Everyone knows that talk is cheap. Yesterday, the chatter was so vociferous that the director of Sundance had to step in and defend the festival's decision to include two films starring Kristen Stewart.Today, it's Team 411 (@KStew411) who has a thing or two to say about the matter.
Every January Hollywood descends on Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival and Hollywood and independent filmmaking rub elbows up and down Main Street for ten days. I love film festivals, especially ones like Sundance that are also markets for distributors to pick up films for release. Without festivals like this we would never see movies like Napoleon Dynamite or Frozen River. And Sundance is especially unique for its combination of genuine independent filmmaking (the festival being in a symbiotic relationship with Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute) and straight up Hollywood excess. Park City will be overrun with agents, studio reps, paparazzi, and celebrities. This year’s star roster includes James Franco, Ryan Gosling, the Affleck brothers, Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, James Gandolfini—you get the idea. Of course there are those who get bent out of shape over the “crass intrusion of Hollywood” in the form of these celebs and agents et al. I would argue without their influence Sundance would have died long ago. Sundance is what it is—both a celebration of independent filmmaking and Hollywood success.
This year everyone is picking on Kristen Stewart, who has rocketed to uber-fame courtesy the Twilight Saga franchise. There’s vocal protest over her having two films at Sundance 2010--Joan Jett biopic The Runaways and Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays a teenage stripper/prostitute opposite James Gandolfini and fellow Sundance regular Melissa Leo as a grieving couple. In 2008, Kristen had two films at Sundance (The Yellow Handkerchief and What Just Happened) and no one said a word. No one cared about her screening a movie back in 2004 (Speak) or even last year when, already famous thanks to Twilight, she showed to support Adventureland. It happens every year—some celebrity is singled out as being “anti the Sundance ideal,” it’s just ironic that this year they’ve picked an actress who has made several previous trips to the festival and, in spite of her recent success, is still referred to as an indie actress.
Kristen makes an easy target. Ever since Sundance announced their lineup her two entries have been among the most anticipated films of the festival. Welcome to the Rileys is one of the most-screened movies of the whole festival. And The Runaways is causing all kinds of ruckus, largely thanks to Kristen’s--and costar Dakota Fanning’s--high profile, but also aided by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, who will be at the festival and playing a concert the night before the movie’s premiere at Harry O’s in Park City. The Runaways premiere will be a full-on media circus, with Welcome to the Rileys being almost just as mad. It is, after all, the “Bella stripper movie.”
Which brings us to the crux of the problem. They’re not rejecting Kristen Stewart as unworthy of Sundance--they’re rejecting Bella. The indie scenesters are holding Twilight against KStew. (Do they hold Blade Trinity against Parker Posey?) This is the eternal struggle of Sundance: indie vs. Hollywood. It’s the debate that will rage throughout Park City over the next ten days, how big of a role should the Hollywood machine play in a film festival dedicated to finding a nurturing outsider talent without “studio interference”. Many dedicated festival goers despise the machine’s presence at Sundance and bemoan what they perceive as the cheapening of the festival because of it. Right now, Kristen embodies that dichotomy. She’s an established indie actress who is also the face of a major Hollywood franchise.
What Kristen Stewart is doing this year is shining a light on the uneasy partnership between independent and mainstream filmmaking. People like to talk about this as an “us versus them” situation, but the reality is the line distinguishing the two is increasingly obscured. Director Christopher Nolan first broke out with the Sundance hit Memento in 2000 and today he is best known as the chief of the rebooted Batman franchise. More recently, the director of Sundance 2009 sleeper hit (500) Days of Summer, Mark Webb, just signed on to helm the Spider Man reboot. Actors cross over even more than directors. Also attending Sundance this year is James Franco, a veteran of the Spider Man films and he of the soap opera stint. He’s starring in another of the festival’s most-anticipated films, Howl. Ben Affleck, one of the most over-exposed celebrities in recent memory, will be at the festival with The Company Men. And Josh Radnor, star of the television show How I Met Your Mother, is making his directorial debut with happythankyoumoreplease, in which he also stars.
Yet KStew is taking all the heat. She embodies the ultimate destruction of the “us-and-them” dichotomy. She proves that both independent and mainstream filmmaking can coexist in one career. And she does it with an unapologetic attitude that simultaneously tells Hollywood she won’t forsake her indie roots and tells the indie scene she won’t ignore or apologize for mainstream opportunities. Indie scenesters often resent Hollywood for seemingly taking away their top talent, and Hollywood has always kind of treated indies as second-class movie citizens. That sort of pigeonholing gets in the way of what’s most important: the quest for good movies. At the end of the day, it’s not how the movie got made, but whether or not it’s any good that matters.
Thoughts?
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