Sundance Film Festival. (Festival Wraps).

UTAH 1/10 -- 20/02

Sundance 2002 wasn't so much a film festival as it was a made-for-television event in the snow-capped mountains of Utah. With its preponderance of made-for-cable movies dressed up as independent art and of Hollywood stars dropping in for sitcom-style cameos (including the suddenly visible Sundance founder Robert Redford), the festival felt like an extension of the mid-season preview for television critics, which coincidentally was underway the same week in Pasadena, California.

When I had previously covered Sundance, during the dot-com boom of early 2000, it looked as if the future of film was off-screen and on-line. The narrow streets of historic Park City were jammed with "entrepreneurs" hawking their digital visions. You could barely slide into a hot tub without some Net freak flashing his URL at you. With the dot-com boom now a bust, Sundance 2002 had a distinctly retro buzz, as well as noticeably fewer crowds and parties. The future of film, it now seems clear, will once again be determined by television, just as it was during the post-war tube invasion of the 1950s.

The main talk at Sundance wasn't about emerging directors or actors, which is what festival-goers usually concern themselves with. Everyone was too busy commenting on how cable firms like HBO, Showtime and InDigEnt Films (an offshoot of the Independent Film Channel) had muscled into creative turf once dominated by such scrappy indie-film players as Miramax and October. The opening-night film, the hate-crime investigation The Laramie Project, was made by HBO for television. So was the empowerment drama Real Women Have Curves, with America Ferrera and Lupe Ontiveros, which went on to win the Audience Award in the dramatic competition and also acting prizes from the Sundance grand jury. An HBO documentary on South Africa, Amanda! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, won the Audience Award in its category and also the jury's Freedom of Expression prize.

The Showtime beauty-pageant documentary Miss America, one of the best-received documentaries at the festival, went straight from the festival to a January 27 broadcast. One of the most popular of the 15 Canadian films at Sundance, John Zaritsky's Ski Bums, a humorous Whistler-lifestyle documentary was made for the NFB primarily as a small-screen affair. InDigEnt hit the jackpot with Rebecca Miller's relationship drama Personal Velocity and the Lolita-style comedy Tadpole, scoring kudos and cash for films made in television-friendly digital video. Personal Velocity, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition, was bought by United Artists for $1 million (U.S.); Tadpole, the jury's pick for the directing prize (it went to InDigEnt co-founder Gary Winick), sparked a bidding war that Miramax won for a Sundance 2002 high of $5 million - not bad at all for an 87-minute movie shot for $500,000.

Personal Velocity and Tadpole will likely have theatrical releases, as will at least a couple of the HBO films, so it may be too soon to claim that video killed the movie star. And give cable firms credit for supporting the kind of low-budget indie dramas and docs that the studios and Miramax have all but abandoned: in today's multiplex-dominated world, it's hard to find any intelligent material among the $100-million blockbusters and quickie teen-exploitation flicks. Still, anyone who cares about movies can't help but lament how the artful notion of film for film's sake is vanishing from today's market-driven indie landscape. Festivals like Sundance, where even celluloid itself is fast yielding to digital video, are starting to become little more than prestige venues for television premieres.

This feeling really came home to me, oddly enough, during the screening of a film that actually was made for a planned theatrical release: The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, a coming-of-age snoozer produced by and starring Jodie Foster. Originally scheduled for Sundance 2001, but delayed by production problems with Todd McFarlane's animated sequences, the movie played like a two-hour episode of the Walt Disney Sunday night television broadcasts of my youth. (Altogether now: "The world is a carousel of color, wonderful, wonderful color.") Foster co-stars in the movie, in the role of a peg-legged nun who hectors a group of rambunctious schoolboy comic freaks, led by the insufferable Kieran Culkin. Poster admitted after the screening that she took the role not because she really wanted it, but because "I was afraid nobody would show up" at the theatres otherwise.

For an actor as good as Foster to have to worry about selling a movie as lightweight as this one made me want to rush out and buy another DVD copy of Taxi Driver. The banality of television has infected even those films not made for it. The depressing experience of watching Dangerous Lives was relieved later in the evening by the premiere screening of The Kid Stays in the Picture, a riotous documentary on the life of legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans. Co-directors Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein have fashioned a hilarious and honest biopic, narrated by Evans himself, on the man who produced Chinatown, Marathon Man and Urban Cowboy, but who later almost destroyed himself through drugs and scandal.

At first, it seemed somewhat incongruous for a film about a big Hollywood producer to be premiering at indie-boosting Sundance, with the well-tanned Evans flown in from the Coast for the evening. But it was a film about a guy who makes films, not videos. In the context of television-dominated Sundance 2002, it was not only blessed relief, but also downright radical.