Weinstein at Sundance

For better or worse, it is Weinstein, not Redford, who embodies the true spirit of Sundance. Back when the festival began in 1981, the definition of an ‘independent film’ was pretty straightforward. It meant a picture that wasn’t funded or distributed by one of the big Hollywood studios. Typically, an ‘independent film’ would be a low-budget feature starring non-name actors and which didn’t have any big commercial ambitions.
Nowadays, thanks to Weinstein, it’s primarily a marketing term, a way of branding a film as edgy and artistic in the hope that it will find favour with upmarket audiences. Take Pulp Fiction, for instance, the most famous ‘independent film’ of the 1990s. While it was made by Miramax, a company that was then run by Harvey and his brother, it was actually financed by Disney, which acquired Miramax in 1993.
After the box office success of Pulp Fiction, the other studios decided that they, too, wanted to produce ‘independent films’ and some of the biggest companies in the marketplace today — Working Title, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage — are wholly owned subsidiaries of the six major studios. Not only do independent features cost less to produce than a typical studio picture, which means that the successful ones are more profitable, they are also more likely to garner awards, thereby reassuring the studio brass that they’re not simply in the business to make money.
So where does Sundance fit into this picture? One of its functions is to give these studio-financed, low-budget features the imprimatur of authenticity. It is, after all, the world’s leading independent film festival, so what better way of branding your picture ‘independent’ than opening it at Sundance? This year, for instance, several of the movies that had their world premieres at the festival were entirely funded by the big Hollywood studios.