THE GOLD STANDARD
“Get Out” broke out at last year’s Sundance. This year’s crop includes “Lizzie,” at left.
Last year, after the not-so-secret midnight Sundance screening of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” the film’s team took an Uber back to Peele’s Park City, Utah, hotel room, where they ordered room service and stayed up until dawn reading the over-the-top reactions to the movie on social media. “The energy in that theater was so incredible,” producer Sean McKittrick remembers. “Everybody was just giddy to be there and you could feel the audience engaging in the material, exploding at all the right moments. I’ll never forget it.”
McKittrick will also never shake the 2001 Sundance premiere of another one of his films, “Donnie Darko.” That one didn’t go quite as well. The film was a hot acquisition title — until Harvey Weinstein pulled up in a motorcade of Range Rovers wearing a “Donnie Darko” crew hat.
“Everybody left, assuming he had bought the movie,” McKittrick remembers. Weinstein hadn’t. And the response to the movie’s intriguing blend of sci-fi, horror and dark comedy was decidedly mixed.
“People didn’t know what to make of it,” McKittrick says. “You remember that Entertainment Weekly buzzmeter? It was an arrow straight down.”
With its mix of mostly unproven filmmakers and daring material, the Sundance Film Festival is a crapshoot. No one on the “Get Out” team figured the movie would go on to become an Oscar contender for best picture. And the same could be said for Sundance movies — “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Precious,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” among them — that did go on to earn nominations.
So look at this list of 2018 Sundance titles knowing that we might be talking about a couple of them a year from now. And a couple of them might disappear the weekend after they arrive in theaters.