Dramas and Docs Top Sundance Slate
Forget La Croisette. Deer Valley Drive is the place to be as spot producers and directors like Nonfictionulls Stacy Peralta (seen here) shift their sights to Park City.
Spotmakers' Dramas and Docs Top 2012 Sundance Slate
Nonfiction, Park Pictures, Chelsea and Supply & Demand Integrated
are just a few of the ad content producers making big
splashes at the indie world's annual conclave.
By Anthony Vagnoni
The Sundance Film Festival is set to kick off in just about a month, and the schedule is jammed with work in the dramatic and documentary categories, both feature length and shorts, with work produced by regular contributors to your evening broadcast commercial breaks.
This year features some familiar names well known to the Sundance crowd, such as Nonfiction Unlimited Director Stacy Peralta, who's bringing his autobiographical "Bones Brigade" skateboarding doc to the festival. The film reunites the director of "Dogtown and Z Boys" with his crew of Southern California trendsetters, including Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero, Mike McGill and others, and tracks what they've done since they helped make skateboarding an underground phenomenon.
Another major player at the festival this year will be the new feature film division of Park Pictures, Park Pictures Features (see our story on their launch here), which will debut it's new dramatic film "Robot & Frank," directed by Jake Schreier and starring Frank Langella, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon and Liv Tyler.
The film is the futuristic tale of an older man who's provided with a robot caregiver by his adult children. It's being included in the Sundance Premieres category, where out of competition films directed by both new and more established talents are shown. It was produced by the Park Pictures' Director and Partner Lance Acord and EP Jackie Kelman Bisbee, in partnership with film producers Galt Niederhoffer and Sam Bisbee.
Also on hand will be execs from Chelsea, a regular Sundance contributor thanks to such roster talents as Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney and Kevin Macdonald. The company's Lauren Greenfield will have a new documentary screening at the festival titled "The Queen of Versailles," which has been selected as the Opening Night Documentary.
In development for the past two years, it tells the story of a wealthy couple that was constructing the biggest private residence in the US – a sprawling, 90,000-square-foot (that's over 27,000 square meters) palace inspired by Versailles – when their business empire falters due to the economic crisis. Their rags-to-riches-to-rags story reveals the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream. Chelsea Partners Allison Amon and Lisa Mehling are among the credited producers on the film, which is having its world premiere at Sundance.
Supply & Demand Integrated will be represented with two short documentaries directed by Lucy Walker and Matt Lenski. Walker's "The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom" is a look at the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, while Lenski's "Meaning of Robots" is a quirky look at a model-maker who's been shooting a stop-motion robot sex film for the last decade. Both were produced by Supply & Demand Integrated.
L.A.-based shop KnickerbockerGlory and its Partner and Director Laurence Thrush will be represented with Thrush's debut indie feature, "Pursuit of Loneliness," about a group of staffers at a country hospital who try to track down a relative of an elderly patient who passes away under their care.
The list of production houses also taking part in the festival, either with work they've produced or with films directed by talent on their rosters, includes Partizan, PRETTYBIRD, Paranoid US and Rebolucion in Argentina, among others.
Writer/director Quentin Dupieux, who's represented by Partizan, has a film at Sunance titled "Wrong," which is being screened as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. It's the offbeat story of a man named Dolph who searches for his lost dog.
Directors Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who are represented by PRETTYBIRD under the name Tim & Eric, will be represented with the comedy "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," about two guys who are given a billion dollars to shoot a film but who squander it instead. The film chronicles their attempts to earn it back by taking over a run-down shopping mall.
Director Nieto of Paranoid US also has a film at the festival, a short titled "Lazarov," which is being shown in the festival's International Short Film program. It's the story of a handful of die-hard Russian scientists who work secretly to restore the USSR as a global power.
Rebolucion director Armando Bo will be screening "The Last Elvis," about a delusional Elvis Presley impersonator. The film is running in the festival's World Cinematic Drama Competition.
Last year, SourceEcreative chronicled the participation of a number of top commercial production houses, directors and editors in the films that were being shown both in and out of competition at Sundance. (For a look at that report, click here.) And while the cast of characters on hand may have changed, the role of Sundance hasn't.
Loretta "LJ" Jeneski, EP of Nonfiction, notes that the company has had one of its directors play a key role at the festival almost every year. "With a roster made up of working documentary filmmakers like Stacy and Steve James (who was at Sundance last year with "The Interrupters"), it denotes their place as creative and respected documentarians," she says. "Since documentary work is a key part of Nonfiction's DNA, it's important to us and the ad agencies that come to us that our directors represent the real deal in the documentary world – they're seen as people who will bring those skills to spots."
Jeneski points out that for filmmakers, just getting into Sundance is an achievement. "Of the more than 4,000 films submitted this year, only 112 were selected," she says. "So when a film screens at Sundance, it signifies the quality of the work and the stature of the filmmaker. We're especially jazzed about 'Bones Brigade' this year. It makes Stacy a four-time Sundance filmmaker, and that's pretty special. The fact that this film was also produced in association with Nonfiction makes us especially proud."
Chelsea's Amon tells SourceEcreative that being at Sundance provides a number of demonstrable benefits for a director's advertising career. In addition to the press coverage associated with being there – which "can raise the awareness of the director and positions him or her as an asset," she notes - "it often provides new content for their showreels and, more importantly, can help cement their aesthetic. It provides their work with a voice and a style that is truly their own.
What does having work at Sundance say about the director and the production company that represents him or her? "To us, having a director's work there is a positive signifier of their creative well-being," Amon notes. "It demonstrates that they have diversity and vision. It is a point of pride for us, and, of course, provides us with an opportunity for positive buzz. It also demonstrates that our directors are creatively sharp, and capable of creating either a short or feature length film, whether it's documentary or narrative."
The festival also helps serve as an incubator for new talent and new forms that can be applied to the ad world, Amon adds. "In many ways, advertising remains an arena where experimental approaches to filmmaking still thrive," she claims. "The same, of course, can be said of the independent film industry, as evidenced by Sundance every year. Boundaries are pushed in both forms, and when you have 15 or 30 seconds to capture an audience's attention, that kind of daring often holds the key to success. That's why we see Sundance as an important proving ground for new talent."
Supply & Demand Integrated's Founder and Managing Partner Tim Case also notes that there's lots of benefit for the filmmakers themselves, not just production company owners and EPs, when it comes to the festival. The two films his directors have at Sundance represent labors of love that his company chose to embrace as well. "We financed Lucy's 'The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom' and Matt's 'Meaning of Robots' because of the directors' passion for these projects," Case says. "We see it as an opportunity for them to experiment with different kinds of subject matter, and it allows them to work with people in different ways than they would in the advertising realm. Essentially, it's a chance for them to further credential their abilities as filmmakers, and demonstrates that when it comes to their craft, they're fully committed, just as we are."
Published 21 December, 2011
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