Indie films, stars shine at Sundance 2000
by Wishelle Banks, Outpost staff
Writer/filmmaker-in-training Wishelle Banks met with
founder Robert Redford at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival
for her cover story in the American
Indian Film Institute's
"Indian Cinema Entertainment" magazine. In January 2000, she
traveled east again for her second assignment to the film
festival, where she covered the event for
Cowboys
and Indians
magazine and Nevada Outpost.
Truth is stranger than fiction, they say, and nowhere do both come to their most vivid fruition than at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. This year's crème de la crème of independent cinema was held Jan. 20-30, as thousands of film fans flooded picturesque Park City, Utah, for Robert Redford's annual gathering in honor of mavericks much like himself: that elusive breed known as the filmmaker.
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"The next decade, however, is not tied to a specific agenda," Sundance Film Festival Co-directors Nicole Guillemet and Geoffrey Gilmore wrote in their welcome address inside the hefty 2000 Sundance Film Festival guidebook.
"If we at Sundance can continue to serve as a platform for expanding the 'sense of the possible,' we will have successfully fulfilled our mission. And that sense of the possible is commercial as well as aesthetic, inspirational as much as pragmatic. What is important is that the artistic integrity and passion that have fueled its progress not be mislaid, even when out of step with popular taste or criticism . . . and if the true course of independent filmmaking is maintained -- one that explores all aspects of life and reality but also reaches for the sublime -- the possibilities for a new era of filmic creativity are on the horizon."
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Heavenly ideas, indeed. Finding a place to park in Park City anytime during the festivities, however, is more like purgatory.
The Sundance Film Festival attracts more than 20,000 people to the charming little town that welcomed Redford back when he was just on the threshold of becoming a household name. Redford has owned land near the town since 1969, and his film festival has been creating a stir in the area -- and in the film industry -- for 16 years.
Today Park City is very much a year-'round tourist destination, and at any given hour during January's frenzied festival, people languish in their bird's-eye-view hot tubs overlooking Main Street, while steadfast development dominates the small-town perspective.
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Everybody's got a gimmick -- some stunt to halt traffic and get noticed. It's no accident, for example, that the cast and crew of "We Married Margo" just happened to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and hold a press conference to plug their film. They handed out mints, cream-filled devil's food cakes and postcards detailing screening times and locations.
Then there was the Sex Pistols' outrageous number-one gun, Johnny Rotten, creating quite a stir just walking down the street, flanked by reporters, cameras and punk rock aficionados. Rotten was slumming in the States to plug the world premiere of the "The Filth and the Fury," the Sex Pistols' biopic, masterminded by pioneering music-video director Julien Temple.
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This epic production that is the Sundance Film Festival is made possible by major-league sponsors like Entertainment Weekly, Mercedes-Benz, AT&T, Blockbuster and Apple. And, as they do every year, Sundance bestowed the coveted Piper-Heidsieck Tribute to Independent Vision award to a big-name actor who's dared to be different--like Kevin Spacey, this year's recipient, who stars in "The Big Kahuna," which premiered at Sundance.
Spacey was just one of the increasing number of celebrities who depart the confines of mainstream movie roles for the often more meaty ones offered in indie films. "E.R.'s" Julianna Margulies appeared in "What's Cooking?" another Sundance premiere, while veteran actor Willem Dafoe shares the screen with up-and-comers Reese Wisherspoon and Chloe Sevigny in "American Psycho." Ben Affleck starred in "Boiler Room," a big draw at Sundance that's just now hitting theaters. Dean Cain of "Lois and Clark" fame played a gay baseball player in "The Broken Hearts Club." And Rodrigo Garcia directed a dream cast of Glenn Close -- a member of the Sundance Institute Board of Trustees -- Cameron Diaz, Calista Flockhart, Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman and Holly Hunter in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her." Close, of course, was Redford's costar in "The Natural," and those board meetings are undoubtedly anything but dull, with Sally Field, Denzel Washington and Hume Cronyn (emeritus) sitting in, too.
For every "star" that showed up at Sundance, naturally, there were hundreds of wannabes wearing out the old don't-you-know-who-I-am routine, who begin planning for next year's festival as soon as the wheels leave the runway at Salt Lake City International. Without a months-in-advance reservation, a festival package and a Sundance-sanctioned I.D. badge, it doesn't matter who you are. And between stellar events like the "Opening Night Gala," the Director's Luncheon -- where The Man Himself usually makes an appearance -- and the Awards Party, small dramas endlessly unfolded like sidebars, usually just someone pitching their next hissy fit because they can't get into the screening/party/ circle of elite they had their hopes on.
Fully immersed in the par-tay of it all, the masses seemed to forget that they were all there because of one man -- Robert Redford -- a man with a heart of gold, who makes it all possible, year after year after year.
Posted
March 10, 2000
Copyright 2000, Nevada Outpost
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