Behind the Scenes at the Sundance Labs

Later, I sit in on a gentlemanly but brisk story conference between Hancock and Moon Molson, a Harlem-based African-American Fellow working on a script for a character-based, hip-hop neo-noir set in New Jersey. Hancock, who has an exhaustive knowledge of 1970s film and an intelligent feel for character (“People reveal themselves by the lies they tell,” he tells Molson), gently picks his protegé’s screenplay apart and offers suggestions for improvements. Molson listens, takes a few notes, looks brave. Again and again I hear the phrase “ We want people to succeed,” which is not nothing in an industry where, as Hancock says, “there’s so much schadenfreude that you can find someone who’ll trash whatever you do.”

But neither are the one-on-one conferences an exercise in hand-holding. “My script was really raw,” says Molson, who studied with Mira Nair and Tom Kalin at Columbia Film School and whose thesis short, Pop Foul (which screened at Sundance), won him the coveted call from the Lab. “Here, as opposed to film school, there’s this group of professional writers, and they really know how to get inside your script to make it better. I’m getting help with developing my subplot and making it fit organically with the main plot, and comment on it. They don’t completely break us down and make us cry, but we do come out with a lot of tools and concrete ideas to work on.” Molson tells me that he enjoys the sense of community at the Lab. “There’s something about talking to other writers about writing, especially those who are successful, that makes you feel normal, legitimizes the fact that you sit in a room by yourself, talking to yourself,” he says. “These guys do it too, and they make a living out of it.”

Moon Molson takes notes from adviser Malia Scotch Marmo.

Gregory Bojorquez

Ready for his close-up: Sundance Fellow Dan Casey

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• Robert Redford
• Dan Casey
• Scott Frank
• Michelle Satter
• Short Films

Satter really wants the Lab scripts to be made into movies, but that isn’t the immediate purpose. On the contrary, she says, the guiding idea behind the program is to create a protective environment that’s free of external pressures and vested interests. Sundance will not produce or finance the films that come out of the Lab, though advisers and Fellows will stay in touch afterward, and some Fellows who continue on to the monthlong Directors Lab in June will benefit from a grants program funded by the Annenberg Foundation. If their films get produced with a budget of more than $1 million, the Institute asks for a “tiny” percentage of the budget, which it funnels back into supporting the Labs, otherwise funded by a combination of corporate and festival financing. The Institute has just added a new fellowship for producers, which, says Satter, has always been part of Redford’s dream — and has doubtless become a more urgent priority in a glutted market of independent films whose profits have significantly dropped in the last few years. “We do care about the marketplace, and we want to turn out producers who are creatively and strategically skilled,” Satter says. Even the Screenwriters Lab skews more to aspiring writer-directors than pure writers (the ratio this year is two to one), because, as the punishing writers’ strike has demonstrated, the latter have far less power when it comes to controlling their work or seeing it through to commercial release. As former screenwriter Millard Kaufman, famous for being the co-creator of Mr. Magoo as well as for publishing his first novel at age 90, dryly puts it in his entertainingly savage memoir-cum-manual, Plots and Characters: A Screenwriter on Screenwriting, “The greatest part of being a writer is that most of your dreadful work will never see the light. No director in history can make such a claim.”

Gregory Bojorquez

(Click to enlarge)

Ready for his close-up: Sundance Fellow Dan Casey

Kevin Scanlon

(Click to enlarge)

Den mother: Sundance Institute Feature Film Program director Michelle Satter

Robert Redford flits in and out of the building, casual in jeans and sweater, and later in my stay I’m summoned to his aerie — a spare office with an enviably clear desk — to get the official story of how the Labs evolved. Established in the early 1980s alongside the Sundance festival as it expanded in scope and reach, the Labs grew, he says, out of a desire to salvage “story” and “truth” from the onslaught of special effects and the obsession with the youth market in mainstream movies. The Institute sprang from the need for a sense of community “free from smarmy pressures of the bottom line,” says Redford, who is courtly and serious and has clearly given this spiel many times. “If you could create a place that might be a bit idyllic and a little utopian, move it into the mountains rather than the city, take money and competition out of the picture and see if we can introduce consistently new voices into the marketplace, what’s the matter with that?” Nothing at all, though the bottom line is everywhere apparent at the festival these days, in the armies of studio execs bellowing into cell phones, the mushrooming corporate logos and celebrity swag stores that dot Main Street. And the earnest dramas that critics have given the usually disparaging sobriquet “Sundance movies” — not to mention those Redford himself has made — suggest an aesthetic that leans more to liberal middlebrow than to pioneering visions.