The Dark Side of Sundance

By Joel Stein

Sometimes journalism means spending weeks traveling to dangerous locations and badgering violent interview subjects. And sometimes it means coming up with a flimsy excuse to get your editors to send you to the Sundance Film Festival. As lots of people in my office were doing the former, I did the latter. You've got to zig when they zag.

The first person I saw in the Sundance greeting center was a guy talking on his cell phone, saying, "Yeah, I'm an agent too." Eager to fit in, I bought a cell phone, sunglasses and a tasteful pink pashmina scarf. I had heard Sundance would be overrun with agents, producers and movie stars. If only that were true. The town is in fact overrun by desperate indie moviemakers. I thought indie was just another word for cheap, artsy films that no one sees. It turns out indie means movies made by rich kids who spend their parents' money without any way to get their films shown in theaters where people buy tickets.

These auteurs are so confident, they show up even when their work is rejected from the official festival. They stand on the town's main thoroughfare pestering passersby to see their films. They rent out mall storefronts for showings. I saw one director projecting his movie onto a snowy hillside. Another was sneaking a tiny TV into parties and showing his trailer under his trench coat--which, as it turned out, was actually a more unsettling experience than if he had just been naked. There was a director with a sign reading WILL WORK FOR DISTRIBUTION. And in a move even Pakistan wouldn't attempt, producers offered pedestrians a ride in a van, then refused to pull over until they finished showing their movie. Four filmmakers, each with a movie about extraterrestrials, sent their actors dressed in alien costumes to accost people on the street. I had never realized how many scripts involve aliens and repeated use of the phrase anal probe.

Even worse than indie filmmakers are the people who fly to Utah to watch the films. At a Q&A session with a director who had just shown his movie, an audience member prefaced his questions with "One emotional, one technical." The emotional question wasn't really a question at all, but more like a painful, freshman English-level explanation of what he, as a sensitive male, got from the movie's symbolism. It was also a very thinly veiled cry for sex.

I left the festival utterly bewildered that our economy does so well. We have tons of people working on websites that no one uses and making movies that will never be distributed. Alan Greenspan would revise his whole "increased productivity" theory if he went to Sundance.

All this hope and determination would be charming if indie films were better than studio films. They are not. Sure, this year a few talented directors made edgy films that the studios would be afraid to take a chance on, but the vast majority couldn't get their films into theaters because they suck. Studios aren't making bad movies because they're greedy and stupid; it's because there are very few good scripts. Though I may have to go to Cannes to confirm this.