Shadow Over Sundance

It hurts me to say this, but there’s a problem at the heart of the Sundance Film Festival.

Though it exhausts me beyond reason, I love Sundance, I really do. My first trip to the Park City, Utah, event was in 1986, and the festival just completed was my eighth in a row.

I love the spirit of the place: the filmmakers on the street handing out cards and hustling an audience for their work, the director I met wandering the halls of the Yarrow Hotel stopping strangers and asking for $8 million in completion funds, the posters tacked up on every available space (“No Stars! No Action! No Sex! In Color!” for a film called “Trigger Happy” was a personal favorite). And while I don’t ski, I’ve even come to appreciate the snow, especially when it falls early in the morning and creates a silence that is beyond words.

And I love what Sundance, headed by passionate co-directors Geoffrey Gilmore and Nicole Guillemet, has accomplished for the independent film movement. The festival and the independent scene grew up together, and I’m so pleased at how strong they’ve gotten, how hard the festival tries to be both efficient and comfortable, that even the legions of industry types insisting “the buzz has been terrific” on omnipresent cell phones can’t break the spell.

And yet, despite all these good things, it’s impossible to come to Sundance without feeling that this, the preeminent festival in North America, is not all it should be. It has a core flaw that infrequent visitors don’t notice and regulars either shrug off or haven’t wanted to point out because, like me, they love the festival and feel queasy about criticizing it. But maybe it’s time for a Sundance intervention.

The heart of the festival, its centerpiece Dramatic Competition, which this year had 840 films vying for 16 slots, is so much what everyone cares about that its headquarter theater was changed to a larger venue to accommodate the hordes that want to get in. Yet if you ask any Sundance regular which of the festival’s numerous sections (including the Documentary Competition, Premieres, World Cinema, American Spectrum and its remarkable shorts program) is the weakest and most disappointing, the Dramatic Competition would get almost everyone’s vote.

Despite the festival’s success, despite a list of 125 sponsors--including Mercedes-Benz, AT&T;, American Express and Gap--that would do credit to a Super Bowl telecast, there has been increasing irritation at the complete disconnect between how large and prestigious the festival has gotten and its stubborn insistence on focusing its most celebrated section on films that seem perversely picked to conform to a narrow and outmoded aesthetic agenda, films that by and large make the cut precisely because they are doomed never to reach a wider audience.

Contrast this to the situation in Sundance’s parallel competitive section. If you come to the festival and see the 16 documentaries in contention for the Grand Jury Prize, you leave knowing that you’ve experienced close to the cream of this country’s nonfiction filmmaking. You feel exhilarated about the state of the art, and you feel fortunate to have seen the movies you’ve watched. With the dramatic competitors, on the other hand, you end up feeling that the fortunate ones are those who don’t have to see what you’ve suffered through.

Of course, as with any blanket generalization, there are numerous and obvious exceptions. Excellent films with commercial potential regularly appear in competition, including in recent years “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “The Brothers McMullen” and “Smoke Signals.” And the good news about this year’s festival was a drop in that former Sundance staple, woeful films about sullen teenagers confused about their sexuality, that used to drive audiences screaming into the night.

A Certain Bias in Selection Process

But the feeling is inescapable that works with too much box-office promise still tend to be ignored, that the selection process has a strong and unmistakable anti-commercial bias. In theory that may sound noble and honorable, but in practice it’s a counterproductive exercise in artistic elitism that does the independent movement no good at all.

What viewers are subjected to is a self-perpetuating string of earnest, well-meaning films that are as sensitive, artistic and precious as anyone could want but have absolutely no chance of pleasing audiences outside of a festival’s rarefied atmosphere--and frequently not even at the festival.

While Sundance insists that it merely picks the best of what’s offered, there are flaws in that argument. If you live in a town with, say, 30 restaurants, reasonable people with taste will agree on the top 10. But if you have to pick 16 restaurants out of 840, it’s inevitable that lists will vary widely. Having to select so few out of such a large group means that specific aesthetic agendas can’t help but come into play.

Because we’re in a bull market for indie films, with more companies than ever before competing for product, it’s safe to say that any film of real quality, even unapologetically noncommercial ones, will find distribution. Given that, is it really something to be proud of that most movies in the Dramatic Competition are so awkwardly made and out of touch with more than a minuscule audience that they don’t get picked up?

While no one outside of the studio system would argue that just being commercial makes a film good, it’s equally true, though by no means accepted up at Sundance, that just being noncommercial doesn’t automatically confer worthiness either. Yes, there are wonderful films there is no audience for, and those films have a place at Sundance, but just because there’s no audience for a given film doesn’t make it by definition wonderful.

That anti-commercial bias has infected Sundance juries as well. It’s widely known that the popular “The Brothers McMullen,” the Grand Jury Prize winner in 1995, was a compromise choice after the jury split on no doubt more ethereal efforts. Back in 1990, the jury gave its top prize to the formidably inaccessible “Chameleon Street,” giving lesser notice to a tremendous film that could have found an audience with help, Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger.” And one of the most successful films to come out of Sundance, “sex, lies, and videotape,” won an audience, not a jury award.

The list of woebegone films that have been accepted for competition over the years looks especially suspect when you consider the remarkable works that have been submitted to Sundance only to be rejected. Both Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”) and Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”), two of the most justly celebrated of young independent directors, had their excellent first films, “Hard Eight” and “Bottle Rocket,” respectively, rejected. Carl Franklin’s “One False Move,” an independent landmark, was also rejected. And “Gods and Monsters,” good enough to earn an almost sure Oscar nomination for star Ian McKellen, was not good enough for the competition and was relegated to the second-rung American Spectrum. And so on.

Competitive Tone Comes From Redford

It’s not hard to figure out where this fierce anti-commercial bias comes from: the president of the Sundance Institute, Robert Redford. Perhaps because he’s worked so long in the mainstream, perhaps because he cringes whenever people complain about the creeping influence of Hollywood on the festival, Redford has become a zealot for keeping the dramatic competition what he no doubt sees as pure. If he could arrange it so that not one of the 16 films got distribution, it would probably please him more than if they all did.

This year, Redford publicly expressed displeasure at the buzz that grows up around which films are going to be commercial and which aren’t (“Redford Hates the Buzz, Loves the Pics” headlined Variety), a comment that feels disingenuous given Sundance’s growth. Not only has the festival gotten celebrated enough to attract all those sponsors, its success has allowed for the creation of a veritable Sundance empire: There is the Sundance catalog, the Sundance Channel, an about-to-open Sundance chain of theaters and maybe even a Sundance line of health-conscious movie snacks in the works.

Sundance has thrived not because it has insisted on keeping the competition safe for unpopular fiascoes but because it has shown that there is a market for the best of these films; it’s shown that Americans will flock to hand-crafted, non-machine-made independent cinema if it is good. The commercial vitality of these films is the key to the creation of everything under Redford’s Sundance umbrella. It’s not an enemy or a danger sign, it’s something to be embraced.

At the same time, supporting films whose potential audience is microscopic, worshiping their inevitable lack of success like a relic of the true cross, is both perversely holding onto something outmoded in the world Sundance has created and missing the chance to do more tangible good.

Open Up the Field for Grand Jury Prize

Showing films at Sundance is preaching to the converted, so much so that every year distributors are fooled into overpaying for films partly because of ecstatic audience reaction up on the mountain. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that independent films are still at a disadvantage back home. Given that most moviegoing Americans are probably strangers to indie films, and given that Sundance’s imprimatur can be immensely valuable, wouldn’t it make sense to practice a form of cinematic triage and allow more films that have a chance in the real world into the competition and not focus so lovingly on those that are D.O.A.?

How can that be done? One way would be to allow films by established independent directors to break free from the Premieres ghetto and compete for the Grand Jury Prize. Jurors would still want to give newcomers an award whenever possible, and films like Victor Nunez’s “Ulee’s Gold” and even Paul Schrader’s “Affliction” would still get a shot at the help a possible Sundance award would have given them.

More important is simply the psychological switch of loosening up, dealing with reality and reversing the competition’s focus on orphan films that will never find homes. For, finally, what purpose does it serve to pretend the independent field is something it’s not anymore? What’s the point of forcing the indie world to remain precious and sheltered, a curly-haired Little Lord Fauntleroy in aesthetically pleasing short pants, when it’s in fact a healthy adolescent that can be trusted to make its own way in the world without overprotection? People come to Sundance from all over the world to see the best the American independent world can manage, and there’s no reason the Dramatic Competition shouldn’t reflect exactly that.