If this is the gateway to Hollywood fame, did somebody hijack the navigator?

The Sundance Film Festival's Santa Monica offices look as low-budget as many of the independent movies flying through the doors. A lurching elevator that might be condemned in Cuba unloads visitors into a hallway that passes for a lobby.

In one of the frenzied weeks leading up to Thursday's festival opening, programming director Geoffrey Gilmore holds a meeting in a nearly furniture-free room because somebody seized his office in a gotta-have-a-VCR coup. As his staff sorts through videotapes submitted for the 1997 festival, it draws up indexes of tiresome trends, taping lists to the wall: films with prostitutes, films with strippers, filmmakers as protagonists. Some movies find a spot on all three tallies, and new entries turn up so frequently the count is terminated after a week.

For all the playful behavior and tattered furnishings at the edges, there is serious, undeniable power at the core--which is why Hollywood is poised to descend this week on Park City, Utah. Gilmore and his committee's selections represent the independent film equivalent of the Heisman Trophy: instant elevation into the vanguard, a tacit prediction of scoring in the pros.

"I've always maintained that Sundance made us. They're kingmakers," says Kevin Smith, whose ultra-low-budget "Clerks" debuted in Park City in 1994. "When I came to Sundance, I was a wage slave. And then, 24 hours later, I had a filmmaking career."

The festival showcases the best collection of American films made outside the studio system, an array of often provocative, impressive works. But Sundance's rapid emergence as the nation's most important film festival and marketplace threatens to overrun its organizers. A record 597 films (up from 250 in 1994) were submitted for the 18 dramatic competition and 22 American Spectrum slots.

Given those Ralph Nader-for-president odds, it's not surprising that acquisitions executives look at the competition list as if it were the next John Grisham manuscript, for somewhere in that bunch may lurk another "Brothers McMullen," "sex, lies, and videotape" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse," all competition alumni.

Sundance has also become one of the best launching pads for sophisticated art films playing out of competition, and "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Shine" and "The Usual Suspects" all premiered in Park City. A few movie people now argue that Sundance rivals the Cannes Film Festival reel for reel.