Hasta la vista, Sundance. The decision to move on was hardly a surprise. It will be a big change. Park City and Sundance grew up together.
Park City skiing was always considered second tier, and in the early days before snow making and improved lifts, it kind of was. Despite a huge marketing effort, Park City skiing didn’t really get a foothold in the national market until well after Deer Valley came on line. By then, Sundance was well established.
To the extent our town was known at all on the national scene, it was known for Sundance. I’m not entirely sure that Salt Lake City would have won the 2002 Olympic bid without the aura of Sundance around it. It helped get Utah past the “weird factor.”
Through the years Sundance grew and changed. It went from gritty and spontaneous to being highly theatrical and over-produced. Our town became a location, with set dressers coming in and “fixing” it to make the presentation meet their desires.
I’d see news video of Main Street during Sundance and not even recognize the place. Locals were sometimes extras, sometimes stage crew, and often in the way.
At its zenith, it took over the town for a two-week bacchanal with glamorous parties, hospitality suites and limousine jams miles long blocking all traffic. Sundance brought us Paris Hilton, Harvey Weinstein, COVID and more Kardashians than you could count.
The cash spilled around town was astounding. Sundance had spin-off festivals and camp followers that further stretched the limits our what our town could host.
Finally Robert Redford mumbled something about perhaps losing touch with what the whole event was supposed to be about (something to do with low-budget, alternative movie making, I think), and the event started getting cut back to a somewhat more manageable size. It was pretty reduced before COVID, and since then has been little more than a busy weekend extravaganza, with a week of brutally heavy traffic following it.
The festival participants balked at Park City room rates, so it became a commuter event instead of an on-campus, fully immersive experience. The serendipitous meetings between aspiring filmmakers and seasoned directors and producers became few and far between.
The whole thing is a little bit like having a dearest childhood friend come to visit every year, dragging along a half dozen bratty children. You can’t wait to see him, and can’t wait for him to leave.
The streets were clogged with people wearing black with phlegm-colored scarves and cars driven by Los Angelenos who had never seen snow before. But some of them came year after year, and they sort of grew on us. Some bought houses and became neighbors.
Culturally, Sundance never fit in Utah, which is exactly why it fit in Park City. We shared a kind of rouge attitude then. The movies seemed to get stranger every year. Sundance was always a collection of weird, depressing, and unwatchable movies, but now it has become a collection of movies too bad even for streaming.
Last year had a feature that advertised that they had mental health professionals in the lobby in case viewers were overcome by what they saw. Exactly what I’m looking for in a movie — lasting psychological damage and a bucket of popcorn.
In the same way that hosting the Olympics created a whole generation of kids who think living next door to the world’s greatest athletes is normal, and that such an accomplishment is completely within their grasp, Sundance provided outreach and inspiration to the schools.
The high school has filmmaking classes and a creative culture that certainly would not have sprouted here without the festival. If that doofus in the snot-colored scarf can make a movie, so can you. Part of the legacy is the Film Studio, a project that seems as out of place here as a submarine maintenance facility. The Eccles Center has Sundance roots as well.
It will leave a big economic hole, and it remains to be seen if normal skier traffic spending $125 on a grilled cheese sandwich at Deer Valley’s Chute 11 will fill that. There was a time when the skiers were cheap and the Hollywood crowd had endless studio money to toss around. That’s switched. I suspect that filling the hotels with rich skiers who seem to spend just as lavishly might be about as good.
The decision to leave was probably made long before that state legislator denounced the whole affair as anti-LDS porn, but that can’t have helped. The governor has a brilliant idea that he will start our own film festival, consistent with Utah values. It will probably have Eagle Forum’s head book burner Gayle Ruzika running it. Are you listening, Hallmark?
They have one more year here before moving to Boulder. I guess we have to be nice to them, but it already feels like throwing a big birthday party for a spouse who is divorcing you. The sequel is seldom as good as the original, but they might be able to retool it and make it work.
It’s been an interesting ride. And who can forget that long list of wonderful films that came out of Sundance through the years. Films like — well, I can’t think of any.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
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