Sundance Summer

It's one endless reel in my mind now. A big boat is sinking; a starship is rising; an ex-stand-up is drawing $1 million per potty joke; and the studio magpies are eyeballing the receipts over Monday-morning cappuccino.

A smart lad would stick with art house offerings and steer clear of the Cineplex, especially the whizbang mega-releases. But not a slow learner who adores the very idea of going to the movies and keeps thinking the next one's actually going to be worth the eight bucks. I see ads on buses; I hear the buzz; I read blurbs promising the adventure of a lifetime. They do not tell you that part of the adventure will entail leaving the theater with a bag over your head.

And then along comes this assignment: Go to Sundance in Utah; see what the new kids in cinema are doing; maybe have lunch with Robert Redford.

O.K.
This is the Sundance you never heard about, nothing at all like the winter film festival, with its annual invasion of flesh-eating Hollywood toads. Every summer since 1981, a handful of wannabe directors (generally in their 20s or early 30s) have been invited to spend a month learning how to make their first feature films in the company of professional actors, directors and other wildlife, namely moose, which can be spotted from the ski lift. This year 3,000 applications arrived for the Sundance June Filmmakers/Screenwriters Lab. All but eight ended up on the cutting-room floor.

"The summer lab gets the least attention, but it's the most important thing we do," says Redford over lunch in the Sundance mess tent, the music of rushing streams riding in on drifts of alpine air. Important because this level of creative nurturing doesn't exist anywhere else and because these future directors do not seem inclined--not yet, anyway--toward the variety of film that is promoted with either a Happy Meal or the billboard image of a star urinating on a wall.

"I want to make movies I haven't seen," says film-lab fellow Patrick Stettner, 31, of New York City. I realize, just in the nick of time, that it would be inappropriate to hug him. Stettner, who works as a billing secretary at a Manhattan law firm, was selected on the strength of a darkly comic screenplay he had written about the dehumanizing effect of contemporary corporate culture, particularly on women.

His fellow fellows--all selected on the strength of their screenplays--have wrung wit and wisdom out of racial stereotypes, the paralysis of guilt, the gift of redemption. Five of the eight are women, two are black, one is Native American and another is Asian. They have one thing in common: a story to tell. Which, in Hollywood these days, passes for experimental filmmaking.

"The whole focus here is the story," says Redford, who grew up the son of a Los Angeles milkman in a neighborhood sandwiched by Beverly Hills and the barrio. Those clashing cultures, mixed with an interest in jazz and the Beat scene, infused in him a lifelong, insatiable desire for untold stories in alternative voices.

While the pressure in Hollywood is to make what sells, the challenge at Sundance is to make what no one else has yet considered. That's why the staff recruits the best talent, pumps fresh mountain air into their brains and hopes they are never tempted, no matter how much money is waved under their noses, to make The Return of Howard the Duck. "This place," says Mike Hoffman, a 1984 fellow whose recent directing credits include A Midsummer Night's Dream, "is a celebration of human subtlety against the glaring cultural vulgarity."

Central Station (1998) and Three Seasons (1999), two critically acclaimed releases, are by former film-lab fellows Walter Salles and Tony Bui. The Wood, a coming-of-age story about three African Americans by Rick Famuyiwa, is due out this week. The list of Sundance students over the years is long and impressive. It includes Quentin Tarantino, Julie Taymor, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sherman Alexie and Anna Deavere Smith. So when you watch 25-year-old Princess Peter-Raboff, an Alaska native and member of the Venetie Indian Reservation, shoot one of her first ever scenes with award-winning Hungarian director Gyula Gazdag offering pointers and encouragement, you can't help wondering if a young genius is finding her way.

"You do find yourself saying, 'Wow, I'm going to steal that idea for one of my films,'" says creative adviser Alfonso Cuaron, whose credits as a director include The Little Princess. "And when one of them gets famous, you can say, 'Of course. I was the adviser.'"

Fellows don't actually make their movies in the month-long lab, but they shoot dry runs in the hope that they'll one day get the financing to do it for real. (Sundance helps in that process.) And it's not like back home, where you have your roommate or maybe some waiter read for you. Here, Ally Sheedy (St. Elmo's Fire and more recently High Art) plays the role you wrote, or maybe it's Mary Alice (star of the Broadway productions of Having Our Say, Fences and The Shadow Box), or Delroy Lindo (Clockers, Malcolm X and Get Shorty), or Martha Plimpton (remember her from Parenthood and Goonies?).