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PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Television Festival this is not.
That snarky, small-screen nickname is nonetheless being tossed around by some of the Hollywood attendees who are gathering here for the 31st Sundance Film Festival, which starts on Thursday. The reason: Like the rest of moviedom, the independent-film world is grappling with the incursion of television as a creative and financial force.
Independent film used to define the cutting edge in entertainment, but the indie crowd has lately ceded ground to television, which is turning out risk-taking shows like Amazon’s “Transparent,” created by a Sundance film alumna. A vast majority of the 123 movies that will play Sundance this year will end up finding an audience not in a theater but on a video-on-demand system.
The shift leaves Sundance, longtime attendees say, on the edge of an identity crisis. The festival, fiercely proud of its heritage as America’s foremost showcase for independent cinema, is working to hold on to that identity. At the same time, it is tentatively embracing an art form, television, in which innovation and energy abound.
In other words, it is trying to remain relevant.
The signs of this push and pull are everywhere, starting with “Animals,” an independently produced and financed television series. The first two animated episodes, about lovelorn New York rats and gender-questioning pigeons, will make their debut at Sundance on Monday as a special event. Moreover, “Animals” is hoping to use the festival to land a distributor — a first for a television series, Sundance staff members said.
A TV show being shopped at Sundance? It is not as strange as it sounds, at a time when analysts estimate that digital and video-on-demand services are replacing art houses as the primary outlet for more than 90 percent of independent films. The most active Sundance buyers this year are expected to include distributors that tend to lean on video on demand, like IFC, Magnolia and Radius-TWC, the boutique division of the boutique Weinstein Company.
Twelve Sundance documentaries are already spoken for by HBO, CNN, Showtime and Netflix. “Your local art house cinema is moving to your living room,” said Jason Blum, a producer whose film “Whiplash” opened Sundance last year and who notably just announced a major expansion into television.
At the same time, more independent directors and writers are hoping to use Sundance as a launching pad not for a film career but for a television one.
“Now the dream is to write and direct an indie film, get into Sundance and then use that to become a big-time TV series creator, like Lena Dunham, or a show runner or a TV director,” said Reed Martin, author of “The Reel Truth,” a guide to making an independent film. “TV is where all the money is, and where a lot of the creative risk-taking is celebrated these days,” he added.
The indie brain drain is noticeable. The filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, long Sundance darlings, have recently been busy creating the series “Togetherness” for HBO. (They are also executive producers of “Animals.”) Woody Allen, who was indie before indie was a thing, is making a digital series for Amazon, where Jill Soloway — who directed the 2013 Sundance entry “Afternoon Delight” — is the creative force behind “Transparent.”
John Ridley is following up his Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave” screenplay with “American Crime,” which arrives on March 5 on ABC.
So where does all of this leave Sundance?
On the one hand, festival organizers are thrilled about the rise of television as fertile ground for the independent-cinema crowd. Sundance’s oft-repeated goal is to “support independent storytellers,” regardless of the medium. The nonprofit Sundance Institute last year added a television writing lab to its roster of workshops.
More than 900 people applied for 10 openings, according to Keri Putnam, the Sundance Institute’s executive director.
“We spend a lot of time listening to our community of artists, and what we began to see, like everybody else, was the surge of opportunities for independent voices on television and online platforms,” Ms. Putnam said. “This feels like a very natural expansion of our work.”
Similarly, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year started a program dedicated to online series, and the more commercially oriented South by Southwest festival in Texas added a television section.
But Robert Redford, Sundance’s founder, and his crew also want to protect their movie base, which is one reason they work so hard to stage world premieres (106 this time around, out of 123 features total). When film executives no longer need to make the trek to Utah to see new offerings — when everyone can simply view them on Vimeo link from New York and Los Angeles, as some already do — Sundance stops being a must-attend event.
Some festival officials even avoid the word television, referring to it instead as “episodic storytelling.”
“We have no formal plans to add an episodic festival section,” Ms. Putnam said.
Still, “Animals” represents an important toe in the water.
That seven-episode series is not the first TV project to be shown at Sundance. In 2013, the festival screened Jane Campion’s seven-hour “Top of the Lake” mini-series in its entirety, billing it as a “cinematic event.” Last year, the festival’s experimental New Frontier section included Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “HitRECord on TV,” a variety-show outgrowth of a website.
But both of those shows already had cable distribution locked up in advance and were trying to use Sundance to generate tune-in buzz. The same is true of “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” a six-part documentary series headed to HBO next month; Sundance will screen the first episode on Tuesday.
“Animals,” in contrast, is being dangled for sale by agents at ICM Partners, alongside films like “People, Places, Things,” a potential crowd-pleaser about a newly single graphic novelist with twin daughters.
The element of commerce is important. Sundance first hit its stride in the 1980s partly because independent-film executives, split between New York and Los Angeles, came together in the middle to wheel and deal. The festival’s heat has always come from the money changing hands.
“We truly have no idea what to expect,” said Mike Luciano, who wrote and directed “Animals” with Phil Matarese. “It could end up on traditional TV. It could go to one of the interesting home streaming options. That’s what’s exciting about it.”
adj. 创造性的
