By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Waters, Anders, Russell and Hartley Turn Tide, Stick Fork in Sundance at BAM
(L-R) David Russell, Hal Hartley, Janet Maslin, Allison Anders and John Waters bask in Sundance nostalgia Sunday at BAM (Photos: STV)
Monday morning always feels too early in the week to editorialize, but let me just say: If I really wanted to feature a panel discussion with “Four Independents Who Turned the Tide“–as the Sundance at BAM organizers did Sunday afternoon–it occurred to me a few minutes into the event that maybe panelists Hal Hartley, David Russell and Allison Anders would not have been my first choices to join John Waters and moderator Janet Maslin. I mean, they are lovely people (although Russell can be a notorious pill), but “Turned the Tide”? Especially in the Sundance-influence context, I am thinking Steven Soderbergh or Quentin Tarantino or maybe Kevin Smith would have to anchor something like that. I have to assume the organizers tried for at least one of these filmmakers (isn’t Smith in Cannes?); as it was, Russell appeared to be over the panel before it started, while a bemused Hartley never quite seemed to settle in.
Second-guessing aside, of course, the program as a whole was rewarding enough. Viewers started the day reacquainting themselves with the early-ish work of each filmmaker; Russell’s Spanking the Monkey and Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth were feature debuts, while Gas Food Lodging was Anders’s second film and 1981’s Polyester was the biggest movie Waters had yet made in his 17-year career. The subesequent discussion may have peaked early when Russell recounted his early days at Sundance, where he took tickets at the Egyptian Theater and met directors like Hartley, Gus Van Sant and Richard Linklater in between bouts working on Monkey.
“Those guys certainly seemed to be getitng their careers started,” Russell said. “We screened Spanking the Monkey for (festival director) Geoff Gilmore here in New York and he walked in and I said, ‘We were up all night cutting on a flatbed. So there may be some bumps and stuff.’ And he’d been looking at shitty films all day. And he turned to his assistant and he said, ‘Why are we watching it then? Why are we screening it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is not gonna go well.’ And I walked home 50 blocks. Then we got into the festival, and that was a victory right there.
“And then to get written about in The New York Times,” Russell continued, jamming his tongue into his cheek hard enough to leave a bruise. “Then you get to start making a living doing this–thanks to Sundance and The New York Times and that other stuff.”
Times veteran Maslin deflected the comment, moving on instead to the subject of Sundance as a marketplace–a “narrow corridor of options,” as she described it before Waters begged to differ.
“I wanna really stick up for Sundance,” Waters said. “I don’t understand today when people say it’s often too commercial. What is the problem if you’re a kid and you go there and someone overpays for your movie? You’re bitching about that?”
“I think it’s the free iPods,” Maslin said.
“That’s ludicrous,” Waters said, nodding. “The people who give away gift bags and free stuff treated me this year the way the governemt should treat Katrina victims.”
“Don’t you wonder how it’s come to that?” Maslin asked.
“Well, but you know what?” Waters said. “I thnk it’s great. They’ve got Slamdance (also). I think it’s the most incredible, successful film festival for a young person in the country right now. What is anyone complaining about? That it’s crowded? That all the press goes and writes about it?”
“The only people that complain, John, are the media,” Russell said. “Because they’ve got to have something to write about. So they have to keep creating a fake conflict.”
“Yeah, there’s a conflict there,” Waters said.
“The trouble is,” Maslin said, “there’s a finite amount of space if the press is going to do the whole festival. And the more Paris Hilton gets, the less you get.”
“I was guilty of it this year,” Waters said. “I went and launched a TV show that had nothing to do with Sundance. I booked films to show on my TV show that Sundance would reject. So I know that was part of it. But it was always a good experience. I was on the jury there, I saw a lot of great new movies that I had never seen. I hitchhiked there; people picked me up. I’ve never had any bad times there.”
“Did you start out walking up and down Main Street in Park City with Divine?” Maslin asked, recalling Hairspray‘s success at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival.
“No, Divine was never there,” Waters said. “Divine, unfortunately, died a week after Hairspray came out. So Divine was not at Sundance that time. But, however, it was at Sundance before it opened. That’s weird–I wonder why Divine wasn’t at Sundance. I’m not quite sure.”
“Park City would have exploded if he’d been there,” Maslin said.
“He would have liked it,” Waters said. “Except getting up those hills might have been some trouble.”
Anders later chimed in about Sundance’s lingering influence over her work as both a filmmaker and one of the Sundance Institute’s regular lab advisors. “There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that you can’t turn down an AA request because AA got you sober,” Anders said, briefly sucking the air out of the room. “It gave you your life and the more you give, the more you learn. And so I’ve had that with Sundance, too. I never turn down a Sundance request. I really feel like they gave me my career, and so I do a lot of work at the Institute as an advisor. I just always have the best time. I love working with the new filmmakers; they’re excited, because often they’re going to the festival after the labs, and it’s always exciting to see their expectations. And of course it flashes back to me and my first experience there.”
And then there was a Q&A we should avoid getting into (including at least three struggling writers and some guy asking, “What do you think of Crash beating Brokeback Mountain in this year’s Oscars?”), and then they pretty much called it a series. The consensus is that the festival will be back in Brooklyn next year, by which time director of programming John Cooper (right) will have booked Harvey Weinstein for the keynote one-on-one we all know he deserves. Can. Not. Wait.
