Local directors, themes gain buzz at Sundance

PARK CITY — Despite a trio of films with local connections in this year's Sundance Film Festival, Utahns do not get preferential treatment in the selection process.

"We love being in Utah, but everyone has to go through the same submissions process," said festival director Geoff Gilmore.

As evidence, just ask rejected local filmmakers.

"Saints and Soldiers" was a big hit and multiple award-winner at many other film festivals last year, but Sundance passed on the World War II drama.

And in 2000, Richard Dutcher's "God's Army," about Mormon missionaries in Los Angeles, was also turned away. Dutcher said at the time, "I wonder if it would have gotten in if it had been about a gay missionary on a murder spree."

On the other hand, local filmmaker Jared Hess didn't have to resort to anything quite that drastic with "Napoleon Dynamite," which easily got into the Sundance dramatic competition last year and became one of the festival's biggest success stories. (Though Hess shot the film in Idaho, he lives in West Jordan and attended Brigham Young University.)

Hess spent some $200,000 to make the low-key, oddball comedy, and after its first Sundance screening, "Napoleon Dynamite" was picked up by MTV Films and co-distributor Fox Searchlight for $3 million.

So far it has earned $45 million at the box office and is an enormous success on DVD.

This year there are three new films with local connections in the Sundance Film Festival.

"We've just been fortunate the past couple of years," Gilmore said, "that some particularly strong films have come from LDS filmmakers and some of our former volunteers."

One of the films to which Gilmore refers is the documentary "New York Doll," by former Utah resident and BYU graduate Greg Whiteley, which has been stimulating a lot of buzz among moviegoers.

"New York Doll" profiles former glam-rock musician and LDS Church member Arthur "Killer" Kane. And it deals specifically with his conversion to the LDS faith, which Kane describes in the film as being "like an LSD trip from the Lord — only without the drugs."

In addition to his subject, Whiteley interviewed Kane's home teachers and his co-workers in the LDS Family History Center in Los Angeles. The film also includes a long-awaited musical reunion between Kane and his former New York Dolls bandmates. (Toward the end of the documentary, Kane is diagnosed with leukemia; he died before the film was finished last year.)