Not much snow? No worries in Park City. They’ve got Sundance.
The independent film festival that opens its annual run Thursday is big, brash and makes bank. It’s a gold mine for Park City and a high-stakes game for Hollywood, as well as a showcase for independent cinema.
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Sundance by the numbers
112 feature films
64 short films
44 first-time filmmakers
1,860 volunteers
46,000 expected attendees
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It will shoehorn 45,000 movie buffs, industry types and wannabes into Utah’s premier ski town for a high-elevation crucible of screenings, parties, drinks and discourse.
All of it adds up to a big cha-ching for Utah’s cash register. Last year’s festival brought some $70 million into the state, according to the University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research. About half of that will stay in Park City, Mayor Dana Williams estimated.
"It’s the single biggest event we have all year," he said. "It’s organized anarchy."
For Park City, this year’s promise of festival bullion comes as the snow gods have largely gone AWOL, last seen somewhere near Anchorage, Alaska. Everybody in Utah’s ski and snowboard industry is praying for snow, and they got some on Monday with more forecast this week. But even without it, Park City’s restaurateurs and merchants — with the notable exception of sporting goods stores — feel secure they can wait out Mother Nature, at least for a while, thanks to Sundance and a solid Christmas season.
The festival wasn’t always a money machine. Hatched humbly in 1978 as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in Salt Lake City, it bumped along for years as an almost underground conclave for indie movie artists who thought little of Hollywood’s bright marquees.
Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute adopted it in 1984. But the operation was still so quaint that at the 1985 premiere of "Blood Simple," filmgoers could stroll into the Egyptian Theater screening without reserved tickets and drink boxed wine afterward with the movie’s upstart creators, Ethan and Joel Coen.
But according to longtime Park City journalist and celluloid cognoscente Rick Brough, that all changed with the force of an Icelandic volcano in 1989 when Steven Soderbergh debuted the low-budget "sex, lies, and videotape." It went on to make millions. Since then, Sundance has been the launchpad for careers and fortunes.
"Up to that point, it was small enough that you could go to most of the screenings and say you’d seen the festival," Brough said. "Now it’s like trying to eat an elephant."
On one hand, the festival is a serious incubator of independent film. But it also is the closest thing in Utah to Carnival. It will feature 10 days of nonstop partying, movie stars, wealthy moguls, film critics and gawkers. They’ll be dining out and running up bar tabs. Call it Mardi Gras in the mountains. But look for turtlenecks, not beads.
Wasatch Front denizens, too, will trek to Park City to catch a film or just to hang out with the glitterati. But don’t expect them to buy $500 sunglasses or drop several grand on shearling jackets. For the valley people, it’s more like hot chocolate at The Main Street Deli while they wait for Val Kilmer to show up. And there’s always the chance of meeting and falling in love with someone like Marisa Tomei, as one festgoer apparently did in 2009, as evidenced by an amorous epistle in the letters section of the town’s newspaper, The Park Record.
The mayor, who ran the now-defunct Ryan’s Bar on Main Street in the early 1980s, recalled those days when film festival organizers borrowed chairs from local churches for screenings in garages.
"It was a real funky, independent thing," he recalled.
Park City had gratefully accepted when film fest organizers offered to relocate to the then-little ski town. Back then, there was a lull in skier tourist traffic after the Christmas holiday season and Park City boosters welcomed practically any event. In his book, Party In a Box, Lory Smith recalls that it was famed director Sydney Pollack who suggested hosting the festival in the mountains in January because a ski resort would draw interest to an otherwise obscure event.
In fact, it’s been just the opposite. Now, film types book all the lodgings in town and skier visits fall, along with ski rentals, according to Bill Malone, the executive director of the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Visitor’s Bureau.
"It’s one of those things where a rising tide doesn’t raise all ships," he said of the 10-day event.
But overall, Park City and its three ski resorts — Park City Mountain Resort, Deer Valley and The Canyons — get a nice ride from what Malone calls "brand association." That is, you can’t say Sundance Film Festival and not think of Park City.
Every year, thousands of media reports are spawned by Sundance and it’s usually snowing, Malone said. It’s great advertising. "There’s nothing better than snow during Sundance to enhance the ski season."
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