<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the quiet! I expected buzz and excitement from America\u2019s premier film festival. Instead, the snowy hush enveloped everything.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u201cParty Girl,\u201d starring a then-unknown Parker Posey, though you could already feel an aura gathering around her. (It\u2019s what would come to be known at Sundance as the \u201cIt\u201d girl thing.) I loved the film, which was brash and funny and just underground enough in its attitude.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cMannequin.\u201d She was at Sundance co-starring in a movie called \u201cLive Nude Girls,\u201d and as we began to chat, it was clear that she was a deeply serious person, trying to reinvent herself. That\u2019s part of what the Sundance Film Festival was and is about: openness, adventure, art that dares to dream.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 it was a winter-wonderland reverie of the New Old West, which is part of why Robert Redford moved to the area in 1961.<\/p>\n Redford was an ambitious actor whose leap to stardom would be launched by a Western, \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u201d (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 <\/em>Hollywood, which was incarnated by Sundance. Redford\u2019s presence there, set against the reconfigured Western backdrop of Park City, made a statement that I wouldn\u2019t hesitate to call romantic. It said, \u201cIndependent film isn\u2019t separate from the larger-than-life side of movies. It\u2019s a continuation of it.\u201d <\/p>\n Now that Sundance is leaving Park City and heading to Boulder, Colorado, I\u2019ll miss so much about the place. I\u2019ll miss the quiet, which reached its apex in 1997, when there was an epic snowstorm every day<\/em>. I\u2019ll miss the platonic ideal of a party space on the second floor of the Riverhorse Caf\u00e9. I\u2019ll miss the condo parties in Deer Valley (at one, I got to talk to Brian Wilson). I\u2019ll miss the antique intimacy of the Egyptian, where I watched movies with Paul Schrader when we were jurors in 1998, and I\u2019ll miss the majesty of the Eccles Theatre, which could elevate the smallest film into a s\u00e9ance and turn a major one \u2014 like \u201cIn the Bedroom\u201d or \u201cFruitvale Station\u201d or \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d \u2014 into a movie-world-shaking event. I\u2019ll miss the shuttle buses, which took too long but were a place where you could decompress and meditate, especially after seeing something amazing. I\u2019ll miss the toasty propane heat lamps at the shuttle stops. I\u2019ll miss my favorite restaurants, which were not the \u201cfancy\u201d 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\u2019s in the \u201990s or Taste of Saigon or Grub Steak or Davanza\u2019s, with its high wall of beer cans, and where the thin-crust pizzas are divine.<\/p>\n And I\u2019ll miss something that now feels like it\u2019s about the era (the \u201990s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and hear \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Thanks to technology, it would now be possible to shoot an independent film for less money. To this day, the greatest movie I\u2019ve ever seen at Sundance is \u201cChuck & Buck\u201d (2000), the film that put Mike White on the map. It was shot on utilitarian digital video that didn\u2019t look good even at the time. Yet as a vision, as filmmaking<\/em>, 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\u2019s tradition, and it\u2019s change. Here\u2019s hoping that Boulder becomes the rock Sundance now stands on to embrace both.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2246024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[373116,434834,22860,369434,355728,333528,304789],"class_list":["post-2246023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-butch-cassidy-and-the-sundance-kid","tag-claim-jumper","tag-hollywood","tag-main-street","tag-park-city","tag-robert-redford","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Goodbye-Park-City-Sundance-Will-Miss-You-and-So-Will.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2246023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2246023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2246023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2246025,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2246023\/revisions\/2246025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2246024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2246023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2246023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2246023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}