Behind the Scenes at the Sundance Labs
Building a better screenwriter
When the Screenwriters Lab is over, the international Fellows get lodging at the festival, while the rest get $400 and nine tickets each to the World Cinema section, widely considered to be one of the festival’s strongest. Such is the protective atmosphere at the Lab that more than one Fellow feels nervous about moving into such a busy public environment. “The festival’s a zoo,” says Casey, “while here I’m falling into intimate relationships with the mentors and the Fellows. I’m intimidated in a good way. I can tell already that I prefer this to that.”
Two months after I leave the Institute, I contact several of the Fellows to see how their scripts are coming along and how they feel about their time at the resort. I get back a few dutiful messages about how valuable and supportive the experience was. From Casey, I receive a long, thoughtful e-mail. “I love the new draft,” he writes. “Love, love, love it. Ten times more than the original. The lab was extremely helpful in the rewriting process. I won’t lie, though — when I returned to L.A., my head was spinning and I didn’t know where to start. It took me about two weeks to actually get my head into a space where I could begin writing again. I think this was mostly caused by two things: one, the sheer amount of notes that I’d assembled from my lab mentors was so huge, and offered so many different directions to take the script, that I had to sort through every one and find a direction that I felt was best for the project. The second thing that had me spooked was anxiety. Though I’ve done rewrites before, I’d never done them like this. I’d never known how to. And obviously, while getting into the Sundance Labs was hard enough, showing these people that I was listening — that I could use the tools they’d offered, and bring Poletown to another level — that’s an entirely different type of pressure.”
Once he’d worked through the notes and shaken off his hesitation, Casey goes on to say, the next draft began to pour out of him. “It was surreal, because I was making some pretty big changes to the script, and normally, I’m squeamish about these things,” he writes. “But it felt great. I loved every change I made. I suppose that says a lot about the folks at Sundance. I remember saying to you in Utah that it felt a lot like joining a family. Even though the Lab is over, it still feels the same way. It’s a gift. And it’s continuously humbling.”
Just humbling enough, and no more. Casey’s advisers read his revisions and gave him more notes, and in March he submitted his next draft. In April, he learned that, along with six other Fellows from the January Lab, he would be going to the Directors Lab in June.
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