Sundance's Slippery Slope

Date:January 26, 2004
From:Filmstew.com
By Pam Grady

Filmmaker Alan Brown concurs, suggesting that he felt all his production efforts were validated by Sundance's selection of his first feature, Book of Love, a romantic drama about a high-school history teacher (Simon Baker, TV's The Guardian), the wife he adores (Mansfield Park's Frances O'Connor) and the 16-year-old boy (Everwood's Gregory Smith) the couple befriends with unexpected conse-quences. "It's most important to me,” he says. “It's the one thing I can give back to my actors, and not just my actors, my crew, people who really worked on this for, if not nothing, then next to nothing. It sounds hokey, but it’s true. We're here and I could just cry every minute, like right now, because we made it and we did it together."

In the end, regardless of the complex issues and cacophonous publicity machine that spring up in Park City, Utah each January, there is no doubt that Robert Redford’s annual celebration remains a crucial venue for independent voices. Book of Love’s Australian co-star Simon Baker puts the issue into perspective when he says, “We have the opportunity to not only make it to a festival, but to the festival for independent films in America and we have five screenings that are sold out. We have an audience. That's our audience."


From Filmstew.com

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