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By Root 755 0

deep-rooted. For many, it was hard to distinguish the labs, where the works in progress were nurtured with advisers, from the festival, where a committee selected new movies from far and wide to reflect the Sundance aspiration of diversity. Sometimes the lab projects grew into finished features with no help from Sundance beyond the script phase; these were often premiered at the festival. At other times the festival films were outside productions, with no prior association. The very first lab, in 1981, generated El Norte, a story about Guatemalan immigrants cowritten by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, which won a festival premiere and critical admiration on its cinema release two years later; Three Thousand, workshopped by Jonathan Lawton in 1988, would shortly metamorphose into the popular studio hit Pretty Woman. These successes strengthened Redford’s belief in a new-style infrastructure for movie development. “The granola idea was anathema to me,” says Redford. “I recognized where our earliest endeavors might have been misread, but the deduction was wrong. What I wanted in the labs was experiment. What I sought in the festival was variety.”

The head of the selection committee for the remodeled film festival was Geoff Gilmore, the former head of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming department. For him, there was no “standard” Sundance festival movie: “We decided to go for the broadest range, ideological, marginal, countercultural, whatever. The charm, in fact, is that we decided we wanted no real definition other than newness. The idea was, Let us take down the barriers and bring an alternative stream of movies to the public.”

For the 1989 festival, Gilmore chose Atlanta-born newcomer Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, a movie with a shoestring budget written in eight days and shot in thirty, about marital relationships and voyeurism. It won the audience prize and, crucially, distribution from the new marketing lion Miramax and would go on to win its writer-director a Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination. “It wasn’t something I personally connected with,” said Sundance adviser Hume Cronyn, “but I saw how it was perfect for spotlighting the Sundance Bob wanted. The truth remained that the Sundance the board of governors imagined and the one Bob wanted weren’t the same thing. Soderbergh’s approach was radical, and that was Bob’s kind of Sundance.” Radical, Redford knew, wasn’t sufficient. Sundance offerings must connect with the widest audience if the breakthrough of media acknowledgment was to happen. Soderbergh proved the perfect bridge.

The achievement for Soderbergh—and Sundance—was sizable. By the end of the eighties, cinema was in lockstep with the growth of technology, dominated by Batman and its look-alikes. There were still plenty of thoughtful movies about, including, in 1989, Driving Miss Daisy and Dead Poets Society. But sex, lies, and videotape employed Godardesque innovation, seeking, as Godard would seek, to film life—“to discover life in film, and discover film in life”—by using the homemade confessional newly available in the domestic video age. It was intimate; it was original. The movie was made for $3 million, without studio backing, and delivered via Sundance and Miramax to the kind of mass audience only available to big studio productions. Prizes apart, it earned almost $25 million, validating Sundance’s pledge of experimentation. Soderbergh, in Roger Ebert’s description, became “the poster boy for Sundance.”

Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. The moneymen like Gary Beer and Brent Beck, whose job it was to balance the books, had felt Sundance was teetering on bankruptcy. Said Beer: “It was only a matter of time before major packages of land and development went up for sale because, to put it simply, Bob had us ridiculously overcommitted.” To their credit, Beck and Beer had moved to solve the Sundance financial crisis by introducing a mail-order Sundance catalog. “To be honest, it took no great ingenuity,” says Beck. “Sundance was known as a southwestern