Two Sides to Myth of Deal-Making at Sundance Festival

Todd Solondz has turned the myth of Sundance inside out and upside down. His “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” a biting and funny look at the miseries of childhood that manages to be scathing, sensitive and original, is one of the most admired films in the dramatic competition, and, according to the festival cliche, a wondrous studio contract should be the reward.

Except that writer-director Solondz, a wry and engaging 36-year-old New Yorker, has already had his studio experience. Ten years ago. In fact, he had simultaneous three-picture deals with Columbia and Fox that had the studios surrealistically bickering with each other about the potential release order of his unmade films: Would it be Columbia- Fox- Columbia- Columbia- Fox- Fox or Columbia- Fox- Fox- Columbia- Fox-Columbia? There were a lot of permutations.

“It was such an excruciating time for me. It turned out the only thing I liked about these deals was telling everyone I had them. I wasn’t interested in any of the pictures that came my way, and none of my friends could sympathize: ‘Poor Todd, he has these two three-picture deals.’ ”

It wasn’t until after he managed to extricate himself from both arrangements and suffered through a completely miserable debut film for another company that Solondz sat down and wrote “Dollhouse.” And the film didn’t get made until after he’d completely changed professions, he thought for good.

“I wrote it six years ago to redeem myself from the horror of what I’d been through, partially fueled by the success of ‘The Wonder Years,’ which didn’t speak to anything real in my experience,” he says. “I hadn’t seen an English-language film that dealt with this material in an honest way, that captured that period of life. Children are usually looked at as either cute or doing demonic things, everything but what they really are, which is human beings.”

“Dollhouse” introduces us to 11-year-old Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), just beginning her first year in junior high and already teased and abused as “Wiener-dog.” Solondz’s look at the perpetual torment and romantic yearnings she goes through in this awful new world is daring and completely controlled: Rarely has real misery been so bitingly funny.

“What excites me and moves me are things that make me laugh and are poignant at the same time, where it’s funny but touches something that hurts,” the director says. “As adults we know what’s truly a matter of life and death, but a child feels like the stakes are always that high. That period is a struggle.”

Also a struggle that can seem amusing in retrospect is Solondz’s own battles with Hollywood, a place where, he correctly notes, “the business itself is much more entertaining than the movies they make.”

Solondz got an intense dose of Hollywood when his short film, “Schatt’s Last Shot,” was included in a showcase of NYU student filmmakers. A screening in New York got him an agent, and once the showcase got to L.A., he was deluged by others. When he told his first agent he just wanted to meet some of these new people, she started crying on the phone, and when he was cornered by a trio from another agency, “one of them got down on their knees and begged. You read about this but it’s true, it happens.”

Once freed from his pair of deals, Solondz made something called “Fear, Anxiety and Depression” that was released in 1989. It was not a peak experience. “Once I was in pre-production I knew it was a mistake, I felt it was profoundly misconceived, ill-conceived, misbegotten,” he remembers. “It was horrible, and I was so totally broken and demoralized when it was over I moved to another career.”

That would be teaching English as a second language, a job Solondz found “gratifying in ways film had never been.” Whenever anyone asked him about his previous life, “I said I’d been working as a computer programmer, which ended conversation right there.”

The combination of encroaching layoffs at his school and a call from his lawyer asking if he was still interested in directing led to “Dollhouse” being made. The film was one of the successes of the 1995 Toronto Film Festival, where it sparked a bidding war won by Sony Classics. But given his history, Todd Solondz is not surprisingly circumspect about his future. “My next project?” he says. “We’ll see.”

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Nick Park, claymation wizard and director of the Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers” and the brand-new “Close Shave,” has been at Sundance for only a few hours, but he senses it already. “There’s a buzz here,” he says, “a feeling of potential. People are just excited about movies.”

Not just about movies in general, however. Every year there is one particular film that the festival goes mad for, that audiences beg to see and that sparks two-fisted brawling among potential distributors. This year that film is “Shine,” an out-of-competition world premiere from Australia that after only two standing-ovation screenings was sold to Fine Line for a rumored $2 million to $2.5 million. And that was only the beginning of the fuss.

Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, claiming he had a prior arrangement with Pandora, the company handling “Shine’s” international sales, had an altercation with Pandora’s representatives in a local restaurant and has since said that he’s going to sue to get the North American distribution rights.

Remaining remarkably calm in the center of this fuss is director Scott Hicks, who nevertheless says of the whole experience, “It’s been an avalanche. You read about these things happening, but when you’re standing in the middle of the crush it begins to dawn on you that something special is happening.”

Used to “laconic Australians,” Hicks was especially taken by the way “Americans are not afraid to tell you how they feel. And people are so hungry for emotion from movies, they want it so much. A lot of the entertainment we see glosses right over the top of relationships because they’re too hard to deal with honestly. This film opens that door and releases what’s behind it.”

“Shine,” whose title symbolizes the light that sometimes exists at the end of a tunnel, benefits from being based on the true story of Australian pianist David Helfgott, a child prodigy who descended into madness, and the restrained yet deeply feeling way Hicks and screenwriter Jan Sardi have told it.

Impeccably acted, especially by Armin Mueller-Stahl as the boy’s overreaching father, “Shine” is a triumphant story, rich in accessible but not overdone emotions. In many ways it’s a throwback to the best kinds of Hollywood movies, able to move a mass audience without insulting it, which is why it’s created so much excitement in the first place.