There's an old saying: It's nice to take a stroll down memory lane, but you don't want to buy a house there. For its 25th anniversary, Sundance not only bought a house on memory lane, it moved in lock, stock, and barrel.
This year, the festival premieres were preceded by a trailer flashing back over Sundance's greatest hits: sex, lies, and videotape, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Napoleon Dynamite. These glorious ghosts of Sundance past seemed a signal to the audience that they were about to witness something special — maybe even indie film history being made. Each time the highlight reel ended, audiences hooted and cheered. It was as if those snippets of Sundance's glories made the Shackleton-esque odyssey of trying to score tickets in the arctic Park City, Utah, night seem worth the trouble.
But the past, of course, is a double-edged sword. While some hailed Sundance '06 as a return to the festival's indie roots, others bemoaned the lack of splashy, headline-making hits like the ones in that trailer. Either way, the big story of the 10-day festival (sponsored in part by ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY) broke on day 2, when Little Miss Sunshine, an offbeat comedy starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, became the subject of a fierce bidding war. No matter where you were on those first few snowy mornings — rubbernecking at John Malkovich on Main Street, sardining next to Sting on one of the packed shuttle buses, wincing at Paris Hilton as she bumped and grinded her way through the party circuit — all you heard about was Sunshine.
Acquisitions execs dog-piled on Sunshine codirectors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, pitching distributor woo. Offers came from the usual suspects: Focus Features, Warner Independent, and Miramax, and even some new ones, like the fledgling Weinstein Company. (In fact, it was widely expected that Harvey Weinstein would make Sunshine his first Sundance purchase — a clarion blast that he was still in the game.) But in the end, Fox Searchlight went home with the prettiest girl at the prom, paying $10.5 million for the privilege — the richest one-picture deal in Sundance history. ''It's the kind of thing that you don't ever want to hope for,'' said a clearly overwhelmed Faris. ''It blew our minds. They're still blown!''
While it's too soon to predict what will emerge as this year's Hustle & Flow or March of the Penguins, the big winners by the time the awards were handed out were Quinceañera, a coming-of-age drama about a group of Latino teens in Los Angeles, and God Grew Tired of Us, a heartbreaking documentary about three refugees from Sudan's civil war seeking a better life in the U.S. Both movies walked away with the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in their respective categories — the first time such a double exacta had ever been hit at Sundance. After picking up his two prizes, Quinceañera codirector Wash Westmoreland soaked in the moment and tried to ignore the swirling distributors. ''We're so not about business,'' he said. ''We can just get cocktails.''
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