I’m in the camp Sundance made a big mistake going for Boulder. Ouch.
Colorado stayed PC, and I don’t mean the initials of our fair city, unlike whatever that was with Utah’s legislature freaking out over pride flags or Ohio’s own MAGA nonsense channeled through legislative virtue signaling.
That couldn’t have hurt Boulder’s chances. Colorado also threw about twice the loot at the struggling film fest as Utah.
Park City fiddled, and fiddled, for eight years and counting with Bonanza Park, what once was to be HQ for the festival along with the Kimball Art Center. Lock that in and the tune is far different today.
Meantime, the ski town got expensive, Robert Redford got old, and the festival got stale, not merely in recovery following COVID.
Suggestions that Sundance has outgrown Park City sound more lame excuse than reality, considering that nearly everything about the festival — including attendance — has shrunk, not grown. The movie industry has gone cold to indie momentum. The weird twilight at Sundance between film as art and the promise of commercial payoff has darkened.
Park City itself is a cornerstone overlooked, a set piece moved aside, a pearl lost off the thread, not yet missed. And what is Boulder? A chimera, I suspect. A pretty boy soon exposed. Not what they thought.
The new darling has more and larger theaters, though. That’s a plus. Park City’s space has ebbed, at least for the moment, and it’s expensive to bring the places available up to standard with funds better used to create art than show it. Makes sense, although a sure sign of an indie mindset beginning to curdle is the belief you need to spend big to make your screens suitable.
What ebbs will wax as well, surely. A film fest vacuum in Park City will fill with a better fit at a better time, say later in April or into May. An audience is primed, Sundance won’t take all of Hollywood with it. Local organizing talent and connections remain.
And Boulder won’t prove out, not for this. Have you been there? It’s nice enough in a suburbia-meets-frat-house-row kind of way. More buildings, more streets, more traffic, mainly an oversized college town connected at the hip to greater Denver, population in the millions.
Might as well stay in LA for all that. Sleep in your own bed, at least, for essentially the same experience.
Park City still hints at frontier. It’s still a real place, still a little dangerous and maverick in the right ways, where an LA gal can feel equally cool in cowboy hat and boots as spikes and strappy black, where there’s history, a touch of Old West Sundance Kid, and skiing right off Main Street.
That’s not Boulder. The Pearl Street Mall is a mall; it says so right in the name for a reason. It’s meant for people attracted to … malls. The vibe is all wrong, pleasant as the place might be for shopping. There’s nothing Sundance about it. Maybe this element has gone forgotten, but it’s essential. How long before the dilution to Anyfest in Everytown takes full hold? The cool factor can’t last, not in Boulder, and maybe that quality was going, going anyway.
Choosing Salt Lake City would at least have given Sundance’s future a better chance. Gravity would have pulled the festival back into Park City’s orbit as the mistake grew more apparent. The legacy crumbles in Boulder, and I believe that’s the real glue, a nuance as subtle as the festival’s name.
An irony, perhaps, is that Park City won’t miss the festival. Oh, the screenings, the panels, the corporate popups and other side shows will go. Luminaries, too, for awhile.
We’ll keep the heart and soul of what Sundance was supposed to be about before the festival’s leaders decided it was too big for this little town. But what they’ve really done is lose their way.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.