Students jump into ‘filmmaker’s Disneyland’

LMU’s film students may be blessed with immediate access to Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t connect to filmmakers when outside of Los Angeles. Five undergraduate students in the School of Film and Television discovered this when they spent four days at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah at the end of January.

While it’s become a tradition in School of Film and Television (SFTV) for graduate students and recent alumni to accompany the dean to Sundance, this is the first year that undergraduate students have attended the festival with the school trip. Interim dean Stephen Duncan said that a group of undergraduates approached him with a proposal to attend the festival and he gave them a grant from one of the dean’s funds to help pay for the trip.

When the students arrived at the festival they were surprised by how easily they were able to get into films they wanted to see.

“We came with no tickets, but we got into world premieres,” senior screenwriting major Anna White said.

Each student attended three to six film screenings. Most of them had never been to a film festival before. “We started with the big one,” junior production major Sean Cronin said, but they quickly found ways to get tickets for the movies they wanted to see, sometimes getting lucky in waiting list lines and sometimes finding festival volunteers who were willing to sell some of their tickets.

“And if we didn’t get into one, we’d get into something else,” Cronin said.
The students also had the opportunity to participate in Q&A sessions with the filmmakers after the screenings.

“The Q&As are a good opportunity for the audience to ask questions [of the filmmakers], and at the end there’s often the opportunity to go up and meet them, but you have to be aggressive and put yourself up front,” Duncan said.

White asked the actors and filmmakers questions at four of the six screenings she went to.
“There’s only a certain amount of time for questions, only 10 to 15 questions, and you get nervous, but you just have to find the courage to ask,” White said.

Senior screenwriting major Rod Lundgren recalled that once a Q&A session started, “everyone’s hands jut up really fast.”

White asked questions of such people as director Jake Scott at a screening of “Welcome to the Rileys” and Ben Affleck at a screening of “The Company Men,” though she said that she sometimes “wouldn’t even really hear the answer,” but “I was so excited to just be talking to them.”

Though the film majors had attended many screenings with Q&As in SFTV, they explained that there were differences between those within a film school and those at a film festival. Cronin said that when filmmakers speak at SFTV, they have the tendency to talk down to the audience since it’s composed of students, while at the film festival, they’re surrounded by their peers.

With such an influx of visitors coming into Park City of about 8,000, the whole town does become a festival for the occasion every year. Cronin said, “There’s always a film playing and you see celebrities walking down the street.” The group saw Samuel L. Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones and Joan Rivers while walking on Main Street and coming out of premieres.

“There’s a community feel,” White said. “The entire town – it’s all Sundance, all the time! It’s a filmmaker’s Disneyland.”

Duncan said, “It’s called a film festival, but it’s really a microcosm of Hollywood. There’s an opportunity to see films not released yet, right there in the middle of a selling frenzy.”
Even though the town swells with producers, agents and publicists, plenty of the visitors are simply members of the general population there to see movies, as Cronin, Lundgren and White were. The group was constantly running into other festival attendees eager to discuss the films.

“Everyone was so nice and always wanted to talk and swap stories,” White said.
Lundgren said, “Even the people there to go skiing go to the films.”

While in Park City, the group also found time for shopping and a Joan Jett concert (which was performed in conjecture with the festival’s screening of “The Runaways”). However, they mostly left feeling enthused about moviemaking.

“[I left the festival] so ready to go film my own independent film,” Lundgren said.
Cronin said, “It was just really inspiring to see the filmmakers talk so passionately. I want to be up there someday, with people asking me questions about my own film.”

Cronin, Lundgren and White all plan to attend the festival again next year.
“I don’t know why we’ve never gone before, and now we want to go every year,” Cronin said.

They are also considering volunteering at the festival, performing such duties as ushering and selling tickets. Duncan commented that volunteers are “right there in the mix of it all,” and “get to see how the festival is run.”

Duncan, despite his temporary position as interim dean, is working to set up practices of continuing to send students to Sundance, as well as other festivals and conventions. Duncan also hopes to have at least one member of SFTV’s “Top Recent Graduates” program attend the festival each year.