Sundance Summer

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Gus van Sant might screen To Die For one evening, tell war stories and then hang out with fellows at the actual bar from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You walk into a powwow on creativity, and who shows up but Denzel Washington? "After a while, they don't make you nervous anymore," says Attica Locke, 25, of Los Angeles. "It's not that I got used to seeing stars whose work I respect. It's that I got used to me and the belief that my viewpoint was valid."

Here is the daughter of a black-power activist--a kid named for the prison riots. She grows up in Houston, goes to college in Chicago, and on a family trip across "the raw, evocative landscape" of Texas for Christmas dinner at Grandma's in 1997, she gets an inspiration for a story about two bodies turning up in a small Texas town. One is black, one white. Locke writes a fresh, clean drama about racial stereotypes and her belief that being black is easier in the South than in the North. It becomes her ticket to Sundance, and almost as soon as she drops her bags, two black professional actors--Alice and Lindo--tell her she doesn't know anything about the black experience they know.

Uh-oh. Here comes the learning part. "She has a wonderful, wonderful grasp of dialogue, but something struck me as slightly improbable," says Lindo. "She said to me, 'There you are on the screen and I respect you, and you step off the screen and come here and criticize my work, and it hurts me.'"

Is it any wonder that Locke got so stressed out by the challenging 12-hour days that, as she says, "my body started to break down"? Lindo is apologetic. He should have been more constructive, he says. Maybe so. But Locke, who loses at least a foot to Lindo in height, doesn't back down. "I see beyond the polarity," she says of race relations, speaking with the same hopeful tone that powers her script. At dinner one night, Redford sees in her eyes that Locke is trapped in the halfway house between self-confidence and self-doubt. He strolls up and tells her not to worry. "This is all part of the experience," he says. "You've got a good story."

Redford's mother-henning is one come-on, the setting another. The morning sound and smell of creek water under a wooden footbridge, the afternoon light on lush summer grass, the green-walled canyons climbing the evening sky--anyone who can't draw creative inspiration from this place should probably be shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs. "It's like you're in a bubble," Plimpton says. "Nothing else exists when you're here." Not Hollywood, not Top 10 lists, not even makeup.

June came and went on the mountain, and we are that much closer now to eight new listings in the movie guide. Locke, by the end, has become convinced of two things--that she has to rework one of her main characters and that she has never believed more in her movie. Alice, once a critic, has become an admirer, and says that when the movie gets made, she wants to be in it.

"The stuff I learned at Sundance is bigger than the film," says Locke. When she got back home to L.A., she said she had the odd feeling that no time had passed, but that everything had changed.