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Tale of Two Film Festivals: Telluride and Sundance

I was in the lobby of a hotel in Telluride when the actress Laura Linney started singing and dancing to a song from the Broadway play Dreamgirls. Dylan Kidd, director of a film called P.S. starring Linney which premiered at Telluride, was in the lobby, too. Because Kidd may direct the film version of Dreamgirls, Linney was doing an impromptu, playful audition for a part. She received a smattering of applause from the hotel clerk and a small number of people moseying around in the lobby. She even elicited a smile from Kidd.
As a location for a film festival, few places on earth could be more inviting than Telluride, a small, scenic, former mining town located in a narrow valley at the base of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. Telluride’s lure has not escaped the notice of the local town council who promote a multitude of festivals throughout the year, including fetes for bluegrass music, wine, technology, mushrooms, hot air balloons, and even, nothing (held July 21-24).
Unless you have a four-wheel drive, there is only one way in and one way out of Telluride—a two-lane road that winds 120 miles from Durango. There is a landing strip for small aircraft on a mesa on the outskirts of town, but most people prefer to fly to Durango, Grand Junction, or Montrose and rent a car from there. Because the festival takes place over Labor Day weekend, the weather is usually cool and sunny. However, this year, it rained for two solid days, then snowed heavily before the sun came back out again—typical fall weather at 9,000 feet, but inconvenient nonetheless.
The home of the Sundance Film Festival is Park City, Utah, an easily accessible ski Mecca thirty miles from Salt Lake City. Sundance begins at the end of January, so the temperature gauge frequently teeters around zero with stiff winds and heavy snow. Of course, an advantage to holding the festival when ski season is winding down is that filmgoers who need a break from small, dark rooms can trade in their theater seat for one on a lift at a ski slope down the street.
Because of Park City’s proximity to Salt Lake City and its larger population (Park City is more than four times the population of Telluride), there are plenty of places to eat and stay at Sundance. The number of fast food franchises and hotel chains in Telluride is zero, but they abound in Park City, which makes it at least theoretically possible to woof down a Whopper or bean burrito between screenings.
The bounty of films at Sundance, whose categories include premieres, drama, documentary, American spectrum, world cinema, world documentary, native forum, frontier, shorts, and midnight movies is unmatched anywhere. If you viewed only one film in each category, you would be in a theater for between twenty and thirty consecutive hours. During Sundance’s 2004 season, 127 or so new films premiered in the first five days. In contrast, at Telluride, only 20 or so new films made their debut with another dozen “oldies but goodies” rounding out the festival’s entries.
At Sundance, you purchase a pass for between $400 and $2500+, and when the slate of films is announced in December, you choose the films you want to see and the times you want to see them. You order tickets online up until a few weeks before the festival begins, then the festival mails an envelope to you with everything inside. At Sundance, a ticket guarantees a seat.
When you purchase a pass at Telluride (at a cost of $325-$3500+), you do so on faith, as the names of the films are not released until the first day of the festival. Even then, half of the films are still TBA—“to be announced.” The schedule is not finalized until the morning of the day the films are to be shown.
Instead of offering real tickets, Telluride furnishes a laminated photo identification badge, which permits you to stand in a line for a chance to get a limited number of “real tickets.” There is a “good pass holders line” for folks who have a badge and a ticket; a “bad pass holders line” for folks who have a badge but no ticket; a “non-pass holders line,” for folks who have neither badge nor ticket; and a “really good pass holders line” near the entrance for folks who contributed so much money to the festival that no one would dare ask them to stand in line for anything. The really good pass holders and good pass holders always get in; for everyone else, it’s a crapshoot.
This year, I was watching the Hungarian film Up and Down when the “pass holders ticket booth” opened for a reprise of George Lucas’ golden oldie THX1138 to be screened at the same theater immediately afterwards. When I left Up and Down, I sprinted out to the ticket booth only to discover that all the pass holder tickets had been given away. By staying for Up and Down, I was relegated to the bad pass holders line (badge, but no ticket), which meant that I didn’t get to see THX1138 or hear George Lucas, who showed up to offer a short introduction.
Both Sundance and Telluride use libraries, school gymnasiums, basements, and conference halls as makeshift theaters. All venues at Telluride except one are within walking distance of each other. The only theater that is not a short walk from somewhere in town is the Chuck Jones Cinema, located in Mountain Village, a 12-minute gondola ride away. However, the views from the gondola are spectacular and the ride is free, so going to the Chuck Jones every once in a while is not too bad.
At Sundance, parking is scarce, traffic is bumper-to-bumper, and only two cinemas are within walking distance of each other. The rest of the cinemas are scattered across town, too far to walk, especially if you have a narrow window of time. A free shuttle bus makes the circuit, but where and when the bus stops is difficult to predict. I waited in the snow at a shuttle stop on several occasions, but I never saw a bus. A few times when timing was tight and the weather unforgiving, I took a cab so that I could make the curtain call on other side of town.
The towing company in Park City (there is only one) is legendary for absconding with cars that may be illegally parked or even, not-that-illegally-parked. One afternoon, I left the rental car in a near-vacant grocery store parking lot only to discover, when I emerged from the movie an hour and a half later, that the car was gone. Initially dumbfounded, I dusted off a snow blasted sign that warned, "One hour parking only." A half hour mistake cost me the equivalent of three or four sumptuous repasts at the concession stand, or about $100.
While it is impossible to go “on the cheap” at Sundance, at least Telluride makes an effort to accommodate patrons who might have some difficulty scraping together a few hundred bucks to support their movie habit. At dusk during each night of the Telluride Festival, a film is projected against a huge white sheet in a small park in the middle of town. The screening is free and people usually bring a blanket or a lawn chair. Too, Telluride offers a “late night movie pass” which may be purchased for $20 and affords you the privilege of queuing up in the open air around midnight to see the last feature of the day. Student films are supposed to be free if they are not sold out, but every screening of student films I tried to attend this year was sold out.
The best aspect of the Telluride Festival is that film workers and film watchers interact without the crush of paparazzi or the layers of pomp that usually surface when film and audience mingle. On the negative side, Telluride offers only a handful of new films and, unless you become a major benefactor of the festival, you are going to spend some time standing in line.
Sundance offers more films, more big names, more buzz, and tighter organization, but finding your way from theater to theater in sub-zero weather is a hassle. Yet, if you are serious about cinema and want to get an advance peek at the newest independent films, there’s no better place than Sundance.

By Lawrence A. Baines