The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

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The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King.

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Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies.

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