The good news for the Sundance Film Festival is people still are snapping up movie tickets despite the sour economy. The bad news for the festival’s ski-resort setting — and possibly for filmmakers selling movies — is that the independent-cinema gathering gets under way with the prospect of thinner crowds on the street and a penny-wise mind-set.
Hotel and condo bookings are off for the 11-day festival that opened Thursday. The number of parties may be down, and the ones that do happen are likely to be less lavish. Frugal-minded film distributors are more cautious than ever to avoid the classic Sundance trap of paying too much for movies that will never make their money back.
“It is a buyer’s market, 100 percent. People are cost-conscious, but at the same time, they don’t want to miss an opportunity to find a movie that can break out,” said Michael Schaefer, head of acquisitions for Summit Entertainment, the company behind the hit “Twilight.” ”We’d always love to find another movie, but we don’t have to. We really want to make sure we maintain a healthy balance between the right price and the right movie.”
Sundance hotel and condo rentals have been running 8 percent behind last year’s, said Bill Malone, president of the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.
Yet by the morning of opening day, the festival had sold 218,000 of 245,000 available seats for films showing in Park City, Salt Lake City and other Utah venues, about 5 percent ahead of 2008 sales, said Linda Pfafflin, the festival’s ticketing manager.
That could mean local residents are snapping up more tickets this time, Pfafflin said.
Sundance always draws hangers-on — celebrity gawkers, businesses using the festival to promote products or stars themselves who show up for parties though they have no involvement with the films. The lighter hotel bookings could mean those crowds will be smaller, not necessarily a bad thing for festival organizers who find such outsiders a distraction from the main event of showcasing movies.
“If some of those people aren’t here, hallelujah,” Sundance spokeswoman Brooks Addicott said.
Hotels were trying last-minute deals to fill empty rooms, offering an extra night free or easing requirements for the minimum number of nights, Malone said.
“I even saw a property earlier this season offering ‘book six nights, get a free pair of skis,'” Malone said.
Demand is down for property space to hold parties, Malone said, while caterers have told him that clients are spending less on the parties they do stage.
Even the ranks of publicists who swarm Sundance look lighter this year. John Murphy — president of Murphy PR, which is handling seven Sundance films — said he received e-mails “from other publicists who were going to go and now aren’t going who now have rooms they need to unload. That’s never happened before. It used to be you had to book months in advance or you’re out of luck.”
Sundance has been known for bidding wars on hot titles, among them such eventual hits as “Little Miss Sunshine” and “In the Bedroom.” But distributors also have been burned on films such as “Happy, Texas” and last year’s “Hamlet 2” that had great Sundance buzz but failed to find an audience.
Titles available this time include the cop drama “Brooklyn’s Finest,” with Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke and Don Cheadle; the melodrama “The Greatest,” with Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon; and the gigolo tale “Spread,” with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche.
Richard Kelly, who started his career with the 2001 Sundance film “Donnie Darko,” returns to the festival as a producer on Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark comedy “World’s Greatest Dad,” which is up for sale.
Kelly and producing partner Sean McKittrick said it’s impossible to predict how busy the acquisitions scene will be, since it all comes down to the films themselves. But Kelly noted that Hollywood ended 2008 with a strong box-office showing, a sign that the movie business remains healthy despite hard times.
“Thank God, people are still going,” Kelly said. “As long as people are still going to see movies, we’re in the supply business, and there’s a supply for 2009 that needs to be filled.”
Sundance premieres find buyers as festival opens
Even before the official start of the Sundance Film Festival, there has been action on the acquisitions front for films playing at the independent-cinema showcase.
HBO has picked up U.S. television rights to the documentary “Burma VJ,” which uses footage from underground video journalists capturing the 2007 uprising of Buddhist monks against the Myanmar government.
The film by Danish director Anders Ostergaard has its North American premiere Saturday after debuting last fall at documentary festivals in Europe.
Sony Pictures Classics has bought North American rights to “Rudo y Cursi,” a hit in Mexico that premieres at Sundance on Friday. Directed by Carlos Cuaron, the comic drama reunites “Y Tu Mama Tambien” co-stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as brothers who wind up as soccer rivals.
Redford’s excited over fade out on Bush years
Robert Redford is happy to see the end-credits rolling on the George W. Bush administration.
President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration Tuesday falls in the middle of Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, which the actor has occasionally used as a platform to criticize Bush in past years.
“I’m personally excited just because I’m glad to see the gang that couldn’t shoot straight get out of there. I’m glad to see them gone,” Redford said Thursday at a news conference hours before the opening of the 11-day festival. You’ve got a lame-duck guy going out, but he sure has done a lot of quacking in the last while. So therefore, the sooner they’re gone, the better, and therefore, I’m very excited by the change that’s coming.”
Redford said he hopes federal funds for the arts might eventually rise under the Obama administration, adding that the National Endowment for the Arts has been hobbled by politics.
“They were fighting the political machine of the extreme right that saw art as some kind of threat,” Redford said. “So I think that’s going to change. What I would like to see is, a country like ours should certainly be subsidizing, a little bit more than it is, art in general. Other countries do. So I would certainly like to see more coming out of the NEA. They’ve cut it down to the bone. There’s practically nothing left.”
The festival is presenting 118 feature-length films, starting with Thursday night’s opening premiere “Mary and Max,” director Adam Elliot’s clay-animation tale whose voice cast is led by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette.
The lineup of independent films includes Michael and Mark Polish’s “Manure,” with Billy Bob Thornton and Tea Leoni in the comic tale of a fertilizer company in crisis; Armando Iannucci’s political satire “In the Loop,” with James Gandolfini; Greg Mottola’s 1980s flashback “Adventureland,” with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart; and Marc Webb’s “500 Days of Summer,” with Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Redford, whose Sundance Institute for independent cinema has overseen the festival for 25 years, shared some advice for anyone aiming to break into filmmaking.
“If you want to come into this business, you need to want it more than anything else in your life, because it’s going to be a hard road,” Redford said. “It’s going to take things like luck and hard work and diligence and tenacity and bravery and courage. And to be able to go through that, you have to want it more than anything.”
