It's considered the Sundance Film Festival's ticket to stardom. But for any number of its past winners, nabbing the festival's Grand Jury Prize has been more like a kiss of death.
The Sundance Film Festival opens today, and over the next 10 days, thousands of studio executives, talent agents, film buyers and movie buffs will pack into nine Park City, Utah, movie theaters in search of the hottest new films and filmmakers. The festival will culminate in a Jan. 28 awards ceremony to honor the festival's best dramatic and nonfiction films.
For all the buildup, the Grand Jury Prize contenders might understandably wonder whether they would be better off going home empty-handed.
It took one winning director, Wendell B. Harris Jr., eight years to make another movie -- a film about UFOs that went almost completely unseen -- after his "Chameleon Street" collected Sundance's Grand Jury Prize in 1990. And Jennie Livingston, who took the Grand Jury Prize for the documentary "Paris Is Burning" in 1991, hasn't directed a feature-length film since.
The festival, celebrating its 25th year as a champion of independent cinema, has certainly helped launched the careers of several top directors (Steven Soderbergh, for one) and marked the debut of numerous hit films ("Napoleon Dynamite" and "The Blair Witch Project").
But over that time span, only a handful of Grand Jury Prize winners have parlayed their honors into fame and fortune: brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who have collaborated on many critical hits, including "Fargo" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," and Bryan Singer, who directed "The Usual Suspects" and the first two "X-Men" movies and is wrapping up "Superman Returns," one of the most anticipated films of the summer.
Far more common among the alumni is the tale of director Jill Godmilow. After her "Waiting for the Moon" shared the Grand Jury Prize in 1987, she tried to turn several Raymond Carver short stories into a feature film. Unable to raise the last $500,000, Godmilow left filmmaking to become an academic.
"I think I wasn't cut out for that game," said Godmilow, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame. "It was very exciting to win. And my mother has a picture of [Sundance founder] Robert Redford hugging me. But I couldn't translate [the win] into a life of waiting around, developing projects. I like making films, but that's not making films."
