The morning after Peter Sollett flew back to New York from the Sundance Film Festival, the buzzing of his pager woke him at 6. A production company wanted him to install a film editing computer system, something Sollett has been doing to pay the bills.
The next day, he got a call of an entirely different sort: a programmer at a film festival in Newport Beach, Calif., wanted to know whether Sollett’s short film, which had made its premiere at Sundance, could be shown at the Newport Beach festival.
“It’s just a surprise,” said Sollett, a bit flustered as he spoke with a reporter minutes after hanging up the telephone. “They said they saw my film at Sundance and now it’s an official selection at their festival, even though I didn’t enter it.”
For Sollett, 24, and several other Sundance prize winners living in New York City, the heady aftermath of the film festival has meant reconciling their former lifestyle with a newfound semi-celebrity. Since the final frame flickered in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 30, several of the filmmakers have been flooded with faxes, e-mail messages and congratulatory telephone calls. The attention has been welcome, even if it has deprived the filmmakers of personal and creative time.
This year, 50 New York filmmakers showed their works at Sundance, up from 38 in 1999. They swept most of the top awards, including the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize (shared by Karyn Kusama for “Girlfight” and Kenneth Lonergan for “You Can Count on Me”); the Audience Award for documentary film (Marc Singer’s “Dark Days”); the Audience Award for dramatic film (Raymond DeFelitta’s “Two Family House”); and the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking (Sollett’s “Five Feet High and Rising”).
The strong showing reinforced New York’s reputation as the center of American independent filmmaking, an image spawned by cinematic mavericks like John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee.
“These works are from diverse voices in New York,” said John Cooper, an associate director of programming at Sundance. “That’s why they’re thrilling to watch. There are still stories out there, stories that need to be told.”
Cooper also attributed much of the popularity of this year’s New York films to the strength of the acting and the fact that the city “always looks great on film.”
Sollett, for example, shot much of his half-hour film on the Lower East Side and around the East Village apartment that he shares with Eva Vives, his girlfriend and filmmaking partner. Sollett staged scenes with lovesick teenagers on his fire escape and in the alleyway beneath it.
Sollett has yet to recoup any of the $15,000 that he spent making his film, most of it through credit cards (“the 17.9 percent APR film financing plan,” as he put it). But at a recent French short film festival, he began to see some results from the Sundance buzz. European television stations like Canal + and Channel Four talked of buying screening rights, he said, and festival programmers from Brazil to South Korea expressed interest in showing it.
So far, Sollett has not signed anything. He has kept his day job–the other day, he delivered four editing systems. He said that as long as he has to pay rent, he will keep answering his clients’ pages, and writing his next film in his off hours.
“That whole idea that your film plays at Sundance and you make it, that’s gone now,” Vives said. “So much of the hype is irrational.”
But for Karyn Kusama, 30, who shared the Grand Jury Prize, the aftermath has been extraordinary. While short films like Sollett’s rarely get major distribution, Screen Gems snapped up the feature film Kusama wrote and directed, “Girlfight,” for $3 million. Until her ship came in, Kusama worked as a director’s assistant for five years.
“My whole life has changed in that I don’t have to consider taking a small job or a big job that consumes a lot of my time,” she said.
Kusama has been spending some of that time researching her next film at public libraries and art museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection. When writing, she said, she prefers to work in her shared house in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, where she types her scripts on an old IBM computer (an upgrade is on the way, thanks to the financial windfall).
But the deluge of telephone calls and meetings in the last month has eaten into her personal time, Kusama said. For one thing, she finds she lacks the time to box at her gym, where she trained up to three days a week while researching “Girlfight,” the story of a young woman who achieves catharsis through boxing.
Even before Sundance, Kenneth Lonergan, who shared the Grand Jury Prize with Kusama, had shuttled for years between Los Angeles and New York, where he lives in the West Village. Lonergan, 37, was already an established playwright and professional screenwriter. Until Sundance, his plays brought critical acclaim and his movie scripts provided most of his income.
But after his prize for writing and directing “You Can Count on Me,” Lonergan said, studio executives have asked him to consider directing serious dramatic projects. He had been pigeonholed in comedy after writing 1999’s “Analyze This,” although the sale of that screenplay in 1994 allowed him to write full time.
Meanwhile, Lonergan has eagerly dived back into the theater. He has spent the last two weeks at rehearsals for his new play, “The Waverly Gallery,” which is scheduled to open in March at the Promenade Theater. Even more than on a film set, he said, there is a unique energy that comes from being in a theater: the curtains, the red chairs, the creaking of footsteps on a wooden stage.
“I love almost everything about working in the theater,” Lonergan said. “I love the movie, the fact that it exists, but when I go into a theater and backstage, there’s something so charming about it.”
But Lonergan said the rehearsals, coupled with the attention after Sundance, had made it harder to write. Before the hype, he would roll out of bed, eat breakfast and start typing away on a laptop in his bedroom. In the last month, he said, the ringing phone has forced him to consider renting an office.
Still, Lonergan does not want to complain too much. “I know pretty well this -stuff lasts for five minutes,” he said, “so I’m perfectly willing to enjoy it while it lasts.”
