AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

That Queasy Feeling at Sundance - BusinessWeek

Amid the excitement over 3D, high anxiety about how to hold on to paying customers

Archetypal Sundance moment: It is backstage after the screening of a hotly hyped film, and Reasonably Famous Producer is being directed toward a backdoor exit by Concerned Minder.

CM: (slightly anxious, motioning) Let’s go out this way. So you don’t get mobbed.

RFP: (quizzical, half-joking) But I want to be mobbed!

Clearly, it takes more than a writers’ strike and its attendant angst to squash the forces of ego and celebrity that animate this annual film festival, which every January swallows whole an entire mountain town in Utah, along with some surrounding acreage. This, even as Sundance vets said the strike kept some celebs away. But that’s not what makes the business guys’ guts go queasy. What does is this century’s dominant media narrative: an established medium’s struggles against a Web that makes its products remarkably available for free; the frantic search for a technological silver bullet. And that medium’s fervent wish that its intangibles—in this case, that near-mystical communion in a dark theater amid a throng of strangers—retain enough power to bind future customers to ways of old.

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