(Michael Wechsler and I attended Sundance, or really *crashed* Sundance, in 1995, with the goal of promoting our not-yet-finished feature at the place where everyone in the independent film world was sure to be. Filmmakers screening at Sundance put their posters up all over the place, largely on the walls of Main Street in Park City. These posters advertise screening times for that week in Sundance. Our poster had the title of the film, our mock "Godfather puppet hand" logo and said "Coming Soon," with our phone number, which went to a voicemail. We got a lot of phone calls, including one from legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, which included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer amongst its founders. The reporter spoke to us about what we were doing and included us in her wrap-up about Sundance, albeit mainly in the footnotes of the piece. Like the blurb in the New York Times when it was considered groundbreaking that we used email to promote our film in 1999, it was considered unique by the press in 1995 that we'd put a poster up for a film that wasn't even finished yet, at Sundance.
1995 was a seminal year at the Dance. My USC classmate Bryan Singer, who had won the festival a few years before with his debut indie Public Access, was catapulted to director stardom with the first screening of The Usual Suspects, which we were in attendance for. Although Public Access (written by Christopher McQuarrie, who also penned Suspects) had taken the big prize earlier in the decade, that meant less back then than it would today. The film wasn't released, and even then mainly into video stores, until sometime after The Usual Suspects was a hit years later, and reviews were somewhat tepid. But The Usual Suspects was destined for quite the opposite. The night the film premiered, there was audience electricity in the Egyptian Theater as Kevin Spacey became Keyser Soze. By the film's second screening the next afternoon, Robert Redford himself made one of his increasingly rare appearances, sitting in the back. Redford had clearly heard the buzz and needed to see this one for himself. Necks craned in the theater to catch a glimpse of Redford. There was extra laughter at that screening when Peter Greene's character of "Redfoot" was introduced. It sounded like his name was "Redford," and everyone assumed it was a reference to the star in the back of the theater. I'm still pretty sure it was a reference to Redford. The next day, Bryan told us that he had been invited to visit Redford at his house that afternoon. It was like the hand of the King had anointed him. We were a little jealous, of course, although Bryan was pretty cool in the way he presented things like that to those who knew him when, in that he was never a braggart. It was more, "Jesus, I just got invited to Redford's place! Can you believe it?!" We were all like Freshman who had watched one of our own get invited to the prom by the coolest kids in the class, and we were happy for him, envious, and hoping we would also get a similar invite someday. Later in the decade, Wechsler and I would, in fact, get a call from Redford's office, when we got a good review in the L.A. Times, but it never led to anything much other than a good story.
1995 was also the first year of the Slamdance Film Festival, and where I met Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish, who I would produce the film 18 1/2 with, some 25 years later. The Slamdance directors were also putting their posters up for their alternative festival screenings, right next to the Sundance posters, and our posters. Redford himself also reached his hand to Slamdance and gave it a swat if sorts, with a quote to the press, "There is a festival that has attached itself to us in a parasitical way..." The times were changing: if you didn't let filmmakers into Sundance, they weren't just going away, and they would show up at the Park City party anyway.) Translation of Cahiers Du Cinema Blurb: At Sundance, the action takes place outside the screening rooms. On the walls of the Egyptian Cinema, where we rested our soles during the lines of action in the cold, we could see a poster announcing the upcoming release of Slaves of Hollywood (an allusion to the title of Tama Janowitz's bestseller transformed into a rather uncut film by Merchant-Ivory), and giving a telephone number. According to information, this is the first film by two young directors, in search of a distributor, which describes the tribulations of six young people struggling to "succeed" in Hollywood.