Sundance, 1997

Hi Friends,
I know we are all losing our minds about what’s happening in Minnesota and elsewhere right now, but if you, like me, need an occasional break from the doomscrolling hellscape that is our current news cycle, here’s another nostalgia dispatch from the film business of the 1990s. (Some identities withheld/changed as per usual.)

Rest stop life: my documentary crewmates on one of our travel days.
(Note: Nobody from my story is actually in this photo).

In the mid-90s, I did sound on a documentary produced by a film school friend. As with everything I worked on in the 90s, there was no money, so a rotating rogues gallery of folks from my grad program at NYU and their friends cycled through the various crew positions. The doc was about the legacy of slavery, and as we traveled through Alabama and North Carolina, I recorded sound on some powerful interviews, experienced my first gospel church service, and ate deliciously gut-busting Southern meals in people’s homes. Our group bonded as you do when you’re spending long days together sharing one van and several cheap hotel rooms, so when the film got into Sundance in 1997, the director rented a house for the full two weeks of the festival, and everyone who’d been involved and could chip in for a bed was invited to come along.

I had finally gotten my MFA from NYU in 1995 and was making the barest of livings recording sound and booming on independent films while trying to write my second feature. I’d written my first feature toward the end of film school, staging a rather disastrous reading with friends, so that I could hear it aloud. Lauren Graham, who was the lead in my thesis film and would go on to star in Gilmore Girls, read one of the main parts, and to this day, I can count on the still-visceral memory of her disbelief and disappointment when she got to the denouement, which I’d thought was so clever but was really just ridiculous, to make me feel like throwing up (if, you know, there’s ever a need for that). I still mailed all of that script’s 150 dot matrix-printed pages, secured with a binder clip (!!!!) to the Nicholl Fellowship, and now I had a first draft of a new one on my hard drive. Maybe if I could just find someone to read it at Sundance, I’d finally be able to jump start my real career as a writer-director. Plus, it was winter and work was slow, and I could bring my skis.

Sundance — at least the Sundance of 1997 — was a great place to go as part of a group, particularly if a large portion of that group had no aspirations in the film business and was solely there to party. The producer’s cousin was one of those people, and he appointed himself cruise director and kept a chart of all the parties and activities for every day (except for screenings, because, again, not the reason why they were there). Assisting him were two women in our house whose connection to the doc was unclear whose mission was 100% In Search of Hot Dudes, and were particularly obsessed on Bart Freundlich, director of The Myth of Fingerprints (who none of us had any shot with, because he was there with his star Julianne Moore, who he would later marry). Thanks to them, the very afternoon I landed, I went to a very fun snowshoe outing organized by a small, now-defunct distribution outlet. Snowshoeing is fucking hard and most of us gave up within the first 15 minutes, but when I ended up chatting with a friendly guy from the company who set me up with my snowshoes and looked really good in a stetson, things felt like they were off to an great start.

There also turned out to be a surprising number of people I knew at the festival that year. A film I’d worked on in the fall of ’96 was premiering, and while I had missed the screening, I did see my AD friend Mark, living out his own Sundance fantasy with his then-girlfriend, the film’s lead actress. (I never did get to see that film, because, while I’d thought it was going to be really funny when we were filming, it never got distribution — probably because it had been slapped together in just a few months to make the festival, which was an insane thing to do in those days when we were still shooting on actual film). I also ran into Morgan Freeman (not that one, the other one) — who’d been a couple of years behind me at NYU and with whom I’d worked with as a 2^nd AD on Welcome to the Dollhouse and Milk & Money — literally on stage at the awards ceremony, when his film, Hurricane Streets, and ours won awards back to back. Another classmate from NYU was also there with a doc, and I didn’t really know him, but went up and introduced myself to him because he was hot. He of course didn’t remember me, but then his friend immediately chimed in with, “You’re Betsy Nagler? I’m Avi Weider!” This was another person I’d never met but sort of knew, because he worked with my roommate at a local Park Slope restaurant, and also because his father was the rabbi of the local temple I’d joined in order to use the pool in their basement (I am a bad Jew, we all know this), who, upon seeing a cute 20-something Jewish girl, had immediately said, “Oh, you have to meet my son Avi!”, and then tried to call him both at home and then at the restaurant with no success, because this was all pre-cell phone.

As much as I enjoyed how bumping into all these folks — I knew people! at Sundance! — I was even more thrilled to see Stetson Boy waiting behind the velvet rope outside the big New Line party. When they wouldn’t let any of us in, I noticed a back door. Moments later, me and my friend and he and his friend were sneaking up some back stairs, and voila: we were at the open bar. High on the thrill of crashing a big industry party — Stetson was so excited he kissed me on the cheek — his friend and my friend also hit it off. After we drank as much free booze as we felt capable of, we met them at their condo to got hot tubbing, and resulting in my one and only experience of making out in a hot tub. When we got out and I put on the Stanford sweatshirt I’d brought along, Stetson pulled me in for another kiss and said, “You little brainiac!” But my friend was the one who realized that he meant it facetiously, pointing out, “No, she actually went to Stanford.” And that ended up being the first time that someone clearly lost interest in me the moment they found out I was smart.

I did get in one nice day of skiing — a good break from the shmoozing, because conditions were terrific and everyone was at the festival instead of on the mountain — and did go to a couple of screenings. On the standby ticket line for The Myth of Fingerprints, I started talking to a guy who ended up being an executive at Paramount. Despite what must have been a truly awful pitch because I was still years away from learning to write a logline, he gave me his card and agreed to read my script. It wasn’t quite a Hollywood ending, but I had to admit that Sundance had pretty much checked any and all of the boxes — films, partying, networking, skiing, hot guy make-out — I’d had for the week.

But even the most fun festivals must end and send us back to our everyday, our hot-tub-free lives. I never saw Stetson Boy again, although my friend did go on enough dates with his pal to provide me with the intel, “Those guys do a lot of coke.” But the following January, I did end up going out with — nope, not with the rabbi’s son (yes, I know you thought that sounded like a meet-cute but my life has stubbornly resisted any and all rom-com finales and we were wholly uninterested in each other), but with his friend, the hot film school guy. After an industry New Years Eve party, we had such amazing chemistry — the kind that only happens when you’re both wasted and one of you is sporting a short dress and a fantastic tan from a family holiday trip to the DR — that he called my house at 3 am and woke up my roommates to ask me out. Unfortunately, however, on that date we were both entirely sober, plus he was half an hour late for the movie we were supposed to see together, leading us to spend the rest of the night walking around trying to find another screening of Titanic (yes, another perfect rom-com setup gone to shit), as I slowly learned that men that hot don’t have to learn any conversational skills. One real love story did come out of that Sundance trip though: one of the two Women In Search of Hot Dudes in our house did end up hooking up with one our film’s EPs, a woman to whom she has now been married for nearly 25 years.

I send the Paramount exec my script after I got home, and spoke with him about a month later. It was a very terse phone call in which he sounded extremely bored by my story of four 20-something women struggling to get ahead in New York City. I mean, as a studio white guy in the 90s of course he was, nobody in the script had gotten raped or shot or driven off the edge of the Grand Canyon, but I can also admit that it probably took me another three features before I was really capable of writing anything good.

2026 is the last year that Sundance is being held in Park City before it moves to Boulder, CO., and as I follow news of the festival’s wrap-up, it’s hard not to wish I’d made it there just one more time before that happened. On the other hand, however, Sundance itself could probably use a fresh start. It probably won’t ever go back to being that place where an unknown director could just apply out of the blue and set their career in motion purely because they made a good film. These days, our industry is about as far as it’s ever been from a place where a non-nepo-baby with no track record and no connections can catch a break. But maybe in Boulder, before they have things like security fully worked out, some young 20-something will be able to figure out how to crash a big industry party, and once they’re in, a hot guy will give her (or him, or them) a kiss on the cheek.

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