Usually when a student tells a professor that he’s
skipping class to watch some movies and go to a party, you
don’t expect the professor to be very impressed.
That is, unless your professor is UCLA film and television
directing professor Gyula Gazdag and the place you’re going
happens to be the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent
film festival in America.
“They will be able to make up the work anyway,” said
Gazdag. “It’s a learning experience about how the
industry works so it’s important for them to go to
it.”
In fact, Gazdag himself is going, but only for one day. As an
influential Hungarian filmmaker, Gazdag is moderating a panel
discussion on foreign film, which will include directors from
Spain, Iceland, France and Brazil.
When his work is done and the sun sets, Gazdag will join his
fellow UCLA film folk for a party that has become a Sundance
tradition. It’s his first year at the party even though he
suggested the idea for such an annual event a few years ago.
“Originally, I thought that the party was a really
important thing to do, and I was one of the initiators of the idea
of the party,” Gazdag said. “Since then, thank God, it
became a tradition.”
Beside Gazdag, this year’s party is being hosted by Robert
Rosen, dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, Television and
Digital Media, and Geoffrey Gilmore an alumnus from 1979. The
festivities will take place at Cafe Terigo on Park City’s
Main Street on Jan. 22.
“It’s a low key, but very popular event, because it
is not fancy,” said Dagmar Spira, UCLA’s film and
television event manager, who is organizing this year’s
party. “Everybody is actually welcome to come in. Of course
we are mostly interested in having our alumni there and so on. The
dean usually climbs up on a chair, because it’s so crowded
and gives a speech.”
Sundance is no longer the small independent film festival Robert
Redford founded years ago, but rather it has become another cog in
the machine of Hollywood hype-mongers. One of the reasons the UCLA
party gets so crowded is that it’s known around the festival
as a less formal, more grassroots film-oriented outing.
In a column about the 2000 festival and its intense
commercialization, Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt,
called the UCLA party a “glimpse of the more convivial and
collegial Sundance of old.” The party is, as Spira identified
it, less “fancy.” And it pulls this off with a specific
UCLA touch, from the names on the invitation to the wine
served.
“There’s some of (Francis Ford) Coppola’s wine
(served). He donates the wine. So, he’s there in
spirit,” said Abigail Severance, a fourth-year film student
who attended last year’s festival and party.
Coppola, perhaps UCLA Film school’s most famous and lauded
graduate, has been invited to this year’s party, but it is
not known if he’s going to attend, according to Spira.
However, his potential successors will be there in full force
whether they’re in competition or not.
“It’s nice that all the alumni that have films come
up there, and actual students (come too),” Gazdag said.
“There are always quite a few students who go up to the
festival just to get acquainted with the festival. They have to
learn what a festival is like, how to get in the
festival.”
According to Gazdag, however, in the film community, the
difference between students and seasoned veterans isn’t
necessarily easy to see.
“There’s a blurry line between students and
professors,” he said. “There’s this whole social
element to filmmaking.”
And according to those who have been through the film world
gauntlet, the UCLA party taps into something pure.
“It doesn’t feel like a business place,”
Severance said. “Last year, it felt like a celebration of the
filmmakers, which was really nice. It felt like the school was
proud of us and proud to be connected to us and felt responsible
for our successes on some level. That was a good
feeling.”