Focus Features

Scott Kirsner’s new book, Inventing the Movies, chronicles the ways that new technologies have changed the movie industry, from the days of Thomas Edison and the Kinetoscope to the era of Steve Jobs and the iPod. The book focuses on the role that innovators like the Warner brothers, Walt Disney, Francis Ford Coppola, and Mark Cuban have played in pushing the art and business of cinema forward – but also on the resistance they often encounter from establishment players, who prefer to preserve the status quo.

In this exclusive outtake from the book, Kirsner explores how the Sundance Film Festival and independent filmmakers have supported the development and adoption of new technologies like digital editing, digital cinematography, and digital projection.

For ten days every January, Park City, Utah becomes a microcosm of the independent film world: there are ambitious young filmmakers vying to get their movies noticed, passionate cinephiles debating what’s worth seeing, and acquisitions executives looking to pick up the next Napoleon Dynamite on the cheap, for eventual nationwide release.

The Sundance Film Festival wasn’t explicitly intended to promote the marriage of indie filmmaking and new technologies, but for more than two decades, since Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute took over an event that had been born as the Utah/US Film Festival, it has done more than any other festival to make that marriage happen.

“…I'm about storytelling and content,” Redford told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2005, “and technology is not to be an end unto itself, it’s a means to an end.” In his talk at the annual trade show in Las Vegas, Redford used the word “democratization” several times. He saw technology as a key that would unlock the door to filmmaking, making it easier for any talented storyteller who wanted to express herself do so. “…Now the artist is going to be freer and have more protections in terms of their own individual voices,” he said, “and Sundance is basically an organization, a non-profit organization, that supports the ability of new artists to have a place to work and to be free of restrictions, so risks won’t be considered a failure, it will be considered a sign of growth.”

Napoleon Dynamite

Once Redford’s non-profit Sundance Institute got involved with the festival in 1985, it began to develop into a finely-tuned machine for catapulting unknown directors and their films, many of them made on a shoe-string budget, to wide renown. Sundance helped ignite the careers of Robert Rodriguez (with El Mariachi), Kevin Smith (with Clerks), Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape), and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs). Sundance buzz helped movies like Memento, The Blair Witch Project, The Full Monty, Shine, Capturing the Friedmans, Napoleon Dynamite, and Whale Rider reach mainstream audiences.

The filmmakers whose movies make it through Sundance’s rigorous judging process aren’t all technology evangelists. The Sundance set has embraced new technologies largely out of necessity, because of their potential to lower the costs of making the movie they envision, and getting it distributed and shown to audiences. The organizers of the festival work subtly to support them, setting up the facilities for digital projection, and bringing the manufacturers of new digital cameras and editing software to Park City to offer demos.

Independent filmmakers are eager to get their hands on new technologies “because their needs are practical,” says Ian Calderon, the director of digital initiatives for Sundance. “It’s economics that forces them to go in this direction. The mainstream filmmakers don’t have a need to engage [with new technologies], because they’re comfortable with the tools they’re using, and they have the resources to afford those tools.”

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Scott Kirsner’s new book, Inventing the Movies, chronicles the ways that new technologies have changed the movie industry, from the days of Thomas Edison and the Kinetoscope to the era of Steve Jobs and the iPod. The book focuses on the role that innovators like the Warner brothers, Walt Disney, Francis Ford Coppola, and Mark Cuban have played in pushing the art and business of cinema forward – but also on the resistance they often encounter from establishment players, who prefer to preserve the status quo.

In this exclusive outtake from the book, Kirsner explores how the Sundance Film Festival and independent filmmakers have supported the development and adoption of new technologies like digital editing, digital cinematography, and digital projection.

For ten days every January, Park City, Utah becomes a microcosm of the independent film world: there are ambitious young filmmakers vying to get their movies noticed, passionate cinephiles debating what’s worth seeing, and acquisitions executives looking to pick up the next Napoleon Dynamite on the cheap, for eventual nationwide release.

The Sundance Film Festival wasn’t explicitly intended to promote the marriage of indie filmmaking and new technologies, but for more than two decades, since Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute took over an event that had been born as the Utah/US Film Festival, it has done more than any other festival to make that marriage happen.

“…I'm about storytelling and content,” Redford told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2005, “and technology is not to be an end unto itself, it’s a means to an end.” In his talk at the annual trade show in Las Vegas, Redford used the word “democratization” several times. He saw technology as a key that would unlock the door to filmmaking, making it easier for any talented storyteller who wanted to express herself do so. “…Now the artist is going to be freer and have more protections in terms of their own individual voices,” he said, “and Sundance is basically an organization, a non-profit organization, that supports the ability of new artists to have a place to work and to be free of restrictions, so risks won’t be considered a failure, it will be considered a sign of growth.”

Napoleon Dynamite

Once Redford’s non-profit Sundance Institute got involved with the festival in 1985, it began to develop into a finely-tuned machine for catapulting unknown directors and their films, many of them made on a shoe-string budget, to wide renown. Sundance helped ignite the careers of Robert Rodriguez (with El Mariachi), Kevin Smith (with Clerks), Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape), and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs). Sundance buzz helped movies like Memento, The Blair Witch Project, The Full Monty, Shine, Capturing the Friedmans, Napoleon Dynamite, and Whale Rider reach mainstream audiences.

The filmmakers whose movies make it through Sundance’s rigorous judging process aren’t all technology evangelists. The Sundance set has embraced new technologies largely out of necessity, because of their potential to lower the costs of making the movie they envision, and getting it distributed and shown to audiences. The organizers of the festival work subtly to support them, setting up the facilities for digital projection, and bringing the manufacturers of new digital cameras and editing software to Park City to offer demos.

Independent filmmakers are eager to get their hands on new technologies “because their needs are practical,” says Ian Calderon, the director of digital initiatives for Sundance. “It’s economics that forces them to go in this direction. The mainstream filmmakers don’t have a need to engage [with new technologies], because they’re comfortable with the tools they’re using, and they have the resources to afford those tools.”

Calderon had been present when the Sundance Institute was founded in 1981. Even before then, as a producer and designer for television shows and theatrical productions, he’d been working with Sony to see whether the company’s video cameras might be a useful tool for filmmakers. “My thinking was, Jerry Lewis had started using video cameras in the 1960s so that he could look at digital dailies of his footage,” Calderon explained. “But in the early 1980s, everyone thought that video was kind of déclassé. The attitude was, ‘That’s for television.’” He remembered Sundance board members turning up their noses at the idea of video cameras being used for art films.

“It’s the American way to resist new technologies and dig in your heels,” Calderon said.

Still, filmmakers who came to workshops at the Sundance Institute started using video as a kind of sketchpad, trying to perfect certain scenes before they started shooting with the “real” cameras.

By the early 1990s, Calderon says, filmmakers “started saying, ‘I believe in video – it captures my style.’” In 1995, he took over the top floor of a building on Main Street and set up a small demonstration of how computers might be able to assist filmmakers. “We had some hardware and some software, and that was about it,” he said. “I think we had some Avid software running on a small Apple computer.” By 1999, the festival had accepted a film called The Item into competition, which had been shot on digital video (but was then transferred to film).

The Last Broadcast

That same year, Sundance began trying out the latest digital projectors. The reaction from attendees wasn’t uniformly welcoming, though. Chuck Collins, an executive at Georgia-based Digital Projection, Inc., recalled that the first movie shown digitally at Sundance wasn’t part of the competition, but Stefan Avalos and Lance Weilers’ The Last Broadcast.

“It’s quite amusing, looking back,” Collins said. “At the time, most of the filmmakers in the audience hated video. It was almost sacrilegious. ‘How dare a video person come in and attempt to say that video looks as good as film?’ In some respects, they were right. But over time, as video has gotten better, people have changed their tune.” Sundance attendees weren’t initially sold on digital projection either, Collins said. But in 2000, his company set up three digital projectors at Sundance venues, and five years later, they were putting their projectors, based on Texas Instruments’ DLP (digital light processor) chip, into every screening venue, so that movies in either film or digital form could be shown.

By 2005, Sundance was annually arranging a mini-trade show, held in the basement of a shopping mall on Main Street, that attracted equipment vendors like Panavision and Sony, chipmakers like Intel, and software-makers like Adobe and Avid. There were also hands-on workshops, and panel discussions about how new technologies had contributed to the making films that were being shown as part of the festival.

Sundance, Calderon boasted, was the first film festival to install digital projectors in all of its theaters, the first to show a movie shot on high-definition video, and the first to show a movie edited entirely on Apple’s consumer-level iMovie software (Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, made for a budget of less than $300.)

In 2005, Intel demonstrated a new technology for sending data wirelessly over long distances, by beaming a movie from Park City to the Empire Lodge in Deer Valley, 12,000 feet up in the mountains and about ten miles away. “I feel like Alexander Graham Bell,” said director David LaChapelle, introducing his documentary Rize, about new urban dance styles in Los Angeles. “Oh, and I’m not really here – this is a hologram.”

While digital movies had been sent to theaters via satellite before, this was the first time that an earth-bound wireless network had been used. Intel said that the data traveled from Park City to Deer Valley at speeds up to 25 megabits per second, about twenty times as fast as a standard household DSL (digital subscriber line) connection.

Tarnation

Although the first film shot on digital video had been accepted into Sundance just seven years earlier, by 2006, nearly a third of the movies showing at the festival had originated in some form of digital video, according to Calderon. (Sixty-two films out of 193 being shown.) The digital revolution was also a factor in the growing number of films submitted to Sundance. For the 2006 festival, chief programmer Geoffrey Gilmore and his staff considered 7459 shorts and features; in 1999, that number totaled only about 2850.

Some griped that as the number of films submitted grew, it became harder to identify the gems among them. But Calderon said, “I’m not going to be the cleric and say there’s too much out there. More is better. You have to hope that the good stuff floats to the surface.”

Jeremy Coon, part of the team that produced Napoleon Dynamite, said that he thought the democratization of filmmaking threatened the Hollywood status quo. Coon had edited that $400,000 movie in his Los Angeles apartment, using a Macintosh computer and Apple’s FinalCut Pro software. The quirky tale of a high school outcast was picked up at Sundance in 2005 for distribution by Fox Searchlight, and went on to make $44 million at the box office. 

“As long as making films is expensive,” Coon said, “there’s less competition for the studios. As long as studios control the channels, they can keep releasing their crappy $80 million movies, and they can get people to go see them. With the technology that’s out there today, if you want to go make a feature film, there’s no reason not to do it. It’s like what Coppola said in Hearts of Darkness -- a little fat girl can tell her story.”

Of course, not every filmmaker in attendance at Sundance was a digital zealot. Speaking about technology in general, director Todd Haynes said during a Sundance panel discussion that it could be “numbing of the creative spark” by presenting directors, cameramen, and editors with “too many choices.” (Haynes’ debut feature, Poison, had won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1991; he’d gone on to direct Far From Heaven, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.) Clive Gordon, a documentarian whose first feature, Cargo, played at Sundance in 2006, was still happily shooting on 35-millimeter film. “I’m not wedded to film because I’m an old fuddy-duddy,” said Gordon. “I like the softness of film. I don’t like the electronic look [of digital cameras] – there’s a certain hard edge.”

And as for being freed of the limitations of the length of a single canister of film (typically about eight to ten minutes), Gordon said that wasn’t a pure positive. “The idea of letting the camera run forever can be an advantage, but it isn’t necessarily,” he said. “It can make you sloppy. Also, when you’re looking for a great performance, shooting forever can work against that.”

Gordon also said he had been slow to switch from cutting film to editing on an Avid computer. “I liked the feel of working with film. If you know what you’re doing, you’ll cut it right the first time around. With digital, you can do it a million times over,” he said, echoing Haynes, “and that can give you too many choices.”

But by 2006, an interesting shift was happening. While Sundance directors had long depended on digital tools because of necessity, aspiring to some day shoot on film just like the established, well-paid members of the Director’s Guild and the American Society of Cinematographers, now some of Hollywood’s best-known directors and cinematographers – people like David Fincher, James Cameron, and Steven Soderbergh –   were starting to move in their direction. Big-budget films were being shot, edited, and projected digitally.

And in 2007, Sundance struck a deal with iTunes, Apple’s digital music and video marketplace, to make some of the Sundance-selected short films from that year’s festival available for download, for $1.99. (In the past, it would’ve been hard for an interested viewer to get hold of a short film that had played at Sundance, except perhaps on a compilation DVD months later.) The festival also commissioned several filmmakers, including the co-directors of Little Miss Sunshine, the biggest indie hit of the previous year, to make three-to-five minute films especially for mobile phone viewing.

Both were important steps toward the future – experiments in the ways that the relationship between audience and filmmakers was changing, and the ways that new technologies might change the experience of watching movies.