The Sundance Kids

MOVIES LOOK BETTER AT HIGH ALTITUDES. Sundance audiences are not regular folk. Last year, several movies left the festival with strong word of mouth, only to open to silence at the box office. The House of Yes, a $1.5 million incest comedy, earned Parker Posey raves and director Mark Waters a mountain of envy when Miramax purchased the rights for $1.9 million. But when it was released in October, House earned less than $600,000. "You can't judge Sundance in Hollywood terms. It's about smaller movies," Waters asserts. Still, thanks to all the attention he received there, he says, "instead of some 21-year-old in development reading my script, the head of the company reads it in a weekend."

The Myth of Fingerprints suffered a similar fate. Sony Pictures Classics looked fortunate when Bart Freundlich's family drama, which starred ER's Noah Wyle and Julianne Moore, won festival kudos, but when Myth opened last September, it earned just $522,000. And Going All the Way, a 1950s coming-of-age film starring Ben Affleck and Amy Locane, seemed like a great deal for Gramercy, which acquired it for a low seven figures. But when it opened in September, Going All the Way came up a tad short, making $112,000.

"You can get caught up in the fever," says Fox Searchlight president Lindsay Law, who last year fell victim with the $2.5 million purchase of the overhyped Star Maps, which grossed less than $650,000. Law more than made up the loss, though, with the box office performance of a film that, ironically, got almost no attention at the festival--The Full Monty.

THE GAME'S NOT OVER AFTER SUNDANCE. Even without seeing his film released, a moviemaker can go on to indie glory. Morgan J. Freeman, whose urban drama Hurricane Streets--a 1997 Sundance award winner--won't be released by MGM until February, was able to attract Christina Ricci and Sara Gilbert to his next film, Desert Blue, which starts production in January; he'll return to Sundance this year to meet with distributors.

And Eye of God director Nelson left Sundance disappointed last January, not knowing whether the festival was the end of the line for his drama about the relationship between a waitress and a paroled convict, played by Kevin Anderson. "The film is so dark, something extraordinary would have had to happen to get a distributor," Nelson says. But last April, after playing at the Gen Arts festival in New York, the picture was bought by Castle Hill and released in October. Eye did minuscule business, but it found an admirer in Sean Penn, who--after acting last summer with Nelson in The Thin Red Line--offered him a job adapting and directing Cormac McCarthy's Child of God for his production company.

And despite Strays' tepid reception at the festival, its director-star Diesel landed a part in Steven Spielberg's upcoming drama Saving Private Ryan, a starring role in a print campaign for Timex, and a deal to direct Interscope's Doorman, about the nightclub scene. But what did Sundance do for the still-unreleased Strays? "It's one of the best forums for American filmmakers to show their work," says Diesel. "Whether that's good or bad, I don't know."