Goodbye, Park City. Sundance Will Miss You and So Will I

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. The beautiful pillowy snowbound quiet. The day I arrived in Park City for my first Sundance Film Festival in January 1995, there was much to take in: the awesome mountains, the homes wedged like miniature ski lodges into the hills, the slope of Main Street, with its chic-but-not-yet-so-upscale turquoise-jewelry boutiques (in the thin mountain air, that street could leave you winded as you hiked from the bottom of it up to the Egyptian Theatre), the whole spangly welcoming vibe put out by this former mining town turned ski destination.

But the quiet! I expected buzz and excitement from America’s premier film festival. Instead, the snowy hush enveloped everything.

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The buzz would arrive soon enough. Wearing my new Lugz boots, I walked up Main Street to the festival headquarters, located in the lobby of a steakhouse called the Claim Jumper (how quaint!). Inside, it was gloomy and mostly empty. I took a shuttle to the Holiday Village for my first screening, and it made me an instant Sundance believer. The movie was “Party Girl,” starring a then-unknown Parker Posey, though you could already feel an aura gathering around her. (It’s what would come to be known at Sundance as the “It” girl thing.) I loved the film, which was brash and funny and just underground enough in its attitude.

Days later, back at the Claim Jumper, I looked up and noticed someone with a shy downward glance seated kitty-corner from me. I realized that it was Kim Cattrall, whom I thought of, at the time, as the title character from “Mannequin.” She was at Sundance co-starring in a movie called “Live Nude Girls,” and as we began to chat, it was clear that she was a deeply serious person, trying to reinvent herself. That’s part of what the Sundance Film Festival was and is about: openness, adventure, art that dares to dream.

It often felt like the enchanted backdrop of Park City is what made that possible. Ever since 1981, when the Utah/US Film and Video Festival moved there (it was rechristened Sundance in 1991), Park City has been more than a locale. It has been a mythology wrapped in a history tucked inside a vision of what Hollywood was, and what it might become. The frontier trappings, the sunlit spaciousness, the mountains — it was a winter-wonderland reverie of the New Old West, which is part of why Robert Redford moved to the area in 1961.

Redford was an ambitious actor whose leap to stardom would be launched by a Western, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). And in that star-making role, he looked back (to the legends of Old Hollywood) and also forward (to the New Hollywood he was now one of the kings of). Redford had both Hollywoods in his DNA. And that made him the perfect leader-messenger for the next Hollywood, which was incarnated by Sundance. Redford’s presence there, set against the reconfigured Western backdrop of Park City, made a statement that I wouldn’t hesitate to call romantic. It said, “Independent film isn’t separate from the larger-than-life side of movies. It’s a continuation of it.”

Now that Sundance is leaving Park City and heading to Boulder, Colorado, I’ll miss so much about the place. I’ll miss the quiet, which reached its apex in 1997, when there was an epic snowstorm every day. I’ll miss the platonic ideal of a party space on the second floor of the Riverhorse Café. I’ll miss the condo parties in Deer Valley (at one, I got to talk to Brian Wilson). I’ll miss the antique intimacy of the Egyptian, where I watched movies with Paul Schrader when we were jurors in 1998, and I’ll miss the majesty of the Eccles Theatre, which could elevate the smallest film into a séance and turn a major one — like “In the Bedroom” or “Fruitvale Station” or “Manchester by the Sea” — into a movie-world-shaking event. I’ll miss the shuttle buses, which took too long but were a place where you could decompress and meditate, especially after seeing something amazing. I’ll miss the toasty propane heat lamps at the shuttle stops. I’ll miss my favorite restaurants, which were not the “fancy” fusion places on Main Street (salmon with a rosemary pineapple crust accompanied by tomato quinoa? No, thanks) but the places that offered luscious comfort food, like Burgie’s in the ’90s or Taste of Saigon or Grub Steak or Davanza’s, with its high wall of beer cans, and where the thin-crust pizzas are divine.

And I’ll miss something that now feels like it’s about the era (the ’90s and 2000s) as much as the place: the chance I had in Park City to meet actors and directors in the most casual of settings, the conversations elevated by the feeling that Park City gave us — that we were all in this together. I had memorable encounters, which occasionally turned into friendships, with so many filmmakers, like Mary Harron and Terry Zwigoff and the Hughes brothers and Catherine Hardwicke and Kevin Smith and Michael Showalter and Lee Daniels. Often, they were there with their first films, which meant that you saw something special: the newness of what they were dreaming.

As it happens, the first years I was at Sundance (1995-98) proved to be pivotal when it came to how technology would impact the art, commerce and karma of independent film. In 1997, for the first time, Hollywood insiders walked up and down Main Street barking into cellphones, these elite early adapters offering an initial glimpse into the new normal. And you could feel — and hear — the vibe shift in 1996 and 1997 with the introduction of internet culture. The quiet was no longer so quiet. The Claim Jumper was still the headquarters, but now it was abuzz.

Thanks to technology, it would now be possible to shoot an independent film for less money. To this day, the greatest movie I’ve ever seen at Sundance is “Chuck & Buck” (2000), the film that put Mike White on the map. It was shot on utilitarian digital video that didn’t look good even at the time. Yet as a vision, as filmmaking, it was an indie miracle. What my time in Park City has always brought home to me is the yin and yang of indie film: It’s tradition, and it’s change. Here’s hoping that Boulder becomes the rock Sundance now stands on to embrace both.

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