Sundance Promised Prop. 8 Cinemark ‘Compromise’, but Didn’t Come Through

While the Sundance Film Festival promised that “no film would be exclusively screened” at Cinemark’s Holiday Village Theatre after Cinemark CEO Alan W. Stock donated nearly $10,000 to the ‘Yes on 8 Campaign’, in practice the promise turns out to be not so much broken, as it is meaningless. All films screen at multiple venues, so there was little chance of any one film screening exclusively at the Cinemark venue, but even more so, if you’re press or industry, your only option for screenings is the anti-gay Cinemark Holiday Village Theatre. What’s a anti-Prop. 8 film journo to do?

Defamer‘s Kyle Buchanan explains how, as a member of the press, he’s been shoehorned into a Cinemark Theatre:

“For film critics and buyers who want to see as many films as possible, the press/industry screenings are the only way to go: no tickets are needed beforehand, and the screening experience is quick and easy (unlike public screenings, which sell out beforehand, start late, are buttressed by introductions and Q&As, and occur in isolated areas). Until this year, the press screenings were typically held in three locations: two separate, makeshift screenings rooms in the Yarrow Hotel, and one screening room in Cinemark’s Holiday Village multiplex (just across a parking lot from the Yarrow).

Ironically, programmers have eliminated one of the two Yarrow screening rooms this year and made up for the loss by adding another to the Holiday Village. Since each film gets only one official press/industry screening (a precious few popular films sometimes get an encore screening near the end of the festival), this ensures that at least two-thirds of the festival’s programming will only screen for the industry at Cinemark-owned theaters—and that includes gay-themed films like Dare and One Day in a Life. Press and industry who don’t want to patronize the Holiday Village could always request comped tickets to public screenings, but Sundance rules permit only one comped ticket per day.

As Gilmore has said, there’s a dearth of screening rooms in Park City, so abandoning the Holiday Village entirely would have been a difficult proposition. Still, the official line that steps were taken to assuage activist concerns increasingly appears to be little more than a snow job.”