Long story short: How to launch a career

Show business auditions are as old and varied as Hollywood itself, but in their newest incarnation at the Sundance Film Festival, these make-or-break tryouts have become a lot less private: Now you have to sell yourself in front of hundreds of spectators.

The new audition instrument is the short movie, a cinematic calling card that may not last two minutes but can single-handedly change a director’s professional life. The Sundance short has become the SAT for admission into the independent film community, and many of today’s top independent directors -- from Wes Anderson to David O. Russell to Alexander Payne -- first attracted attention with a Sundance short.

“When I think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ that [list of directors] is what I come back to,” says Sundance programming director John Cooper. “Careers are launched.”

Thousands of filmmakers have noticed and have flooded Sundance with submissions, sending in far more short films than are tendered for the festival’s more famous feature competition. A record 3,389 short films were submitted for this year’s festival, with just 88 titles making the cut. The shorts are shown either in packages (there are six separate Sundance shorts programs, each with about six different titles) or, in a more coveted slot, in front of a Sundance feature.

Having hundreds of industry executives watch your first filmmaking steps can have enormous impact on making the contacts necessary to climb up the food chain. The makers of a total of eight Sundance dramas and documentaries previously attended the festival with shorts. Sometimes, the features represent total departures from the earlier shorts, but in several cases the shorts were basically condensed versions of the subsequent longer work.

One of this year’s Sundance features, “D.E.B.S.,” began as a short film of the same title at last year’s festival, and that 11-minute short helped convince Screen Gems to finance the longer version of the lesbian-laced “Charlie’s Angels” parody. The lovable loser comedy “Napoleon Dynamite,” perhaps the festival’s most talked-about movie, began its life in Park City last year as the nine-minute short “Peluca.” Director and co-writer Jared Hess didn’t even submit the short to Sundance; it played instead at the rival Slamdance Festival.

“I did the short as a showcase of what I wanted to do as a feature,” Hess says. “It was totally instrumental in securing financing for the feature.”

Beyond opening doors and bringing in money, these short films also afford writers and directors a chance to establish a filmmaking style that will become their signature for years to come. Because they are made so far below the radar and without studio financing, they are not subject to meddling and collaboration run amok.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s short “Cigarettes & Coffee” showed in the 1993 festival; elements of the film and Anderson’s storytelling technique were visible in his subsequent feature “Hard Eight.” Todd Haynes’ “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which played at Sundance in 1988, famously used dolls, including Barbies, to chronicle the life of the late singer. The foundations for the movie and TV show “South Park” were laid in 1997 when Trey Parker and Matt Stone showed the five-minute short “The Spirit of Christmas,” which itself began as a $2,000 animated greeting card.

“There are no commercial expectations with a short, so you are encouraged to make mistakes,” says John Curran, the director of this year’s Sundance feature “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and the 1997 Sundance short “Down Rusty Down,” which told the story of a dog’s neutering with a human actor playing the canine.

It’s not that fledgling filmmakers gravitate to short films because they necessarily want to. Some of the shorts are made as graduate school projects, while others are brief because a few minutes is literally all the filmmakers can afford. Hess’ “Peluca,” for example, was shot in two days at a cost of $500. When Hess made his feature “Napoleon Dynamite,” he had the comparatively kingly budget of $400,000 and a 22-day shooting schedule. (It just keeps getting better for Hess: Fox Searchlight bought the film for $3 million.)

Once short-film directors get a chance to make a feature, they very rarely return to the abbreviated format. Part of the reason: Outside of film festivals, late-night cable, minor Internet movie sites and obscure DVD compilations, it’s almost impossible for audiences to see short films.

“If you want to make movies and have a lot of people see them, you have to make features,” says Ray McKinnon, who wrote, directed and costars in the Sundance feature “Chrystal.” McKinnon’s short film “The Accountant” won the live action short film Academy Award in 2002 but was not picked to be in Sundance.

If you believe the maxim that many movies are only as good as their casts, a good short film can be a talent magnet. In addition to sending out copies of their feature screenplay to actors, agents and casting directors, the makers of short films often will send along a cassette of their short.

“It helps if you have an idea who the filmmaker is behind the script,” McKinnon says. “You’re taken a little more seriously.” Among the actors McKinnon was able to attract to “Chrystal” was Billy Bob Thornton, himself the butt of a joke in “The Accountant.”

At last year’s festival, writer-director Alan Brown’s short “O beautiful” attracted the attention of actor Gregory Smith. Brown and Smith had lunch at a Park City restaurant, talked about movies, and now Smith is costarring in Brown’s “Book of Love,” which is in the current Sundance feature competition.

Not every director of a short film is eager to circulate an earlier short; like an old haircut, they can be embarrassing to revisit. Michael Clancy’s 1996 Sundance short “Emily’s Last Date” helped get the writer-director a multiyear deal with DreamWorks. But once he began work on “Eulogy,” a feature in competition this year, he didn’t use “Emily’s Last Date” as an introduction.

“Its production values were so low that I became concerned the actors would become worried about the light they would be portrayed in,” Clancy says.

Another beauty of the short film is that it allows its makers to reinvent themselves. Bryan Buckley is among the top commercial directors going; he has done spots for Pepsi, FedEx and is the director of the new MasterCard ad starring quarterback Brett Favre. But Buckley really wants to make movies, so he’s here at Sundance with the short film “Krug.”

“I do big and glitzy [commercial] spots, so people look at me and think I am totally incapable of doing something small and personal,” Buckley says.

The one thing short films can’t really do is prepare their directors for the rigors of feature films. A lengthy short may be half an hour long, but a 90-minute feature is hardly three times the work. Says “Book of Love” director Brown: “It’s about 100 times harder.”