SUNDANCE - A FESTIVAL VIRGIN'S GUIDE
History of the Sundance Film Festival
History, Part 4
The 1993 festival pretty much picked up where the previous year left off, screening 80 feature films and more than 60 shorts and setting a new attendance record of 55,000 tickets sold. Some of the more memorable films included Sally Potter's Orlando, Bryan Singer's Public Access, Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate, and Victor Nunez's Ruby in Paradise (co-winner with Public Access of the Grand Jury Prize). Two other films also captured the spotlight in 1993, albeit for entirely different reasons. The first was Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, which not only picked up the Audience Award, but the story of how he made the film for $7,000 became instrumental in pushing the DIY filmmaking movement into full bloom. The other film that attracted a lot of attention in 1993 was Jennifer (daughter of David) Lynch's Boxing Helena, which outraged critics and audiences alike for its macabre subject matter.
That year, festival regulars also began to notice how much the business side of the event influenced those who made the trek to Park City. In his festival wrap in Newsweek, journalist David Ansen noted, "It was an irritating but not uncommon sight at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival; a guy in a movie theatre, whispering into his cellular phone as the lights go down." Ansen went on to comment, "Agents and lawyers were crawling all over the snowy streets of Park City, Utah, this year; it was said William Morris Agency alone had 25 reps in place, scouring the festival for the next breakthrough twenty-something filmmaker… [The festival] has become a tension-filled auction block, with long waiting lists for the hot screenings and nervous young filmmakers whose futures are on the line." And it would take another seven festivals for things to calm down a little.
Sundance 1994 kicked off with one of the most bumper crops of conspicuous films the event had ever seen. The line-up of more than 90 features included Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, Rose Troche's Go Fish, John Duigan's Sirens, Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's Suture, and David O. Russell's Spanking the Monkey, although in what has become something of a Sundance tradition, the lion's share of the awards went to films with much lower profiles. The 1994 festival also featured the first look at Steve James' amazing documentary Hoop Dreams (winner of the Audience Award), saluted the work of director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant), and marked the arrival of Kevin Smith on the scene with his seminal DIY film Clerks (which was awarded the peer-voted Filmmakers Trophy). The massive increase in film submissions for the 1994 event (and resultant lower selection success rate) also gave birth to the first of the now plentiful alternative festivals - Slamdance.
For the 1995 outing, the number of films in the program increased yet again, this time to more than 100 feature films and 70 shorts. The bulk of the heavy publicity machine focused on Ed Burns and his debut film The Brothers McMullen (winner of the Grand Jury Prize). However, the rest of the line-up was as strong as ever, with diverse films such as Antonia Bird's Priest, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion, and James Mangold's Heavy. The festival also presented special sidebars focused on world cinema, personal documentaries, animation, and Native American film, and bestowed the Tribute to Independent Vision on Nicolas Cage.
With the independent film renaissance in full swing and Sundance firmly in the centre of it, the 1996 festival bowed to record crowds (approximately 10,000 attendees) and the largest slate of films to date. Another record set during that year was the sum of money spent by acquisition executives to get their mitts on the next Clerks or The Brothers McMullen. Indeed the acquisition activity during the festival was getting so cutthroat that it often spilled over into open argument; one infamous incident involved Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein and Pandora Cinema's Jonathan Taplin engaging in a public shouting match in a Park City restaurant over which company had actually closed the deal for the Australian movie Shine. And all of this against the backdrop of one of the heaviest Park City snowfalls during the festival in many years (10 feet in 10 days). Memorable films in 1996 included the Campbell Scott/Stanley Tucci co-directed Big Night, Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol, Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, which won the Grand Jury Prize, Lee David Zlotoff's Audience Award winner Care of the Spitfire Grill, and Leon Gast's documentary on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman fight, When We Were Kings.
The 1997 festival brought with it something of a "market correction" in terms of business deals. A more sober approach to acquisitions became the norm following poor box-office performance by most of the previous year's buzz films. But this didn't dampen the quality of the festival itself, which featured another impressive line-up of films, including many from amongst Sundance alumni like Errol Morris, Tom DiCillo, Victor Nunez, and Kevin Smith, as well as a major retrospective of the work of German new-wave giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
With another record attendance in 1997, Sundance was literally bulging at the seams. Problems with venue sizes and public transportation - not to mention the fact that it had become common for the entire telephone system in Park City to crash on a regular basis under the massive load - began to highlight a question the festival hadn't had to face before: Was the event getting too big for Park City to handle? A few voices suggested that the festival should move back to Salt Lake City to provide better facilities for an event that size. Vehement opposition to a move, however, came from Park City itself; businesses and local officials were unwilling to give up an event which by now generated around $20 million of direct investment into the town each year.
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