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That’s So Sundance: Part 4

January 28, 2010 by Peter

Peter, Jeff and Jason are in Park City Utah to cover and uncover the Sundance Film Festival for 5 days.

Check out Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 coverages by following the Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 links.

On Saturday I attended a celebration of successful viral marketing. It started with these folks from a fancy ad agency, julia oh and some white guy, patting themselves on the back about their work promoting the film coraline, which made 3 times the amount of money it was supposed to make. They acknowledged that this was partially because it was a good movie, but way more in their opinion it was because they imagineered a bunch of bobo cornell boxes and mysteriously sent them to twee bloggers. I couldn’t decide whether that was more sad than it was correct or the opposite—probably a toss-up.

Then the vp of mtv’s ‘new media department’ got up to talk about this new web series they’re debuting at the festival called Five Dollar Cover and against every impulse-bone in my brain it sounded fantastic. They asked a couple of clever up-and-coming directors to create an episodic fictional film in their hometown, first memphis (working with BYT Sister site Live From Memphis), then seattle so far, starring a different band in each episode playing themselves but in a made-up story. It’s like american idol meets mumblecore. At least that’s what the satanic tapeworm who now speaks for me says. Then they ask a bunch of local directors to profile the bands with their own spin on standard rock documentary, and they find quirky ways to work with sponsors to make money out of it, and yadda and yadda yadda. He showed a clip of it, and the bands looked diverse and awesome and the stories looked charming and I loath how much i sound like a press release right now.

But the real interesting bit was the intro to the dude’s presentation of the marketing strategy. “For many years I was the head of mtv films, so I understand where you all are coming from. You’re all saying “feature films are dead, can I still have a career?” Well I can tell you yes, you can. Maybe not today…but someday.” I could feel the air being sucked out of the room by 200 publicists. Hooray internet! Also Steve from 90210 was there.

A couple of days, hours, eons, later I was waiting for the new Jonathan Ames movie the Extra Man to premiere. I say it’s Ames’ movie because he wrote it, based on his own book, and because when the directors introduced him he stood up and made three nerdy loud wookie crows as a blessing on the proceedings. He has a lot of promise, that guy, both as a writer and a character. But so the movie wasn’t so great (Kevin Klein was too silly for the main character’s mopey reactions to him to make sense, John C Reilly has a funny voice the novelty of which wears off within 10 minutes, and Katie Holmes is just a block of expensive wood…) but I sat next to a guy named David Permut (who turned out to be a pretty major producer ((lol captain ron for the win))), the first person on the mountain to share this weird rank cynicism I had been infected with all weekend.

Everyone I’ve met so far, from actors like teenage snowboader Eddie Hassell (the Kids Are Allright) to Greenland’s first feature film director (Otto Rosing), has been overwhelmingly positive about the festival experience, which my intimations of exclusivity and commercialism couldn’t shake at all.

I know I know literally nothing about the movie business, but there’s something really strange about a massive party that brutally cements the enstablished chasms between successful and unsuccessful, the winners and losers and the not-in-the-running, all while blithely praising itself as the champion of the lone rebel.

David Permut (that’s him on the left) had no such misconceptions. I told him I was writing about the lifestyle of Sundance as much as the films and he cackled musically. “Ah yes, the embarrassing parties. The deals, the cutthroat negotiations high in the hills of Deer Valley. The people talking about everything other than the films.” He had a lot of interesting things to say about the movies he’d seen (none of which I should reveal even in this unnoticeable space, nor whether or not he walked out of the Extra Man [tho I can tell you he's making a Sam Kinison movie, which makes my brain get an erection]) but his attitude about the festival was one I felt most akin to: “There’s plenty of support for small films here,” he said, but in the end, “This is a business conference.”

Are there two sides to the festival or just one side and a series of delusions? It depends on who you ask. But since every arist you meet is just happy to be here because they’ve already won recognition just by getting invited, and every press person who meet feels coddled and protected and catered-to, and every random rich ski-bunny couple from Cheyenne feels lucky to meet a real Hollywood director slash movie star, so…who is all the “Rebel you rebel! Grow underground! Break preconceptions!” cheerleading aimed at?

Yeah, it’s for that tiny precious minority, the 1% of the people around here on the next step up the ladder from Hollywood players like Permut. Not the rich, the uber-super-duper rich, what Chris Rock called theguywhosignsShaq’schecks wealthy. Every piece of programming, every free drink or free bottle of perfume, every indie band and blogger-rap group flown in, everything in this town and it’s 40,000  more imported inhabitants tending bar and driving cabs and holding clipboards and just looking sick hot in a fur cap, it’s all designed to make a few extremely rich men (and, on rare occasions, their wives) take out a checkbook and buy a movie created outside the existing system of studio production. I may sound like I’m complaining about this (utterly obvious to insiders) revelation, but I’m not. Until some massive alternative system of distributing reels of film to theater screens comes along, this is the best chance a film artist has to get their vision up in front of faces instead of passed around, downloaded, or streamed on a tiny screen. And all the insipid backscratching and patting and rubbing and stabbing and any other thing you can do with a back-side, all that’s worth it.

Mostly. It depends on who you ask. Don’t ask me tho I’m infected. I gots SUNDANCE FEVER. Soon to be followed by DC  DIARRHEA

Tomorrow: More movie review pomes, an interview with Greenland’s best movie director, and 1000 ridiculous afterparty photos if Jeff ever stops being hungover.

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