Sundance starts, and Asheville filmmaker is there

Sundance officially starts Thursday, and Asheville’s own Chusy Jardine will be there with his made-in-Ashvegas movie, called Anywhere USA. The festival is a celebrity-packed pimp fest, with filmmakers trying to sell their movie progeny. There’s some interesting economics at work, as well, as this Wall Street Journal explains:

More than 50,000 people are expected to attend Sundance this year, up from 36,000 four years ago. Routinely, cellphones at Sundance stop working because so many people crowd Main Street during opening weekend. Studio executives say that when closing multimillion-dollar deals to purchase film rights, they have to drive six miles down the highway to the interstate to regain service.

Harvey Weinstein, the studio head and producer behind major indie and mainstream hits like “Pulp Fiction” and “The English Patient,” says that buying a film at Sundance is “an endurance test. You see the film at 8, start bidding at 10 and finish at 6 a.m. There is another tone at the other festivals — at Cannes, you see the film, but then there are other things to do before buying, there’s a fabulous party to go to and you’re in a tuxedo rather than a ski jacket.”

Nearly half of the 64 films in competition at Sundance this year were made by first-time directors. Nevertheless, some say that the festival has changed in the past couple of years.

“It used to be a launching festival,” says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics — meaning that Sundance is now a better place to buy a film than to generate publicity for a movie that’s already been purchased. “It’s changed dramatically — now it’s all about the middlemen, about the deal that closes at 4 a.m. while other buyers are banging down the door and sitting out in the cold.”

This year, only slightly more than a dozen of the films at Sundance boast distributors before the festival begins — in part because sales agents are holding out for on-site bidding wars.

Sundance’s Mr. Gilmore says that last year the films that sold at the festival itself went for more money than ever before: about $45 million in total, he estimates.

Play mini-mogul and match the 2007 box-office receipts with hits from the 2007 Sundance festival.
Studio executives worry that this year some prices will get pushed up into the range of $12 million to $15 million per film owing to increased demand for material, persistence of the writers’ strike, and prospective director and actor strikes.

Buyers say they are looking carefully at three star-packed films aimed at young audiences: “Hamlet 2” (with Elisabeth Shue), about a high-school drama course that puts on a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play; “The Wackness” (with Mary-Kate Olsen), about a high-school kid growing up in New York who pays his therapist with marijuana; and “Assassination of a High School President” (with Mischa Barton), about a newspaper nerd and popular girl at a Catholic high school who investigate stolen SAT exams.