Sean P. Means: What I’ll miss about the Sundance Film Festival, and what I won’t

The Sundance Film Festival’s Utah era, after more than four decades, is nearly over.

This weekend, the last screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City will play out. After that, an event whose history predates the existence of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute will pack up and head east to Boulder, Colorado, for 2027 and beyond.

This year’s Sundance has been my 35th festival, and likely my last. My job has been to recount the festival’s moments and madness to the readers of The Salt Lake Tribune. I expect most Utahns — and I count myself as one of them — will have much less interest in an event that isn’t staying here.

People have been asking me for the last month what I’ll miss. Since I’ve been covering the festival for more than half my life, I can’t pin it down to one thing. So I wrote a list of what I’ll miss and a few things I won’t.

• I’ll miss the feeling of anticipation in early December, when programmers announce the slate of films they’ve chosen. It’s the first time we get to consider what actors will be coming to promote their films, what notable people will be the subject of documentaries, and what unique voices might emerge as the next wave of moviemaking.

• I’ll miss getting in line for that first screening, at the Eccles or the Park City Library or The Ray, knowing exactly as much about the movie as everyone else in the theater — and, like other longtime festival attendees, having faith that we’re about to see something special.

• I won’t miss the walk up the incline on Old Main, especially when the cold air stabs the inside of your lungs. I was already acclimated to the altitude and it was a pain; I truly felt sorry for the people who came to Utah from sea level every year.

• I already miss seeing movies in makeshift theaters that for the rest of the year were a tennis complex, a hotel conference room and a synagogue. Those temporary theaters gave Sundance an aura of “Brigadoon,” a mythic place that only existed for a few days out of the year.

• I’ll miss the conversations I have with others — in the theater lines, at the shuttle stops, on the buses, getting into parties — about what movies we’ve liked.

• I’ll miss the random encounters on the shuttle buses, particularly going to the day’s first screenings. Once, I got chatting with Faye Dunaway on a mostly empty bus — and I left knowing that no one I’d tell would believe me. (This is before selfies and “pics or it didn’t happen” became so ubiquitous.)

• But I won’t miss the shuttle buses system — especially after this year, after being lied to by bad signage about what routes go where. Saying the Redstone shuttle stop is “just across the street” from the Kimball Junction Transit Center is an egregious understatement, since the two stops are separated by a state highway and, according to my FitBit, a half-mile walk.

• I’ll miss talking to filmmakers on red carpet lines. I have loved being able to engage, even for a couple of minutes at a time, with people passionate about their movies and eager to share them with the world.

• I won’t miss everything else about red carpet lines — the chaos, the standing for hours, and the journalists holding up their cellphones and shooting video as they ask inane questions their editors have told them the internet wants to know. (For the record, Tessa Thompson’s favorite movie snack is popcorn, which she acknowledged is “pretty basic.”)

• I’ll miss the soup and sandwiches they sell at the Park City Library, and I’ll miss the fact that buying concessions at that theater would support a local nonprofit, the Park City Film Series.

• I won’t miss having to wolf down pizza in the Eccles Theatre lobby, because the management wouldn’t allow any concessions aside from water bottles into the auditorium.

• I’ll miss meeting and befriending some of the world’s best film journalists and critics. For people who write about movies, Sundance is summer camp in the winter, where you reconnect with the same people year after year.

• I’ll miss sitting in the far back row of the Eccles Theatre, in the left-side corner as you entered the auditorium. That’s where Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic from the Chicago Sun-Times and half of “Siskel & Ebert,” would sit when he attended. He said it gave him a clear view of the screen and allowed a quick getaway when the lights came up.

Roger was sitting there when I mustered my courage to introduce myself, and was shocked that he already knew my name from my byline. I was even more shocked over how for years later (until 2010, when medical problems robbed him of speech), he would talk with me about movies as a colleague.

• I won’t miss the self-importance of some people who come to Park City. One of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard at Sundance involves a movie journalist I knew, familiar within the industry but not outside it, who left a cowboy hat at a Park City hotel in 2008 and thought that gesture was universally understood as a sign that he intended to come back there next year. This person neglected to reserve a room until it was too late, and expressed surprise that the hotel didn’t understand the hat’s clear message.

• I won’t miss the memories of Harvey Weinstein, the indie-film mogul who bullied people for decades and is accused of sexually assaulting or harassing dozens of women — including at least three while in Park City. I also won’t miss the people in the industry who knew about allegations against Weinstein for years and did nothing.

• I already miss watching movies in the Egyptian Theatre, a wondrous jewel box that sat out this year’s festival. My wife and I were there for the premiere of “The Blair Witch Project,” and the scary vibe continued as we walked back to our condo in the dark Utah night.

• I’ll miss how Utah moviegoers became, through years of practice, the most engaged and energized audience a new filmmaker could hope to have. People who know this industry will say the Salt Lake City screenings were the best shows during Sundance, because they served as a test audience for a movie’s general release. If you could make it there, as a different city’s song goes, you could make it anywhere.

• I won’t miss the FOMO, the fear of missing out, that defined the Sundance experience. It required an act of will to remember that wherever you were, something very cool was going to happen, and you might miss it if you’re stewing about the six other cool things happening at the same time.

• I’ll miss the thrill of discovering new movies from first-time directors, people who would go on to become the biggest filmmakers working today — names like Ryan Coogler, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Chloe Zhao, John Cameron Mitchell, the Coen brothers, the Duplass brothers, Jared and Jerusha Hess, Miranda July, Robert Rodriguez and countless others.

• I miss Robert Redford, who created the Sundance Institute and got this whole thing rolling. When Bob died in September, I wondered how his spirit, his idea of opening up the world to a vast number of independent storytellers, would continue on without him. I still wonder, though I have confidence in the people tasked with carrying his banner.

• I’ll miss being a regular part of this crazy event. The Sundance Film Festival was true to its Utah roots, a product of serendipity as much as planning, something that could never be tamed or contained. How will Sundance do as it’s transplanted to new soil? I’ll miss the opportunity to find out up close.

Note to readers • Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune’s deputy enterprise editor, was the paper’s movie critic from 1993 to 2018. He has covered every Sundance Film Festival since 1992.