Sundance Institute

Robert Redford will visit Philadelphia on Friday to announce plans for a multiscreen Sundance Cinemas art house on 40th Street between Sansom and Locust, a spokesman for the actor, director, impresario and entrepreneur confirmed yesterday. After prolonged negotiations with the University of Pennsylvania, which is developing the commercial thoroughfare on the campus' western edge, Redford's new movie-theater company has signed a deal that would bring a six-to-eight-screen theater to University City.

LOS ANGELES - It's hard enough to get into the Sundance Film Festival - more than 10,000 features, documentaries and shorts were submitted for just a few dozen slots in this year's festival. But it's almost equally hard to leave the nation's top gathering for independent film with a distribution deal. Only a handful of Sundance titles receive a meaningful theatrical release. Determined to break that distribution bottleneck, the Sundance Institute on Wednesday launched an initiative that for the first time packages festival films under the Sundance name and offers them for simultaneous viewing on six of the Internet's biggest video platforms - Apple Inc.'s iTunes, Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix Inc., Google Inc.'s YouTube and Rainbow Media's SundanceNow.

If the University of Pennsylvania had not already been doing the hard part - creating two community-based elementary schools, developing accessible jobs for its neighbors and working to reinvent its urban campus as a livelier, safer place - getting Robert Redford to set up shop in West Philadelphia might appear just a theatrical stunt. But university president Judith Rodin earned the right to revel in reflected star power as she joined Mr. Redford recently in announcing his plans to build, with partner General Cinema, a funky Sundance Cinemas complex on Walnut Street near 40th Street.

The geeks had a word for films like Stacking. Two words, really: granola movie. They dubbed them thus because such films are wholesome, crunchy and extol values that are good for you. Know those TV ads for breakfast cereal where the homespun Wilford Brimley assures you that he spoons it because "it's the right thing to do"? That's the tone - avuncular and right-minded - aspired to by this kind of picture. You've endured granola movies. They're stories about regional Americana, often set on a farm, and more often set in the not-too-distant past.

Gresham's Law - the theory that bad money will drive good currency out of circulation - might apply to American independent movies. Lousy indie films seem to be driving intelligent ones out of distribution. Trouble is, the perpetrators are laudable in that they fund projects the studios would never touch, namely, movies where the character - not the actor - is the star. However honorable this mandate, many of the resulting films are tarnishing the indie reputation for maverick work.

Sundancefever. Happens every time Robert Redford comes to the University of Pennsylvania. Back in '98, the president and deans panted like fangirls. This time, undergrads are starstruck and stammering. "Mr. Redford?" gulps a quavering-voice female undergrad in Zellerbach Theatre where, on a recent October evening, a capacity crowd of nearly a thousand previewed the actor-director's Lions for Lambs. Afterward, they pitched softball questions. "Before all of us gathered here," the undergrad prefaces her query to the rakish actor up on stage, "I would like to say, you're a very sexy guy. " "And this is a very sexy school," says Redford, a ruggedly youthful septuagenarian, before gentling the conversation back to his film.

Sundancefever. Happens every time Robert Redford comes to the University of Pennsylvania. Back in '98, the president and deans panted like fangirls. This time, undergrads are starstruck and stammering. "Mr. Redford?" gulps a quavering-voice female undergrad in Zellerbach Theatre where, on a recent October evening, a capacity crowd of nearly a thousand previewed the actor-director's Lions for Lambs . Afterward, they pitched softball questions. "Before all of us gathered here," the undergrad prefaces her query to the rakish actor up on stage, "I would like to say, you're a very sexy guy. " "And this is a very sexy school," says Redford, a ruggedly youthful septuagenarian, before gentling the conversation back to his film.

In Hollywood, the cost of making movies is a subject much like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. When he signs on to star in a film, Robert Redford commands the kind of salary that can bloat a film budget in a hurry. But through the Sundance Institute in Utah and his other efforts, Redford probably has done more than any other major Hollywood figure to encourage independent writers and directors. One of the frustrations he and his proteges have encountered is that, while a film can be made for a fraction of the cost outside Hollywood, distribution and marketing require the payment of expensive agents, managers, lawyers and the like.

'It's Bob Redford calling," says Bob Redford - OK, Robert - from his office at the Sundance Channel in New York, where he has resumed the obligatory "hoo-hah" of a press junket after taking a weekend off, to kick around the city. "I just dove in and enjoyed New York like I used to years ago when I lived here," he reports happily. "It was great. " Redford is on the horn to talk up An Unfinished Life, the new Disney Miramax release that he stars in with Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez.

JoBeth Williams' father was an Irishman with a fine tenor voice whose hopes for a career in opera vanished when he could not summon the nerve to leave Houston and pursue his dream in Italy. He settled instead for a humdrum life as a salesman of baling wire and cable and drowned his frustrations in drink. Williams' eyes have a distant look when she recalls her Texas childhood in the '50s and the eruptions at home. "He never hit me or my mother," she said. "But he broke the furniture and put holes in the wall.

LOS ANGELES - It's hard enough to get into the Sundance Film Festival - more than 10,000 features, documentaries and shorts were submitted for just a few dozen slots in this year's festival. But it's almost equally hard to leave the nation's top gathering for independent film with a distribution deal. Only a handful of Sundance titles receive a meaningful theatrical release. Determined to break that distribution bottleneck, the Sundance Institute on Wednesday launched an initiative that for the first time packages festival films under the Sundance name and offers them for simultaneous viewing on six of the Internet's biggest video platforms - Apple Inc.'s iTunes, Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix Inc., Google Inc.'s YouTube and Rainbow Media's SundanceNow.

Sundancefever. Happens every time Robert Redford comes to the University of Pennsylvania. Back in '98, the president and deans panted like fangirls. This time, undergrads are starstruck and stammering. "Mr. Redford?" gulps a quavering-voice female undergrad in Zellerbach Theatre where, on a recent October evening, a capacity crowd of nearly a thousand previewed the actor-director's Lions for Lambs. Afterward, they pitched softball questions. "Before all of us gathered here," the undergrad prefaces her query to the rakish actor up on stage, "I would like to say, you're a very sexy guy. " "And this is a very sexy school," says Redford, a ruggedly youthful septuagenarian, before gentling the conversation back to his film.

Sundancefever. Happens every time Robert Redford comes to the University of Pennsylvania. Back in '98, the president and deans panted like fangirls. This time, undergrads are starstruck and stammering. "Mr. Redford?" gulps a quavering-voice female undergrad in Zellerbach Theatre where, on a recent October evening, a capacity crowd of nearly a thousand previewed the actor-director's Lions for Lambs . Afterward, they pitched softball questions. "Before all of us gathered here," the undergrad prefaces her query to the rakish actor up on stage, "I would like to say, you're a very sexy guy. " "And this is a very sexy school," says Redford, a ruggedly youthful septuagenarian, before gentling the conversation back to his film.

'It's Bob Redford calling," says Bob Redford - OK, Robert - from his office at the Sundance Channel in New York, where he has resumed the obligatory "hoo-hah" of a press junket after taking a weekend off, to kick around the city. "I just dove in and enjoyed New York like I used to years ago when I lived here," he reports happily. "It was great. " Redford is on the horn to talk up An Unfinished Life, the new Disney Miramax release that he stars in with Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez.

If the University of Pennsylvania had not already been doing the hard part - creating two community-based elementary schools, developing accessible jobs for its neighbors and working to reinvent its urban campus as a livelier, safer place - getting Robert Redford to set up shop in West Philadelphia might appear just a theatrical stunt. But university president Judith Rodin earned the right to revel in reflected star power as she joined Mr. Redford recently in announcing his plans to build, with partner General Cinema, a funky Sundance Cinemas complex on Walnut Street near 40th Street.

Robert Redford will visit Philadelphia on Friday to announce plans for a multiscreen Sundance Cinemas art house on 40th Street between Sansom and Locust, a spokesman for the actor, director, impresario and entrepreneur confirmed yesterday. After prolonged negotiations with the University of Pennsylvania, which is developing the commercial thoroughfare on the campus' western edge, Redford's new movie-theater company has signed a deal that would bring a six-to-eight-screen theater to University City.

Robert Redford is still talking about Incident at Oglala. Usually, the way things work in Hollywood, a movie gets set to open and the star blows into some swank hotel, makes every print journalist and Evening Magazine/MTV/VH-1/E!/A.M. Dubuque video interviewer line up outside the suite and grants them their sound bites and pithy quotes, one after the other. At the end of the day, the star's work is done. On to next project. But six weeks after the opening of Incident at Oglala - a taut documentary about the 1975 killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and the subsequent conviction of Indian activist Leonard Peltier - Redford is still talking up his project.

Gresham's Law - the theory that bad money will drive good currency out of circulation - might apply to American independent movies. Lousy indie films seem to be driving intelligent ones out of distribution. Trouble is, the perpetrators are laudable in that they fund projects the studios would never touch, namely, movies where the character - not the actor - is the star. However honorable this mandate, many of the resulting films are tarnishing the indie reputation for maverick work.

The geeks had a word for films like Stacking. Two words, really: granola movie. They dubbed them thus because such films are wholesome, crunchy and extol values that are good for you. Know those TV ads for breakfast cereal where the homespun Wilford Brimley assures you that he spoons it because "it's the right thing to do"? That's the tone - avuncular and right-minded - aspired to by this kind of picture. You've endured granola movies. They're stories about regional Americana, often set on a farm, and more often set in the not-too-distant past.

In Hollywood, the cost of making movies is a subject much like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. When he signs on to star in a film, Robert Redford commands the kind of salary that can bloat a film budget in a hurry. But through the Sundance Institute in Utah and his other efforts, Redford probably has done more than any other major Hollywood figure to encourage independent writers and directors. One of the frustrations he and his proteges have encountered is that, while a film can be made for a fraction of the cost outside Hollywood, distribution and marketing require the payment of expensive agents, managers, lawyers and the like.