January 30, 2000

As the annual Sundance Film Festival winds up its 10-day run of celebrating independent film, a question remains: What, exactly, is an independent film?

And the answer is: Well, it depends.

It depends on whether you think an independent film is one whose creators hocked their baseball-card collections and sold plasma once a week to get their movies made; or whether you think it's simply one financed by a boutique company such as Miramax instead of a mega-studio like Disney.

There were plenty of both types, and everything in between, at this year's Sundance, which ends today. But in matters of both finance and star power, the line between indie and something else tended to get a little blurry.

For instance, there is the small fact that Miramax, which presented five films at Sundance 2000, is an affiliate of Disney. There was also the reality that some of Sundance 2000's movies were veritable star vehicles, featuring the likes of Alfre Woodard, Heather Graham and Christopher Walken...

This is great for the filmmakers, but it tends to turn an event such as Sundance into as much a marketplace as a celebration of film -- a situation that seems contrary to the idea of nurturing movies outside the big-money Hollywood system...

Other voices

Predictably, the idea that Sundance is not as indie as it used to be has inspired alternative festivals, which play in Park City at the same time as the big event...

The most established of the alterna-fests is Slamdance. Launched in 1995, Slamdance has quickly scored a few coups of its own.

Last year's Slamdance Audience Award winner, "Man of the Century," was picked up for distribution by Fine Line Features. And "20 Dates," which also debuted as a Slamdance film, was released last year by Fox Searchlight...

The atmosphere at the Slamdance headquarters on Park City's Main Street is a marked contrast to the controlled chaos of Sundance. Slamdance visitors lounge in inflatable plastic chairs, or browse the Net at a ring of iMac computers in a cave-like room.

The festival's casualness extends to the trophy that Slamdance awards its winning films: a statuette of Sparky, The Happy Dog.

And as a further signal of the Slamdance ethos: The festival's opening-night film was "R2PC: Road to Park City," a comedy based on a book called "How to Shoot a Feature Film Under $10,000 and Not Go to Jail."

Todd Robinson is the director of "Amargosa," a documentary that was on this year's Slamdance menu. The film, about a 76-year-old former Broadway dancer who stages her own shows in a remote desert town, was recently named as one of 12 finalists for an Academy Award.

"Amargosa" was rejected for a slot at Sundance, but Robinson entered it into Slamdance at the last minute. Neither festival knew the film would be on the short list for an Oscar nomination.

To him, the whole spectacle of Sundance and its spawn, with big-money interests chasing "small" films, has become "like a snake eating its tail." But he argues that the commercial aspect remains secondary to the films themselves.

"Everybody who's here is buying and selling," Robinson says. "Be sure of that. We're all walking sandwich boards for our films.

"But the reason people make independent films is that they have a passion for telling stories. All this other stuff is just a way to get it out there."...

The San Diego Union-Tribune