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SCREEN IDLE Ben Affleck gets left out in the cold
Steve Granitz
By David Hochman
David Hochman
David Hochman
David Hochman is a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly

A horror? Hardly Capping off the first full day of the 10-day festival, the packed midnight screening of the eagerly awaited horror film, "The Blair Witch Project" (starring Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard) kicked off a long night of negotiations that ended by dawn with the festival's first notable acquisition. The movie's a faux documentary about a trio of student filmmakers who head out into Maryland's remote Black Hills in search of the local bogeyman. Although the audience was terrified by the movie, the scarier part would happen later.

"There was a frightening amount of interest in this film after the screening," says producer Gregg Hale. "The distributors just couldn't schedule meetings (to try to buy the distribution rights to the film) fast enough." Executive Producer Kevin J. Foxe helped set up a slew of meetings for the following day, but Artisan Entertainment couldn't wait until dawn and insisted on a middle-of-the-night meeting. "All I wanted was to sleep," jokes codirector Eduardo Sanchez, "but (the producers) kept waking me up every 10 minutes telling me about the negotiations."

By 7:30 a.m., when Foxe, Hale, and an exhausted Sanchez headed to bed, the rights were sold for an amount people around snowy Park City were estimating to be between 1 and 2 million dollars. Not bad for a movie with a budget so low that, as Donahue puts it, "our crafts services consisted of one Power Bar we all had to share."

Springer Nation Parker Posey and Lili Taylor eat your hearts out. The new indie film poster child appears to be talk-show host Jerry Springer, who appears in no less than three films so far. He plays himself in "24-Hour Woman," which stars Rosie Perez as a morning-talk-show producer. He shows up again in "American Pimp," the Hughes brothers' documentary on prostitution. And he's there again in "Sex: The Annabel Chong Story," a documentary about the 22-year-old master's student who set the world's record for multiple sex partners in a single day: 251 in 10 hours. Where did the filmmaker of "Sex" get an idea like that? "I first heard about Annabel," director Gough Lewis explained at the premiere, "on the 'Jerry Springer Show.'" Jer-ry! Jer-ry!

Snowdance More than two feet of snow has fallen on Park City since the beginning of the festival Thursday, making walking up and down Main Street a dramatic competition in its own right. Luckily, the Sundancers are prepared -- decked out in their Ugg boots, Eddie Bauer Parkas and Patagonia microfleece. "Snow is not something I'm exactly accustomed to," says Australian actor Bryan Brown, here with "Two Hands," about the underworld Down Under. "Luckily, I just learned to ski in Europe."

The Daily Buzz Harvey Weinstein is expected to fly in from L.A., where he was attending the Golden Globes, on Monday to bid on "Happy, Texas," a crowd-pleasing comedy starring William H. Macy, about two escaped convicts who pretend to be gay children's-beauty-pageant coordinators in order to escape the law.... Even after fighting the crowds outside the Holiday Village Theater, Ben Affleck couldn't muscle his way into the premiere screening of "American Pimp".... Audience favorites so far: "Happy, Texas"; "The Blair Witch Project"; "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," a Tarantinoesque British gangster flick directed by Guy Ritchie; and "SLC Punk," about Mohawk-haired punks from Salt Lake City.... Oklahoma is huge in Utah right now: "Possums," about a hapless high school football team, and "Chillicothe," a post-college comedy, were both shot there; the star of "Girl Next Door" is from there; and "Fool's Gold," a cop caper comedy starring Camryn Manheim, is set there. Perhaps it's the state where the movie distributors come blowing down the door.


Posted Jan 25, 1999 | Order Article Reprints