Park City » Robert Redford got straight to business.
The actor-filmmaker kicked off the 2010 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night with only a brief welcome -- then started talking up the movie the 1,200-plus film lovers at Park City's Eccles Center were there to see.
Redford's quick introduction -- and the selection of one of Sundance's competition entries, the biographical drama "Howl," rather than a gala premiere -- should set the tone for a streamlined festival designed to remind Hollywood of Sundance's rebellious roots.
"Getting back to your roots can come off as being fresh and new," Redford said.
Redford called "Howl" -- a dramatic re-creation of Allen Ginsberg's famous 1955 poem and the 1957 obscenity trial it spawned -- "kind of a composite of a lot of what we are."
Documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman started the project with money from the Sundance Documentary Fund. When they decided to shift gears and make it a dramatic film, with James Franco as Ginsberg, their script was workshopped at the Sundance labs and received another grant from Redford's Sundance Institute.
"We were wrestling with making something as worthy as the material it was based on," Friedman said of the shift from documentary to dramatic film. "You really had to do something different to do justice to it."
Though Redford has said he wants this festival to be about looking forward, he couldn't help offer a reminiscence from his teen years. He told the Eccles audience about how he and some friends drove to San Francisco to hear some jazz, and ended up in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore, where Ginsberg and other poets of the Beat Generation were reading.
"I had a taste of Allen Ginsberg even before 'Howl,' " Redford said.
John Cooper, the festival's director, added one tidbit to the story that Redford left out: That the car he and his friends were driving was stolen. "I put that in for all you bloggers," Cooper joked.
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Redford looked back to Sundance's history and forward to its potential as a showcase for independent film.
"When we started this [in 1986, the year the Sundance Institute took over the festival], we didn't know how it was going to go," Redford said. "I assumed we might not last more than 10 years."
Redford pointed to the promotion of Cooper, Sundance's programming director for seven years, to the top job. "It was simply time for fresh new blood," Redford said about the departure of longtime director Geoff Gilmore, "and that happened to coincide with Geoff's need to move on."
But Cooper rejected the idea that his ascension means a radical change in Sundance's mission. "If there were problems with the festival before, I was probably a part of those problems," said Cooper, a 20-year veteran of the festival staff.
Redford, as he does each year, advised the press to avoid hyping films too early. "You're not going to know [what's good] until the festival is over," he said.
Redford did remark on one documentary on the festival slate: "Smash His Camera," about notorious celebrity photographer Ron Galella, with whom Redford had many encounters earlier in his career.
Redford told one yarn about Galella -- "I'm telling it because it's a story where I win," he said -- when the actor was shooting "Three Days of the Condor" in New York in 1975. Redford recalled how he had managed to get to his trailer between shots in front of the New York Times building without Galella getting a photo.
But to get back out of the trailer, Redford said, required a make-up artist putting the star in an elaborate disguise -- including horn-rimmed glasses, a fake mustache and an afro wig -- while Redford's blonde stand-in was sent out as a decoy.
After the news conference, Redford stepped off the Egyptian Theatre stage and into the throng of reporters to say hello to two old friends of Sundance: Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, and his wife Chaz. It's the first time Ebert has attended Sundance since 2006, when he had emergency surgery to his jaw that left him unable to speak.
The 2010 Sundance Film Festival gets going at full steam today, with screenings around Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City, Ogden and the Sundance resort.
