No TV critics' tour this January? No problem! For the first time in five years, I've got the time — and the budget — to attend the nation's premiere documentary film festival in Park City, Utah.
I'll be posting daily videos and daily diaries from Friday through Tuesday and possibly Wednesday, righ' chere at TVBarn.com.
Yeah, yeah, I know … but that world you read about in the Times and EW, that ain't the Sundance I know. There are thirty-two documentary films in competition, another handful of them in non-competition categories. Most of them will air on television in the next 18 months. Perhaps sooner if they don't get this strike over with.
I can't wait to see Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?", or "I.O.U.S.A." or "FLOW: For Love of Water" or "An American Soldier" ... and there are a plenty more docus where that came from. Of course, it's not all nonfiction. Oprah's next TV movie, "A Raisin in the Sun," is premiering here, as is HBO's "Sugar," made by Sundance sweethearts Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. However, given the tight scheduling and the happenstance of being in the same place as 50,000 people in a small, remote (well, it used to be remote) town in Utah, I'll need some luck to get to see those films that experience the most advance cases of Sundance effect, which could include "The Wackness," "CSNY Deja Vu," "The Deal" and "What Just Happened?"
David Carr is reporting today that fewer than 20 of the more than 120 films appearing at Sundance have a distributor. That, and the writers' strike already having an impact on the winter 2009 film market, would suggest a feeding frenzy — though when I put that argument to Shawn Ryan earlier this week, he sniffed, "I’m not sure that buying some little independent feature is going to make up for not having the script ready to shoot next year’s James Bond movie." Fair enough, but it's the perception of a feeding frenzy that already precedes the feeding frenzy, right?
