the most independent-minded rascals ever to direct a studio picture, William Wellman. An entire section is being devoted to the irascible Wellman and his films, including “Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick,” an excellent and affectionate new documentary on his life, and a generous selection of his output.

If better, more adventurous films than “Nothing Sacred,” “The Ox-Bow Incident” or the remarkable “Wild Boys of the Road” appear at Sundance over the next 11 days, it will be a fine year indeed.