True story: one year, someone called the Sundance Institute pretending to be someone’s mistress to save money on tickets to the Sundance Film Festival. Another year, someone who lived outside Utah posted an advertisement on Craigslist.org, soliciting locals to buy him tickets.
And in 2007, a Californian nearly got away with a scalping scheme that could have cost locals 300 festival tickets. The scalper registered with celebrity names and Utah addresses and stood in line at a box office in Salt Lake City, dispensing $50 bills to locals willing to buy him tickets at a discounted rate.
The California resident may have slipped through the cracks before, but “this year we actually caught the guy and shut down his whole ring,” says Linda Pfafflin, who helps to police ticketing fraud.
Pfafflin has served the Institute as the senior manager of ticketing and customer services for two years and can rattle off at least a dozen tales of busted ticketing schemes and counterfeit credentials. The key, she says, is to check street addresses on drivers’ licenses and utility bills.
But Pfafflin is proudest of her efforts to make the festival’s ticketing more efficient and thus more available for locals. This year, Pfafflin expects to give Summit and Wasatch county’s residents 1700 purchase time slots during the Locals sales weekend (Jan. 5-6), a number that more than doubles the local tickets before the Institute hired her. In 2004, about 600 purchase times went to locals.
The ticket mania has already begun for 2008. Registration for local festival passes have ended, but Locals registration for individual tickets to screenings begins in December, after Thanksgiving.
“People are always curious about why we give large numbers of tickets to locals,” she explains. “It’s because the festival basically comes in here and disrupts Park City residents’ lives there’s no parking at Albertsons, kids get to school late. So it’s important to us that we provide locals that service.”
The increase in local tickets has to do with Pfafflin’s efforts to use technology. Instead of waiting outside in the cold for hours, last year, Pfafflin began to issue what she calls “virtual wristbands:” A system in which registered locals are randomly chosen in groups and sent an e-mail giving them a time to show up at Old Town’s Gateway Box Office to pick up tickets (a process that takes 15 minutes per person).
The self-described “ticketing nerd,” says her enthusiasm for the Sundance Film Festival began when she became a volunteer at the Eccles Center box office during the festival. As a hobby, in January, Pfafflin would take a few weeks off from working as an executive for the grocery store chain, Albertsons, Inc. In 2004, she landed her full-time job at the Festival though she took a substantial pay cut to work at the nonprofit, Pfafflin says she’s never given it a second thought.
Pfafflin’s passion for Sundance is evident in the way she talks about the future.
“We want to be as cutting-edge as possible,” Pfafflin says. “That’s what Sundance is all about.”
In the next few years, she plans to employ scanners at all screenings for the festival, a technology she plans to test in two theatres in 2008, and to drive more traffic to the Sundance Web site. Long range, she says the festival will get even more high tech, sending tickets in barcodes to cell phones. Barcodes, she says, help to alleviate the issue of confusing the wrong ticket in the wrong place, lowering the possibility for ticketing fraud and hastens the processing in the day-of waitlist lines.
The other side of the job involves fielding questions from the public, the most frequent of which is “what film should I see?” Pfafflin’s response is to suggest people stop hunting for the hot ticket, and instead to go on a personal quest to find the “undiscovered film gems,” the films without big-named stars that might not make it to Blockbuster shelves. And though registering for tickets in advance alleviates stress during the festival, Pfafflin and her daughters prefer “the waitlist game.”
The best bet is to ask a fellow festivalgoer in line about what films they’ve seen. In her experience, the buzz doesn’t happen from reading the credits or asking staffers the buzz is on Main Street.
The window for purchasing Locals Sundance Film Festival Passes and Ticket packages has passed, but registration for locals-only individual tickets begins Dec. 3 and ends Dec. 14. For more information, visit sundance.org/festival.
Top three questions the Sundance Institute staff cannot answer:
According to Linda Pfafflin, the Sundance Institute’s Senior Manager of Ticketing and Customer Service, the key to an exciting festival is to challenge your tastes and take a chance on film.
*1. Which films are hot?
Pfafflin suggests avoiding trying to play the game of hunting down the film with the most buzz or the films that might be a smash at the box office later on. Sundance staffers often have as much of an idea of the “hot films” as the attendees do most of the films are premiering, so no one has viewed them yet, including staffers. Pfafflin recommends seeing films that might not be released later on in video stores, but could be “undiscovered film gems.” She recalls seeing a French film about penguins at one festival in a half-empty theater. The film was later dubbed in English and given the title, “March of the Penguins.” In 2006, the film won an Oscar for “Best Documentary.”
But if you’re still playing the game, the best bet is to talk to people waiting in line next to you at the festival, she says, and ask them what films they have seen.
*2. What celebrities will be there?
Pfafflin emphasizes that the Sundance Film Festival is about the filmmakers, not the stars. Even if celebrities are featured in the films, she cannot guarantee their arrival in Park City.
She adds that a star-studded cast is no indication of seeing a good film and offers Napoleon Dynamite as an example of a film that became hot without casting anyone famous.
*3. What films are in the catalogue?
Often the films are still in production in September, according to Pfafflin and this year, the festival needs to sift through 8,000 submissions before January to select less than 200 films for the festival. The catalogue has yet to be printed by the fall.
Sundance Film Festival by the numbers*
120
The number of film submissions that will be features at the festival.
700
The number of screenings at the festival.
8,000
The number of film submissions the festival has surpassed this year.
600
The number of locals who participated in the Locals Tickets Sales Weekend in 2004.
1,700
The number of locals the Sundance Institute expects will participate in the Locals Tickets Sales Weekend in 2008.
25,000
The number of people who screened a film after waiting in line the day-of during the festival in 2007.
250,000
The number of tickets printed for the Sundance Film Festival each year.
*According to Sundance Institute staffers.