Matthew Hickman: Reflections on 2014 Sundance Film Festival
About a month ago, there was this announcement:
The Black List and Cassian Elwes have announced the winner of their first Independent Screenwriting Fellowship.
Unrepresented screenwriter Matthew Hickman will attend the upcoming Sundance Film Festival with the producer behind 2013 awards contenders Lee Daniels’ The Butler, All Is Lost, Dallas Buyers Club and many other films.
Hickman was chosen based on his script An Elegy for Evelyn Francis, which was hosted on the Black List website. He beat nine other scripts with indie sensibilities from unrepresented writers with lifetime earnings of less than $5,000.
“I work at a regular job in retail. I don’t have contacts in the movie business,” Hickman said in a statement. “Despite this, I have always hoped that if I wrote stories which were good enough, eventually I would find people who wanted to help me bring them to life. For aspiring writers in my shoes, the Black List is our broadest, most credible link to the people who can do just that. They provide access to the kind of professionals who can help jumpstart a writer’s career, as I have been incredibly fortunate to discover in Cassian Elwes. This fellowship is the greatest opportunity that a writer like me could ask for, and I cannot thank [Black List co-founder] Franklin Leonard and Cassian enough for creating it.”
Elwes, who also spent 15 years arranging financing for nearly 300 films as the head of William Morris Independent, said of Hickman’s script, “I could not get it out of my mind. He wrote something that was both human and real and created a character that actresses will want to play. Matthew is exactly the type of writer I was hoping we would find through the Black List — a new original voice that could benefit from this experience that he will receive in Sundance. I could not be more grateful to the Black List for helping me create this fellowship, and I hope Matthew gets from the experience as much as I know I will.”
Matthew has kindly agreed to write a public journal of his experiences before, during and after the Sundance Film Festival, and allow me to share them with you. Now that’s he’s returned to Los Angeles, you may read the entirety of his reflections on the Festival by clicking More.
Matthew’s latest dispatch:
Hello everyone! This is the first Sunday afternoon I’ve been back in town since Sundance, and I’m just now starting to feel as if things are getting back to normal — a new normal, I should say, and one I couldn’t be happier about.
The extent to which my life is changing as a result of winning Cassian’s fellowship is becoming clear incrementally. I should add that I understood it was life-altering the moment he and I first spoke (not least of all because he said, “Matthew, I’m going to change your life,”) but it takes a while to experience the myriad ways that your life is going to be impacted. In a sense, Sundance was only the tip of the iceberg, but before we get that far, let me talk a little about the festival itself, now that I’ve had a few days to take everything in.
Sundance is a place unlike any other I have ever been to. I’m not sure what Robert Redford and company were thinking whenever they decided to begin the festival there, but I’m glad they did. Park City is a small town which sits pretty much right in the middle of the Wasatch Mountains. The heart of the town, including Main Street, is sandwiched only a couple hundred yards from the steep bottoms of competing ski slopes where souls much braver than I come rocketing downhill, some at speeds which you’d be cited for in most residential areas. I know I’m not the first person to use the word “majestic,” to describe mountains, but there’s a reason its been exhausted from overuse — being in that kind of environment does a great job of reminding you just how fragile, insignificant, and ineffectual you are. I like to think that might do good things to the average Angeleno’s ego, but I’m sure a few of them are impervious even to the world’s most ambitious and intimidating geography.
In Los Angeles, the climate and the geography spoil you and make you soft. They make you believe you’ve got everything figured out, and, having made it to L.A., even nature itself has been brought more or less under your control. You can have nature the way you want it — a quick hike through Topanga Canyon, or an afternoon at the beach — but only for a few hours. In Park City, the elements are uncompromising, they demand to be dealt with on their own terms any time you decide to open the front door.
It’s beautiful but harsh, and I was constantly aware of how the veneer of domesticity we’ve lacquered over it isn’t as thick as it might seem. Sure, I was always within walking distance of beer, a sushi restaurant, and a movie theater — there was even a hot tub on our cabin’s back porch which seemed like the ultimate middle finger to nature — but I don’t think it would take much for the land to reassert its hold on us in places like Park City. Just ask one of the many people who I’m sure woke up the morning after complaining about how weak “Mormon beer” is (the alcohol content is limited by state law in Utah), only to find themselves suffering from debilitating hangovers made possible by the high altitude.
I’m also fascinated by the idea that there are controlled avalanches conducted on the ski slopes. Life in that kind of environment seems to be carried out with a respect for what the terrain and climate mean for humans, and also under the recognition that we can’t tame the planet, only carve out our small place in it. It’s a lesson Los Angeles (and probably many other places — I’m looking at you, Beijing) could well learn from, with its endless inhabitation of every even remotely flat nook and cranny in the L.A. basin and beyond.
Anyway, before I digressed into all this nonsense about man’s place on earth, I meant to talk about the festival itself, something I assume you’re much more interested in. One analogy I used frequently while speaking with friends was to imagine Mardi Gras (or Saint Patrick’s Day in Savannah) with cold weather and movies added to the mix. That gives you a decent idea of the general atmosphere there. It’s more than a festival — it’s a carnival, and in some places an outright bacchanal, which is loads of fun, but at times can run the risk of subsuming the real reason we’re there — the movies.
The way I see it, anyone visiting Sundance should make it a priority to do a couple of things. The first is to see as many movies as possible, which is no easy task. Demand for tickets is extremely high, and even ticket holders are not guaranteed entry to the hottest screenings. I was very fortunate on this count; Franklin, Terry, and the Black List got me tickets to over a dozen movies and documentaries, free of charge, as part of the Fellowship. If I make it back to Sundance next year, I won’t have it nearly so good — tickets cost twenty dollars each, and even at that rate they sell out far in advance. I should add that the ticket price is a relative deal, as you’re often watching the premieres (and sometimes even witnessing the birth) of world-class filmmakers. From Fishing Without Nets to E-Team to Watchers of the Sky, there were some unforgettable stories on screen this year. I would have been lucky to see half as many movies as I actually got to.
The second thing to do is attend parties and meet folks. It bears mentioning here that Sundance parties are odd creations. Corporations, agencies, wealthy producers, and others will rent out relatively normal venues — say, the bars and restaurants on Main Street — and transform them into premiere receptions, theme parties, and countless other celebrations complete with velvet stanchions, free booze, lots of schwag, and very, very long lines. Getting into these places is a bit of a circus, and it won’t surprise you to learn that being with Cassian was the only thing that got me inside most of them.
Once you’re inside, it’s one of the better parties you’ve been to in your life. To begin with, never underestimate the power of an open bar, and then multiply that by casual sightings of folks like Aaron Paul and conversations with Elizabeth Banks. To the uninitiated, it’s slightly nuts, and even though many industry folks seem to get acclimated to these kind of situations fairly quickly, I hope I am always a little in awe while I’m in rooms like that, whether it’s my first or fortieth time around (and I feel confident knowing that at least Jennifer Lawrence is with me).
There was also, surprisingly, a reception sponsored by the Black List and IndieGoGo for Cassian and I. I have to admit, it’s an odd feeling being fêted in a room you’re still trying to accept the fact that you belong in. I had a wonderful time though, and couldn’t be more thankful to everyone responsible for putting it on. It was the first time in my life outside of my birthday anyone has thrown me a party, and I met some fantastic people there.
By the way, allow me to take this as an opportunity to shill for IndieGoGo a bit — if you’re thinking of crowdsourcing some project you’re involved with, you owe it to yourself to consider them in addition to Kickstarter. They leave behind the “all-or-nothing,” approach, and they take a smaller percentage off the top of whatever funds you raise than Kickstarter does. I think both are great at what they do, but it seems IndieGoGo has gotten less love from the media than perhaps it should have.
We also attended a bash that would have made Fitzgerald himself proud, hosted by producer Adi Shankar at a home (I presume he rented). It was literally on top of a mountain — getting there was a joint effort between Cassian and I, as we spent almost an hour trying to navigate the back roads of Park City before finally stumbling upon a compound with countless taxicabs and limousines parked out front. I won’t waste too much breath trying (inadequately) to describe the palatial grandeur of the place, so instead I’ll just say, look at some of these homes on Zillow for an idea of what it was like — especially the ones on White Pine Canyon Road.
The immediate purpose of attending these parties is to have fun. Even if some of it is a little ostentatious, it’s not often you get to rub elbows with every manner of industry figure in a twenty million dollar vacation home — especially if you ship packages for a living. The way I see it, most of the people I spoke to won’t remember me, and that’s fine. It’s hard to form a real impression of someone whenever you’re one of fifty three-minute conversations they’re having that evening.
On the other hand, some people do linger in your mind — for whatever reason. If I am able to form even one or two meaningful relationships from those meetings which Help me lay the foundation of a real career in this business, then the investment of time was well worth it. Only time will tell, and it seems that the real test of these interactions is in your follow through. Sundance is just getting your foot in the door with these folks, a name in their heads — everything you make of it after you get back home is what matters.
In fact, that reflects something I felt about the whole experience. I mentioned earlier that in some ways, Sundance was just the tip of the iceberg. As much as I loved wandering the streets of Park City looking for movie stars and getting a head start on seeing next year’s awards contenders, the train of thought constantly running through my mind was this: how do I take this experience and start a career with it?
On that front, one of the things Cassian and I have discussed in several interviews is his desire to turn my script into a movie — something I could not be more thrilled about. We’ve talked about it ever since our first conversation, which it’s hard to believe now was only a month ago. Seeing that the Fellowship was created with its only explicit reward being a trip to Sundance, I take his desire to turn my script into a movie as the ultimate compliment and an unimaginably lucky bonus.
Much of the time we spent in Park City in between movies and industry events, Cassian and I were discussing just these plans. What will the timeline look like? How large of a project will it be? What actresses and actors might be involved? None of these questions have firm answers yet, but they have possible answers, and having heard the possibilities alone has left my imagination slightly unhinged with excitement about what the next year or two might hold.
For the immediate present, I’m happy to take things one step at a time. This morning, for example, it meant waking up slightly earlier than usual to tape an interview with KPCC while pacing the cold tile of our kitchen floor. It also meant having a conversation with my mother during my lunch break where I was able to tell her with greater confidence than ever before that she won’t need to worry about me for much longer. I’m sure she’ll continue to worry anyway (she always does, and its something I regret to admit I’ve inherited from her), but perhaps she’ll worry a little less as things come together.
Whenever I moved to Los Angeles, I tell my friends, I had pretty detailed delusions of grandeur about what my future would look like. A few years without much progress was enough to take some of the wind out of my sails — I was still convinced I’d make a career out of being a writer, but hard experience taught me that there’d be no magical moment which changed the course of my career and set me off on a path toward the life I imagined when I first moved here. It would be a long grind, and success (whatever degree I achieved) would be defined and made possible in part by my long, obstinate struggle. It was a narrative I took some comfort in, and looking back on it now, I have to say —
I’ve never been happier to be wrong in my life. That’s not to say the road ahead isn’t hard — I know it will be. But for the first time since I started this journey four years ago, I know I’m not doing this alone. I couldn’t be more grateful for the support.
I’d like to thank Franklin and Cassian again for everything they’ve done, and I look forward to keeping you all updated with how things unfold. The next time I check in with you all, I’ll tell you a little about what’s happened since I’ve come back home, and hopefully fill you in on a few things still in the works.
To read Matthew’s first dispatch, go here.
To read Matthew’s second dispatch, go here and here.
I think we’ll be getting one more dispatch about the status of Matthew’s project with Cassian. But all in all, one thing is clear: This has been an experience of a lifetime for one young screenwriter.
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