great difficulty attracting top-drawer items from the bowels of the studio system. So Cannes 2000, for instance, settled for Brian De Palma's frigid Mission to Mars while even the most aesthetically rigorous French journalists and critics were wondering why Gladiator wasn't there in its stead.
There are reasons for this absence. Cannes, unlike Toronto, comes in the spring, the wrong time of year for the “quality” films studios would prefer to send to festivals. Cannes, as noted, can kill your picture, something studios don't want to risk with prospective blockbusters costing tens of millions of dollars. Cannes is expensive, especially when you factor in flying stars over in private jets. And, especially in recent years, the festival hierarchy has been unwilling to play the Hollywood game, to take trips to Los Angeles and do the kind of schmoozing and flattering of the powers that be that's necessary to overturn more rational considerations.
Also a factor is that the jury awards at Cannes can be so arbitrary and contrived, so governed by whim and geared toward advancing political and cultural agendas, that studio pictures rarely get what Hollywood considers a fair shake. For every year like 1993, when the Palme d'Or was wisely split between The Piano and Farewell My Concubine, there is a 1999, when the David Cronenberg-led jury horrified everyone except themselves by giving three major awards to the unwatchable L'Humanité. “David Cronenberg's decisions,” one festival veteran said, “are scarier than his films.” In 1992, the brilliant French-Canadian Leolo was shut out at least in part because its director, Jean-Claude Lauzon, made a provocative sexual remark to an American actress who was on the jury. “When I said it,” the director recalled, “my producer was next to me and he turned gray.” In an atmosphere like this, it's no wonder one of the best Hollywood films of the past decade, L.A. Confidential, made it into the competition and came home with nothing. Not exactly the kind of encouragment the studios are looking for.
Yet when a film hits here, when it wins a major award and touches a nerve in the audience, it really hits. Quentin Tarantino was genuinely shocked when his Pulp Fiction took the Palme in 1994 (“I don't make the kinds of movies that bring people together, I make the kinds of movies that split people apart”), but that moment was the engine of the film's enormous worldwide success. Steven Soderbergh had already won a prize at Sundance, but when he became the youngest person to win a Palme for sex, lies and videotape, he said the experience was “like being a Beatle for a week. It was so unexpected, like someone saying ‘You've just won $10 million' and sticking a microphone in your face. I didn't know how to react, I don't know what I said.” And then there was Roberto Benigni.
Benigni's Life Is Beautiful didn't win the Palme in 1998 (that went to Theo Angelopoulos's understandably forgotten Eternity and a Day); it took the runner-up Grand Prize, but it mattered not. A direct line could probably be traced from Benigni's effusive behavior that night, running on stage and passionately kissing jury president Martin Scorcese's feet, to its eventual status as a triple Oscar winner and the then highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history. That indelible image of Benigni in ecstasy will likely do as much for the status and mythology of Cannes as the earlier shot of Simone Sylva going topless with Robert Mitchum did for this festival of festivals so many years ago.
Sundance
He materialized all at once in a crowded room, his eyes wide and next door to desperate, his grip on my shoulder firm, even insistent. “See my film,” he said, quiet but intense. “Change my life.”
At any other film event in any other city, that moment with a young director might have seemed unreal, out of place, even threatening. But this was the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the flagship of the burgeoning American independent film movement and a dream factory for the modern age, where, as Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, “You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star.”
It happened to Kevin Smith after his Clerks debuted here in 1994: “When I came to Sundance, I was a wage slave. And then, twenty-four hours later, I had a filmmaking career.” It happened to Ed Burns, now known as one of the stars of Saving Private Ryan and a director in his own right but then working as a grunt at “Entertainment Tonight” until The Brothers McMullen screened at Sundance: “Nothing has been the same since. The lights went down, the movie starts and the audience starts laughing. And then afterwards, agents, production companies, and distribution companies — right then and there — the bidding war begins.”
It happened to Steven Soderbergh, whose unheralded sex, lies and videotape took the audience award and went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, gross $24 million, and create a directing career that blossomed with the Julia Roberts-starring Erin Brockovich. It happened on a bigger scale to the modest Blair Witch Project, which cost $100,000, sold for just over $1 million after a midnight screening, and ended up grossing $140 million and putting its formerly scruffy trio of filmmakers onto the covers of Time and Newsweek and into the carefully groomed center of a high-gloss ad for Dewar's scotch. Such is the power of Sundance.
That one particular festival held every January in a ski town thirty something miles from Salt Lake City—a tourist-dependent hamlet “somehow both pristine and fake” (in critic David Denby's words) that likes to boast about having five hundred realtors and more chefs per capita than Paris, France — should have this kind of a transformative gift has been lost on absolutely no one.
While 250 films applied for the festival's dramatic competition in 1995, that number had more than tripled, to 849 films looking for but sixteen places, by the year 2000. Documentary entrants shot up from 220 in 1999 to 347 in 2000, a jump of 57 percent for the same sixteen spaces in just twelve months. The twenty-nine slots in World Cinema attracted 450 hopeful films, with directors who got in happy to make the trek from as far away as Bhutan and Tajikistan, two of the remoter parts of Asia. Perhaps most impressive was that but sixty short films were chosen from an almost terrifying 1,928 applicants.
“I meet people in so many walks of life and they're always grabbing a camera,” says festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, both heartened and unnerved by that torrent of cinema. “People used to go to a garret and paint. Now it's ‘I'm a filmmaker.'” Adds Steven Soderbergh, who ought to know, “making a movie has sort of crept up on being a rock star on the fantasy list for most people.”
For a town with a population in the area of 6,000, the growth in attendance — it's now estimated that more than 20,000 show up annually—has been equally unnerving. The festival expanded from 15,750 seats sold in 1985 to 135,922 in 1999, an increase of almost 900 percent. And that doesn't count the great numbers of people who take advantage of the area's ever-increasing supply of condominiums built for skiers to show up without tickets on the increasingly unlikely chance they will stumble onto some.
At the 2000 festival, for instance, people stood on the waiting list line for the world premier of American Psycho for four hours without getting in (they can count themselves lucky), and other ticketless individuals have been known to show up with sleeping bags at the festival's outdoor box office as early as a frigid 3:50 A.M. to wait for released tickets. As the crowds increase, it's closer to truth than hyperbole when master documentarian Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, The Thin Blue Line) waspishly says he prepares for trips to the festival by “spending seventy-two hours in a meat locker with people I don't like, and all of them have cell phones.”
If further proof is wanted of this festival's preeminence and influence, it can be found in the ever-growing number of competing/complementary events that take place in Park City at the same time as Sundance, attempting with some success to latch onto whatever individuals can't procure tickets and won't be bothered with standing on those interminable lines.
Very much first among equals among the alternatives is Slamdance, founded as a salon de refusés by four directors whose films
