Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Phil Nugent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

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.

For whom were these movies made? Even when they managed to acquire a theatrical release, as Stacking did, they never got far out of the major cities before twitching to death in the hot sun. Certainly there was no audience for them among the people whose lives they tried to ennoble. Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural farming community, I can tell you that nobody who spends his days working on a farm wants to blow his mad money on the chance to watch some poor bastard wonder whether he'll be able to get this year's crop in. Basically, they were made only for the people who'd see them at a festival like Sundance: educated liberals who felt virtuous from seeing people in denim and broad-brimmed hats being boring on-screen and critics who enjoyed denouncing the public for not making these fine, well-meaning movies as successful as Lethal Weapon. One reason they're such period pieces now is that they were made before people started thinking in terms of the Red State/Blue State divide, which makes them bittersweet reminders of a time not so long ago when educated big-city liberals thought of the people who grow their steaks as dull but honorable tillers of the soil instead of that pack of dumbasses who re-elected Bush.

IN THE SOUP (1992): It's not exactly unheard of for a movie to be greeted with awards and recognition at Sundance and then die on the vine when it's sent out into the cold, unfriendly world to fend for itself. That was certainly the case with this comedy, starring Steve Buscemi as an aspiring filmmaker and the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a Life Force, which was directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, the rtist formerly known as Mr. Jennifer Beals. (Beals is in it, too, as are Jim Jarmusch, Carol Kane, Stanley Tucci, Debi Mazar, Sam Rockwell, and the late '80s indie stalwart Rockets Redglare.) The movie's Grand Jury Prize wouldn't be so embarrassing if it weren't for the competition: among the movies it beat out was Reservoir Dogs, which got a legendary bad reception from a festival crowd put off by its violence and gaudy showmanship. You don't have to be a Tarantino enthusiast to compare the reaction his movie got to the soft, clumsy whimsey of Rockwell's and feel that Sundance, just three years after sex, lies... had taken it to a new level, was already in danger of seeming out of touch. Nothing Rockwell ever did again would garner as much attention; his biggest break came when Tarantino invited him to contribute a segment to the disastrous implosion of a multi-director feature, Four Rooms. The real winner of this round would be Steve Buscemi, who could boast of having starred in the year's big hit at Sundance and also having a breakout role in the real-world hit that smoked the Sundance hit.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995): Never has anybody gotten more out of a pretty face and a knack for making connections--he was working in the offices of Entertainment Tonight while making his movie and managed to slip a copy of the film to Redford himself when the great man was on ET plugging Quiz Show--when he had nothing, literally nothing else, to back it up than McMullen star and auteur Edward Burns. Burns's movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to be a modest hit in theaters, was a half-assed sitcom that benefited from his lack of an eye and his inability to parlay his $28.000 budget into a halfway-decent-looking or decent-sounding movie; for a while, people taken with Burns's puppy-dog eyes, floppy locks, and the notion that making a movie while working as a production assistant on Entertainment Tonight counted as a struggling-artist story assumed that the rough poverty-row look of the film must confer artistic respectablity on it. Burns cleared up any lingering misunderstanding with his second film, She's the One, where his lame script was given a pricey big-studio mounting and consequently just looked lame. (He also publicly humiliated his McMullen co-stars Mike McGlone and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns by casting them alongside real actors such as John Mahoney, Cameron Diaz, Amanda Peet, and Frank Vincent. McGlone's "performance" in She's the One, which consisted of having a petulant, screaming fit in just about every scene he was in, made him in particular look like a prime candidate for the title Supreme Asshat of the Known Universe.) Burns has directed half a dozen movies since then, none of which has garnered any real attention; he also acts, sort of, in better directors' films, most notably in Saving Private Ryan from back in the days when his name had some heat attached to it. Technically, his name still does, in the sense that he now must spend a certain amount of time wondering if he's obligated to correct people who think he's the Ed Burns responsible for The Wire.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL (1996): This movie about misunderstandings and redemption in rural Maine was the only feature film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff, best known for his work in TV, as a writer and producer on such series as Remington Steele and Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The real creative force behind the movie was Roger M. Courts, a direct mail fundraiser and CEO of a Mississippi-based Catholic fund-raising organization called the Sacred Heart League, Inc. Courts was interested in making a movie that could serve as a film equivalent to the "testimonial" literature religious groups passed around, and he spent many years looking for a script that had what he saw as the right mixture of Christian teaching and solid narrative values. He decided that he'd found it in Zlotoff's screenplay about a young ex-con (played by Alison Elliot) whose death at the end of the movie turns her into the fresh-faced Christ figure of Pepperidge Farm. It seems likely that the humanist audience at Sundance missed the religious undertones completely and simply took the movie's heavy-handed moralizing and rustic dullness as a throwback to the good old days of "regional filmmaking", and that the movie won the festival's Audience Award partly on the strength of nostalgia for the days before Miramax deals and Tarantino rip-offs. Ironically, the movie's popular success at the festival led to a high-priced bidding war among distributors. In the end, it was Castle Rock Entertainment that paid top dollar for the privilege of seeing the movie crash and burn in theaters later that year. The material has since found its true level as a play (with a de-sacrificial happy ending) that is popular with regional theater groups.

HAPPY, TEXAS (1999): Sometimes, the family vibe at a big festival, where a lot of steady filmgoers mix and mingle with filmmakers, can inspire a certain amount of self-deception. This godawful comedy, starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as escaped convicts posing as gay beauty pageant directors (while Northam fends off the advances of gay small town sheriff William H. Macy), was received with rhapsodic abandon at Sundance, which can best be interpreted as an explosion of love for Steve Zahn, who had delivered a steady stream of amazing supporting performances in such movies as Reality Bites, That Thing You Do, and Out of Sight, and who had his biggest role to date here. He won the Grand Jury Prize for his performance, which isn't completely off the wall: he's very funny in it. But Miramax's decision to shell out what was variously reported as anywhere from $2.5 million to $10 million dollars for the movie itself proved, shall we say, ill-advised. At the time of the purchase, there were actually outraged bleatings in the trade press from people complaining that Miramax got all the cool movies. But after Happy, Texas collapsed in theaters, the movie would be remembered only as the centerpiece of stories about how Harvey Weinstein couldn't be trusted alone with his checkbook at Sundance.

Independent Film Festival of Boston: Three Things I've Learned About Crawford, Texas

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Crawford, a documentary about (and named for) George W. Bush’s favorite cynically selected folksy backdrop...I mean, uh, vacation spot...was first reviewed here by Scott Von Doviak (at SXSW) and will screen this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

The film profiles the titular town and its residents from just before the future commander-in-chief’s arrival (he bought his ranch there around the time of the 2000 presidential campaign, back when he was governor of the state) through the Decider's recent reversals of fortune. The film was a little preachy-to-the-choir but interesting and taught me the following things about Crawford...

1. The town is small, but not really as dusty and rural as the president would have you believe. In fact, in one of the doc’s best moments, the filmmakers reveal how dozens of different TV news crews use the same farm equipment as a backdrop for their reports from the "Western White House," while carefully framing out the modern high school adjacent to the folksy rustic hardware.

2. There’s a pretty wide, purple-state range of opinions in the heart of "Bush country"...and, in fact, a “peace house” was sitting smack dab in the middle of Crawford even before Cindy Sheehan and the Camp Casey crowd showed up.

3. Once the novelty wears off, having your small town crammed with reporters, protesters and secret service agents gets old pretty quick.

Whither Wim?

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Over the past decade and a half, Wim Wenders has been responsible for one of the most peculiar filmographies ever assembled by a big name director. While Until the End of the World will always have its passionate defenders (including a few of us here at the Screengrab), it’s harder to make a case for such white elephants as The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel. The director’s 2005 attempt at recapturing the spirit of Paris, Texas by teaming up again with screenwriter Sam Shepard for Don’t Come Knocking resulted in yet another moody, cryptic and meandering melodrama stuffed with oddball characters and dazzling visuals but short on narrative sense or recognizable human behavior.

Is there a quick fix that might set Wenders back on the path of relevance? This article in The Independent makes the case that getting the hell out of America might be a good start. It’s true that the U.S. has been the setting for some of Wenders’ least compelling work of late (the short jaunt to Cuba for 1999’s Buena Vista Social Club sure seemed to work wonders), and the director seems to have taken the hint with his new work-in-progress The Palermo Shooting, a “romantic thriller about a photographer that bounces between Germany and Sicily” that reunites Wenders with retirement-fund hawker Dennis Hopper. Still, it may not be fair to blame America for his follies; as the Independent piece hints, it might be about time for him to lose Bono’s phone number, too.

The Screengrab : texas

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Independent Film Festival of Boston: Three Things I've Learned About Crawford, Texas

Whither Wim?