Sundance Summer

By Steve Lopez/Sundance

It's one endless reel in my mind now. A big boat is sinking; a starship is rising; an ex-stand-up is drawing $1 million per potty joke; and the studio magpies are eyeballing the receipts over Monday-morning cappuccino.

A smart lad would stick with art house offerings and steer clear of the Cineplex, especially the whizbang mega-releases. But not a slow learner who adores the very idea of going to the movies and keeps thinking the next one's actually going to be worth the eight bucks. I see ads on buses; I hear the buzz; I read blurbs promising the adventure of a lifetime. They do not tell you that part of the adventure will entail leaving the theater with a bag over your head.

And then along comes this assignment: Go to Sundance in Utah; see what the new kids in cinema are doing; maybe have lunch with Robert Redford.

O.K.

This is the Sundance you never heard about, nothing at all like the winter film festival, with its annual invasion of flesh-eating Hollywood toads. Every summer since 1981, a handful of wannabe directors (generally in their 20s or early 30s) have been invited to spend a month learning how to make their first feature films in the company of professional actors, directors and other wildlife, namely moose, which can be spotted from the ski lift. This year 3,000 applications arrived for the Sundance June Filmmakers/Screenwriters Lab. All but eight ended up on the cutting-room floor.

"The summer lab gets the least attention, but it's the most important thing we do," says Redford over lunch in the Sundance mess tent, the music of rushing streams riding in on drifts of alpine air. Important because this level of creative nurturing doesn't exist anywhere else and because these future directors do not seem inclined--not yet, anyway--toward the variety of film that is promoted with either a Happy Meal or the billboard image of a star urinating on a wall.

"I want to make movies I haven't seen," says film-lab fellow Patrick Stettner, 31, of New York City. I realize, just in the nick of time, that it would be inappropriate to hug him. Stettner, who works as a billing secretary at a Manhattan law firm, was selected on the strength of a darkly comic screenplay he had written about the dehumanizing effect of contemporary corporate culture, particularly on women.

His fellow fellows--all selected on the strength of their screenplays--have wrung wit and wisdom out of racial stereotypes, the paralysis of guilt, the gift of redemption. Five of the eight are women, two are black, one is Native American and another is Asian. They have one thing in common: a story to tell. Which, in Hollywood these days, passes for experimental filmmaking.

"The whole focus here is the story," says Redford, who grew up the son of a Los Angeles milkman in a neighborhood sandwiched by Beverly Hills and the barrio. Those clashing cultures, mixed with an interest in jazz and the Beat scene, infused in him a lifelong, insatiable desire for untold stories in alternative voices.

While the pressure in Hollywood is to make what sells, the challenge at Sundance is to make what no one else has yet considered. That's why the staff recruits the best talent, pumps fresh mountain air into their brains and hopes they are never tempted, no matter how much money is waved under their noses, to make The Return of Howard the Duck. "This place," says Mike Hoffman, a 1984 fellow whose recent directing credits include A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is a celebration of human subtlety against the glaring cultural vulgarity."

Central Station (1998) and Three Seasons (1999), two critically acclaimed releases, are by former film-lab fellows Walter Salles and Tony Bui. The Wood, a coming-of-age story about three African Americans by Rick Famuyiwa, is due out this week. The list of Sundance students over the years is long and impressive. It includes Quentin Tarantino, Julie Taymor, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sherman Alexie and Anna Deavere Smith. So when you watch 25-year-old Princess Peter-Raboff, an Alaska native and member of the Venetie Indian Reservation, shoot one of her first ever scenes with award-winning Hungarian director Gyula Gazdag offering pointers and encouragement, you can't help wondering if a young genius is finding her way.

"You do find yourself saying, 'Wow, I'm going to steal that idea for one of my films,'" says creative adviser Alfonso Cuaron, whose credits as a director include The Little Princess. "And when one of them gets famous, you can say, 'Of course. I was the adviser.'"

Fellows don't actually make their movies in the month-long lab, but they shoot dry runs in the hope that they'll one day get the financing to do it for real. (Sundance helps in that process.) And it's not like back home, where you have your roommate or maybe some waiter read for you. Here, Ally Sheedy (St. Elmo's Fire and more recently High Art) plays the role you wrote, or maybe it's Mary Alice (star of the Broadway productions of Having Our Say, Fences and The Shadow Box), or Delroy Lindo (Clockers, Malcolm X and Get Shorty), or Martha Plimpton (remember her from Parenthood and Goonies?).

Gus van Sant might screen To Die For one evening, tell war stories and then hang out with fellows at the actual bar from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You walk into a powwow on creativity, and who shows up but Denzel Washington? "After a while, they don't make you nervous anymore," says Attica Locke, 25, of Los Angeles. "It's not that I got used to seeing stars whose work I respect. It's that I got used to me and the belief that my viewpoint was valid."

Here is the daughter of a black-power activist--a kid named for the prison riots. She grows up in Houston, goes to college in Chicago, and on a family trip across "the raw, evocative landscape" of Texas for Christmas dinner at Grandma's in 1997, she gets an inspiration for a story about two bodies turning up in a small Texas town. One is black, one white. Locke writes a fresh, clean drama about racial stereotypes and her belief that being black is easier in the South than in the North. It becomes her ticket to Sundance, and almost as soon as she drops her bags, two black professional actors--Alice and Lindo--tell her she doesn't know anything about the black experience they know.

Uh-oh. Here comes the learning part. "She has a wonderful, wonderful grasp of dialogue, but something struck me as slightly improbable," says Lindo. "She said to me, 'There you are on the screen and I respect you, and you step off the screen and come here and criticize my work, and it hurts me.'"

Is it any wonder that Locke got so stressed out by the challenging 12-hour days that, as she says, "my body started to break down"? Lindo is apologetic. He should have been more constructive, he says. Maybe so. But Locke, who loses at least a foot to Lindo in height, doesn't back down. "I see beyond the polarity," she says of race relations, speaking with the same hopeful tone that powers her script. At dinner one night, Redford sees in her eyes that Locke is trapped in the halfway house between self-confidence and self-doubt. He strolls up and tells her not to worry. "This is all part of the experience," he says. "You've got a good story."

Redford's mother-henning is one come-on, the setting another. The morning sound and smell of creek water under a wooden footbridge, the afternoon light on lush summer grass, the green-walled canyons climbing the evening sky--anyone who can't draw creative inspiration from this place should probably be shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs. "It's like you're in a bubble," Plimpton says. "Nothing else exists when you're here." Not Hollywood, not Top 10 lists, not even makeup.

June came and went on the mountain, and we are that much closer now to eight new listings in the movie guide. Locke, by the end, has become convinced of two things--that she has to rework one of her main characters and that she has never believed more in her movie. Alice, once a critic, has become an admirer, and says that when the movie gets made, she wants to be in it.

"The stuff I learned at Sundance is bigger than the film," says Locke. When she got back home to L.A., she said she had the odd feeling that no time had passed, but that everything had changed.