Day 1 - 20 January

What's Cooking for Opening Night

The slopes were bare, but the streets and sidewalks filling up with the hopeful, the jaded and the hungry as Sundance 2000 opened for business. As the hordes of the faithful began to arrive early Thursday morning, they were surprised by film crews on nearly every corner- the sidewalks literally loaded with camera crews of all types looking for footage.

Sundance appeared to have everything well in hand for the onslaught of festival attendees and dealt with the long lines efficiently, although most don't anticipate glitches in the system until the first full day of films on Friday. Slamdance (just up the hill and less than a half a block from the Sundance Festival), was taking advantage of an extra day to load in projectors and equipment: Slamdance unveils its annual showcase on Saturday. However, most filmmakers looked content to find the best breakfast place (Morning Star on Main), best coffee (rumored to be the WGA Screenplay Cafe at Prospector), or just enjoy their status (as marked by the id badges the festival requires everyone to wear) among other filmmakers.

Easily identifiable by the requisite black attire, festival attendees were staking out the lay of the land: one filmmaker stood near the festival flagship theater, The Egyptian, with a piece of cardboard dangling from his neck which read, "Will work for distribution." The merely curious, who had succumbed to the desire to see famous people and watch movies, were entrenched at the main box office where a continuous stream of information, downloaded constantly, updated the remaining available tickets for any given show. The "tourists", including one woman from South Carolina who had decided on a whim to visit the festival, were having a fair amount of success if they were patient and flexible.

Arrivals flowed into town in a steady stream until the last planeload made it up the hill from Salt Lake City at twilight, just in time to cause a traffic jam as hundreds of earlier arrivals returned back down the mountain to attend the Festival Opening Night, What's Cooking from Writer/Director Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach). The first British script to ever be invited to the Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab, What's Cooking embodied what Festival Co-Director Geoffrey Gilmore called the "celebratory nature of the Festival" with it's broadly painted, lovingly humorous look at the modern American family.

The crowd of 2000 filled Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City surrounded by banks of press who were interviewing themselves as part of their Sundance story-Roger Ebert barely made it past the coat check rack when he was thrust into an interview. Noticeably absent from the evening were Festival Founder Robert Redford, leaving Co-Directors Geoffrey Gilmore and Nicole Guillemet to stand in for the traditionally Redford-led event.

Charmed by both Chadha and her film, as well as the stars attending in support of the screening (Alfre Woodard and Julianna Margulies taking center stage among the ensemble cast), the audience was delighted by Chadha's opening speech as she spoke about her creative impulses driving first the script, then the production of What's Cooking.

"As a little girl in England," she confessed, "I used to dream of Salt Lake City, and even more-Provo, hoping one day I could make the journey. Of course, the dream was inspired by the poster of Donny Osmond hanging on my wall. And while I don't know if Donny is in the audience, I do know I'm happy to finally have made it here!"

The crowd stayed supportive throughout the screening, getting hungrier by the minute as the story unfolded around four families over one particular Thanksgiving holiday in Los Angeles. The food scenes alone rivaled Babbette's Feast for succulence; no surprise considering how well they all ate during shooting. What's Cooking Line Producer David Grace confided post-screening the best thing about the film production was eating the set each night at wrap.

Overall, crowd response was huge to what seems to be an easy bet to become a lovely, non-threatening holiday tradition on American screens, and while all felt extraordinarily confident a deal would be made by the end of the night for distribution, most were unwilling to say what kind of a deal it would be.

Moving to the Marriott for the post-film Opening Night Party, the crowds had to then be let down by the disappointing food and lack-luster environs. The Latin band tried vainly to get the crowd enthused, but one pass by the food table and another through the bar was about the most anyone wanted to do.

Buzz remains high as various filmmakers and producer's reps arrive to hype their work. In American Spectrum, both Could Be Worse and Two Family House are enjoying early notice as their rep, infamous Jeff (The Dude) Dowd arrived in town to promote the films.

In Shorts on the Frontier, G. from award-winning, three-time Sundance short filmmaker Rolf Gibbs engineered terrific word-of-mouth from early press. Gibbs shot free fall perspective by dropping a camera 30,000 feet and running the camera until as it plummets to the ground. Not surprisingly, he went through a lot of cameras trying to find the right way to get the footage-after five cameras and 18 "bombs" (the casing that held the camera) as well as nearly constant FAA denial, Gibbs linked two digital cameras to each other and got the footage he wanted. The result is a four-minute ride toward the earth with no soundtrack other than a composed score mimicking wild sound.

Most excitement remains surrounding the two premieres on Friday, however. Both Stanely Tucci's (Big Night) Joe Gould's Secret and the long-awaited American Psycho from Mary Herron are sold out and the anticipation level high for the first premieres of the festival.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Kathleen McInnis

Sundance