Sundance Film Festival

WHERE’S THE LOVE FOR LUDLOW?

Love, Ludlow screenwriter and exec producer has created an honest and engaging blog detailing his experiences making the movie and going to Sundance. In today’s entry, he identifies a phenomenon — call it the “Package B” effect — that I had been sensing myself. Patterson writes: Apparently there’s a bit of grumbling from some of the smaller films shown at Sundance this year. Some feel there was a bit of “frontloading” to the schedule. This meant that the bigger films with bigger stars were shown in the first week of the festival, while the smaller one’s premiered near the end. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: RECURRING REFRAINS

Cinema is full of failed literary adaptations, attempts by famous directors to translate the work of their favorite novelists into images and screen action. Most of these films crash, however, by the sheer weight of their ambition. Tackling a writer’s best known book, they invariably disappoint his or her hardcore partisans when what’s particularly riveting about the work becomes less interesting when it’s visualized. Japanese director Jun Ichikawa avoided all of the Great Author-to-Film pitfalls with his Tony Takitani, an adaptation of a story by the great Haruki Murakami. Not so much a film as a celluloid ode to Murakami […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCIES

Saw back to back screenings in the Sundance “experimental” Frontier section to kick off my festival moviewatching this year. Frequently ignored by most industry, the Frontier section always contains a few real discoveries by filmmakers the fest tags as “experimental” but who will go on to make the mark in the indie scene. A few years ago J.T. Petty debuted his chillingly simple near-silent ghost story Soft for Digging in the section and last year Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation screened there as well. This year the Frontier “filmmaker to watch” may be Kyle Henry, whose Room is an excellently directed and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: “THEY MAY AS WELL SALUTE AL QAEDA…”

“They may as well salute Al Qaeda,” a guy sitting behind me at the 40 Shades of Blue press screening quite sincerely grumbled after seeing one of the “Independent” mini-trailers that precede all of the screenings here. These short films, which basically serve as cinematic headers for a credit roll of festival sponsors, occupy a strange place in the festival each year. They’re intended to be amusing but innocuous — little film tidbits to reinforce the idea that “You are at a Film Festival!” — but their sheer repetition invariably transforms them into gauche cinematic eyesores by festival’s end. This […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2005
DEEP INSIDE PARK CITY REAL ESTATE

The enterprising and publicity-savvy filmmaking duo of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have an entertaining Web site up for their Sundance entry Inside Deep Throat, a Brian Grazer-produced doc on the infamous porn film (number 50 on Filmmaker magazine’s “50 Most Important Independent Films” list almost a decade ago) that will hit theaters this spring. The directors post a blog on the site as well as some interesting links, the most fascinating of which is this link to local Park City paper The Park Record. Titled “Sundance documentary reveals local’s role in Deep Throat,” the article is a portrait of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2005
PARK CITY LANDSLIDE

A small addition to the world’s very strange weather woes of the moment, this news out of Park City. One and possibly two skiers have been trapped in a giant landslide in Park City, Utah near the Canyons Resort, just days before this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 14, 2005
LIKE SUNDANCE USED TO BE…

From a story in Variety: “The porn industry’s AVN Adult Entertainment Expo has always been a colorful, if slightly tawdry, event, a reliable resource for camera crews looking to goose news ratings in the name of covering the multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry. However, in what is the AEE’s seventh year since splitting away from Las Vegas’s concurrent Consumer Electronics Show, the porn event has begun to look a little more like Park City… Like the Sundance Film Festival of a decade ago, the once scrappy trade show has begun to make big deals with corporate sponsors. It’s attracting celebs who […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 6, 2005
SUNDANCE PREMIERES, SPECTRUM, MIDNIGHT & FRONTIER

The Sundance Institute today announced the Opening Night film and complete lineup of feature films screening in the Premieres, American Spectrum, Frontier, Park City at Midnight, Special Screenings, and Sundance Collection categories of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. According to a press release received today, “The Film Festival opens on January 20 in Park City with the World Premiere of Happy Endings, written and directed by Don Roos and starring Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Tom Arnold. ‘A discussion of American values is at the forefront of many of the films this year, and the humor and compassion with which […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 1, 2004
MARK SILVERMAN FELLOWSHIP

Sundance has awarded its annual Mark Silverman Producer’s Fellowship to L.A.-based producer Gina Kwon. Formerly a V.P. at Myriad Pictures, Kwon has worked with Academy Award-winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler on his TNT series The Residents and his Fox series American High. She’s most associated, though, with director Miguel Arteta and producer Matthew Greenfield, having production-managed Star Maps, associate produced Chuck and Buck, and co-produced The Good Girl. She is currently producing a Sundance Lab project, Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, aiming for a Summer 2004 shoot. The fellowship, which is a tribute to the late producer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2004
REMEMBERING LYNN AUERBACH

Lynn Auerbach, the Sundance Institute’s much-loved Associate Director of the Feature Film Program, passed away shortly after this year’s festival following a brief illness. For her many friends and colleagues — including the dozens of young fellows and industry mentors who have passed through the Sundance labs since her arrival at the Institute 15 years ago — the news came as a sad shock. Passionate, witty, and clearly in love with her job of discovering new filmmaking talent and helping them develop their projects, Auerbach nurtured her fellows with equal amounts emotional support and keen advice. Just a few of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2004

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