"On Jan. 25, The New York Times ran what was a fairly glum take on the 2009 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. There, mixed in among various Chicken Little-isms, reporter Michael Cieply quotes filmmaker Joe Swanberg, director of Alexander the Last, as saying, "I've come to realize that my festival run is my theatrical run." Cieply's use of Swanberg is meant as a reinforcement – a personification of the woe afflicting his picture of things as they stand. And it's in that spirit, as he turns from Swanberg to continue his article, that Cieply offers the following bridge: "If Sundance was a lesson in diminished expectations for most ...." He doesn't stop to wonder if his implication – that every filmmaker whose work misses a theatrical run is some poor sap suffering from "diminished expectations" – is a fair one.
For the record, Chris Hyams' Sundance was not as gloomy as the one portrayed in the pages of The New York Times. On the Friday the festival opened, Hyams' Austin-based B-Side Entertainment – which was already busy providing a select group of filmmakers with some pretty savvy public-relations help and the cinema-nerd world at large with a free, easy-to-use Web-based interface for film festivals – announced that it would receive $4.25 million to help fund a full-on play for a slice of the feature-film distribution world. For Hyams and B-Side (http://www.bside.com/), this fresh infusion of cash did indeed mark a sort of arrival. But, more to the point, it also signaled a further business-world endorsement of Hyams' approach to distributing films – one that would seem to totally recast Swanberg's comments.'
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http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:744086
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