Buzz epidemic grips Utah town

The hills are alive with the over-caffeinated chatty cliques of New York and Los Angeles purged from their native habitats for the Sundance Film Festival. And everywhere they go -- from the slushy street corners to the overheated shuttles to the hyper-styled swag houses -- they generate and devour that ephemeral, intoxicating, all-powerful, sometimes devastating elixir: buzz.

It’s buzz that’s behind the $9-million acquisition of “Hustle & Flow” by Paramount and MTV Films. It’s the reason people lined up five hours early to see Pierce Brosnan portray the “anti-Bond” wearing a Speedo in “The Matador,” now a Miramax property. It’s personified by blogger Jason Calacanis, who speaks so fast he doesn’t seem to breathe, racing from theater to theater, armed with a PDA, a laptop and two cameras. It’s that insatiable need to know the next big thing that colors every chat on the shuttle buses that crisscross the town.

The hunger for it motivates indie filmmakers to parade down Main Street in silly costumes, place branded merch in every handshake and, in the case of “Unknown White Male” lead producer Beadie Finzi, to write the film’s title in the grime of a dirty parked car.

Buzz can be a distraction from truth and authenticity. But here, at the intersection of art and commerce, buzz is oxygen. Without it, entire tribes of film buyers, publicists, agents and journalists would simply cease to be. The festival crowd would lose all perspective, aimlessly wandering this 12-square-mile burg with no sense of urgency. In other words, Sundance wouldn’t be Sundance without it.

“People are in one area, obsessed with one major topic, and that’s what you have to talk about,” says publicist Michele Robertson, who has worked on three films at the festival this year. “It’s like being held hostage and talking about how much water you have left.”

Buzz is like mercury, virtually impossible to contain once it’s released. It connects people to the experience, it makes them relevant, critical even, to the business of pop culture. “It begins with a sliver of truth, which is someone seeing a film,” says Tony Safford, Fox Searchlight’s senior vice president of acquisitions. “And then there’s this kind of expanding spiral of collusion that occurs, because we all want to think we are in the know.”

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When does it start?

In the indie film world, buzz happens in different ways, depending on the film’s commercial appeal and the team that’s selling it. Sundance is the first stop on the annual film festival circuit and some say a film’s buzz begins after Sundance Director Geoffrey Gilmore and his staff announce their selections. Others say the buzz starts the minute someone with credibility, and without an obvious interest in the project, raves about it. Then there’s the buzz generated by the audience after a public screening -- organic buzz, if you will -- that takes place on buses, at after-hours parties and on festival blogs.

When it happens, it happens very quickly. “Murderball,” a documentary about quadriplegic rugby players, was among this year’s entries with great word of mouth. It screened at 2:30 p.m. on the festival’s first Friday, prompting cheers from the audience. Within hours, it had rocketed to the top of the must-see list among the shuttle bus crowd. “There’s the machine and then there’s human nature,” says Sundance director of programming John Cooper. “And human nature is always going to override everything else.”

Films with celebrity names attached, whether as cast members, directors, producers or even high-profile sales agents, attract buzz without trying. Dozens of filmgoers stood out in the cold, trying to scalp tickets to the first screenings of Brosnan’s “The Matador”; “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School,” which starred Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei and John Goodman; and “Pretty Persuasion,” which featured Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston and James Woods.

The key, in these cases, is to control the buzz. And for film buyers, sometimes that means generating negative talk about a film to force competing buyers off the scent. Nothing kills buzz like a little bad word of mouth, like the banter of these two film buyers comparing notes before one screening: “ ‘Brick’ looked great, but the story’s too slow. A bit of a slog for relatively minor payoff,” said one. “ ’40 Shades of Blue’ wasn’t fully realized,” said the other. “It didn’t hit me where I live.”

Usually, films are kept top secret until the festival premiere, screened only for VIPs to avoid building unrealistic expectations. This strategy produced a sold-out crowd for the premiere last weekend of “The Matador.” But buzz is temporary, and by the next day it had moved onto “Hustle & Flow,” the crowd-pleaser about a Memphis pimp-turned-rap artist. By Monday, chatter was diverted to “The Squid and the Whale,” a semiautobiographical film directed by Noah Baumbach and co-produced by his friend, director Wes Anderson. And Thursday, reports of Focus Features’ $2-million acquisition of the British picture “On a Clear Day” shifted the buzz yet again.

“Often the movies that are buzzed about before Sundance are not the movies that are buzzed about once they’re seen at Sundance,” says Jeremy Barber, who co-heads with Rich Klubeck the packaging and financing of independent film for United Talent Agency. He also represented “Hustle & Flow.” “And ironically [those] movies ... are not the movies that are buzzed about once they come out.” Everyone’s favorite example of this phenomenon is “Happy, Texas,” the 1999 comedy starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam that had enormous popular appeal, was acquired for a whopping $10 million by Miramax and then tanked at the box office.

Often filmmakers will show the film before the festival to a few select people who possess some useful authority and are likely vehicles of buzz -- a well-placed film executive, influential filmmaker or veteran film journalist.

“It’s like a genie in a bottle,” says Robertson, who represented two buzz-worthy films at this year’s festival, “Marilyn Hotchkiss” and “Game 6.” “You can sit there and it plays and you see the acquisition people come out and you can say, OK, we’ve got something here. You’re going to know where you stand from your first screening.”

Vocabulary used to describe the film is critical. It’s better to be emotional than factual. Films that are described as “human” or “terrifying” or “hilarious” or as having “powerful performances” that “stay with you” are those that earn buzz. “The best buzz is non-information,” says Peter Guber, chairman of Mandalay Entertainment and co-host of AMC’s “Sunday Shootout.” “It’s when they give us emotional resonance. That’s the kind of buzz that’s vital and viral.”

Having a movie on the edge also helps. The buzz on “Wolf Creek,” a horror film bought by Miramax before the festival began, sustained the week because everyone wanted to say they saw the festival’s “super-violent” picture. “The Aristocrats,” a documentary about the world’s filthiest joke, was similarly popular.

“Game 6” executive producer Michael Nozik said that during the promotion for last year’s Sundance entry “The Motorcycle Diaries,” he and his staff worked hard to prevent people from deeming his movie as “too something,” as in “too dark,” “too esoteric” or “too commercial.”

Film sales agent Dan O’Meara, whose company, Epstein, Levinsohn, Bodine, Hurwitz & Weinstein, represented last year’s art-house hits “Garden State” and “Open Water,” had refined his pitch for this year’s film “212,” a romantic comedy about three sets of New Yorkers. His language was crucial because the movie has a no-name cast and a first-time director (Anthony Ng).

“I’ve been describing it as romantic and interesting and delightfully intimate, refreshingly uplifting, unpretentious and magical,” he says. “It’s something that kind of enters you and leaves you with a warm feeling.”

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The blogging phenomenon

While the media often rescue a handful of Sundance pictures from obscurity, the perceived objective view of festival blogging has become an even faster -- and, for some, more credible -- source of buzz. Blogging, by its very nature, is the perfect vehicle for buzz. It moves rapidly, morphs by the moment and travels electronically. The festival doesn’t track the numbers of bloggers because, as Ian Calderon, the Sundance Institute’s director of digital initiatives, says, “they’re organic and they’re self-generated and they’re spontaneous.” But, he adds anecdotally, there are dozens of people blogging from their laptops, their PDAs and their cellphones. And their numbers increase every year.

“For every journalist out there, there are 4,000 [bloggers] looking for tidbits,” says blogger Calacanis. “People find it very refreshing to get that sort of unfiltered view of the world.”

In some cases, “unfiltered” simply means a platform to whine. Calacanis, on the other hand, is an independent blogger whose website bloggingsundance.com is devoted exclusively to his festival experience with an aim to give readers up-to-the-minute, articulate reviews of the half-dozen films he sees each day. Sometimes he even posts during the screening.

On one recent morning, he was camped at the festival’s headquarters typing and talking and checking his watch because he had to catch the documentary “After Innocence” in 10 minutes and he still hadn’t posted a review of the film he saw last night -- “Murderball” (“great, tense”). But he kept getting distracted by reporters, festival staff, filmmakers and studio execs who wanted to exchange festival favorites.

There was the Magnolia Pictures executive with his opinion on “The Matador” (“liked it”). And the two British filmmakers pitching their film “Unknown White Male” (their pitch: “an extraordinary portrayal of an amnesiac”). He nabbed an invite to that film, then dashed off to “After Innocence,” slipping into the theater just as the lights went dim. Two days later, he posted a review of the documentary titled “The most important film at Sundance this year.”

And a day after that, his posting had snagged one reader’s attention: “Anyone have any idea which studio owns this film (or is bidding to get it)? It sounds very interesting.”