Sundance at 40: The Most Infamous Fistfights, Freak-outs, Walk-Outs and Firsts

This year, Sundance is celebrating the 40th edition of the film festival that has, for four decades, broken talent, launched award-winning indies and seen its fair share of fist-fights and walk-outs. In 2014, THR broke down 30 key moments in the fest’s history in honor of its 30-year edition. Now, we are back with an update, adding ten key moments from the past decade to the mix.  

1. Ryan Coolger makes a splash (2013)
At the 2013 fest, Fruitvale won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, and went on to be acquired by Weinstein Co., grossing $17 million against a less than $1 million budget. More importantly, it established Coogler as a massive filmmaking talent, and cemented his partnership with his star Michael B. Jordan, which has now spanned both the Creed and Black Panther franchises.

2. Daniel Radcliffe’s “Farting Corpse Movie” prompts headlines and walk-outs (2016)
Swiss Army Man’s opening sequence has Paul Dano riding Daniel Radcliffe, playing the corpse as a human jet-ski powered by his own flatulence. It was one of the most anticipated films of the 2016 festival, but during its premiere at the Eccles, it garnered headlines for “mass walkouts” (the number was in the couple dozens for a 1,500 seat theater). “We eere wondering if there was going to be a bidding war that night, and that very much did not happen,” co-director Daniel Scheinert later told THR, with fellow director Dan Kwan adding, “I was not sleeping well, kind of in a funk, being like: ‘What do we do? How do we get out of this situation?’” The movie was eventually acquired by A24, and the Daniels would go on to win best director and best picture at the 2023 Oscars for their film Everything Everywhere All At Once.

3. Netflix and Amazon buy big (2016)
When battle lines were first being drawn in the streaming wars, there were questions about if the tech companies would bring their wallets to Sundance. We got our answer in 2016, when Amazon and Netflix each went on their own shopping sprees, grabbing films like Tallulah and eventual Oscar winner Manchester by the Sea. In 2017, they continued the trend with titles like Icarus, The Big Sick and Mudbound fetching big price tags. And while the number of sales has dwindled, you can reliably bet on a streamer plonking down a significant chunk of change for at least one title every festival. If nothing else, Sundance’s recent history has been a case study in one-upmanship.

4. Sundance Cyberattack brings in the FBI (2017)
A mysterious cyberattack that took down the fest’s ticketing system for a period of time at the 2017 festival prompted help from the FBI. “We have been subject to a cyberattack that has shut down our box office,” the fest tweeted at the time. Some assumed the reasoning for the attack to be the 2017 title Icarus, the doc centered on the Russian doctor who revealed the country’s widespread state-sponsored sports doping. “Nobody really knows who’s behind [Saturday’s cyberattack],” said filmmaker Alex Gibney at the time. “If you look to who could be behind it, you look to people who are good at it, and the Russians would certainly be one party.”

5. Women March on Main Street (2017)
Ahead of the Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, women took to Main Street to coincide with the Women’s Marches being organized nationwide. Chelsea Handler organized the Park City march that took place in temperatures of 22 degrees, with thousands of fellow marchers, including Charlize Theron, Laura Dern and Connie Britton. Later that year, Harvey Weinstein, who had long ruled over the Park City fest, would be the center of the New York Times and New Yorker exposes that would lead to Hollywood #MeToo movement. 

6. Knock Down the House, Boys State and a new era in doc deals (2019)
Sundance had always been a launchpad for Oscar winning docs, but non-fiction titles rarely fetched the price tags of their narrative counterparts. That changed in the late 2010s and 2020 with eye-popping sales like 2019’s Knock Down the House going for $10 million to Netflix and Apple/A24 nabbing Boys State for $12 million in 2020.

7. Palm Springs sells in a massive deal … and .69 cents (2020)
Even when spending millions for potential acquisitions, it’s still important to have fun. In a late-night deal, it was announced that the Andy Samberg comedy Palm Springs sold for the specific price of $17,500,000 million and — ahem— 69 cents.  (Later reports pegged the deal closer to $22 million.) The movie hailed from SNL alums turned producers The Lonely Island (aka the guys that brought you SNL video shorts “Dick in a Box” and “I Just Had Sex”), so it wasn’t unexpected behavior.  “We had been up all night, and it was 5 or 6 in the morning when we [suggested] that. Our brains were fried,” Samberg later told THR.

8. Sundance: Early COVID spreader? (2020) 
While COVID-19 lockdown wouldn’t come until two months later, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival resulted in harsh flu-like symptoms for several attendees. While catching “the Sundance flu” has been a time-honored tradition, 2020 festival attendees reported having caught something far worse, going so far as to suggest it was early cases of COVID-19. The first documented U.S. case of COVID-19 was confirmed Jan. 21 in Washington state. 

9. CODA sets a new record (2021)
During the 2021 festival, the first to take place remotely in the pandemic, CODA’s family drama sold for a massive $25 million, still the biggest sale of the festival to date. The investment turned out to be a good one for Apple: The movie won the best picture at the 2022 Oscars.

10. The 11th hour COVID-19 cancellation (2022)
After a 2020 festival that eked through right before the pandemic (or maybe not? See: No. 4), and a 2021 fest that was held online, Hollywood was looking forward to getting back to Park City. But a surge in COVID cases due to the Omicron variant led to the decision to cancel the 2022 in-person festival, less than two weeks before the opening of the fest. Many non-refundable condo and hotel fees were lost that day.

Read THR’s original 30 key moments below, timed to the 30th edition of the Sundance Film Festival.

When Robert Redford took over Sundance in 1984, it was a sleepy little get-together of movie buffs called the U.S. Film Festival. Nobody in Hollywood had heard of the thing, let alone flew their private jets to it. Of course, 30 years later, independent filmmakers consider Park City the single most important piece of real estate east of Silver Lake, at least for 10 days every January. Indeed, so much indie history has been made at the festival over the past three decades — and so many storied careers launched, from Quentin Tarantino‘s to Hugh Grant‘s, from Steven Soderbergh‘s to Kevin Smith‘s — it’d be impossible to recount it all here. So THR has whittled them down to 30 key moments.

1. Sex, lies, and videotape sells for $1 million (1989)

The mother of all indies, Steven Soderbergh‘s low-budget ($1.2 million) yarn about a bunch of restless Baton Rouge yuppies — played by then-unknowns Peter Gallagher, James Spader, Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo — lost the Grand Prize to Nancy Savoca‘s True Love (bet you can’t remember that cast). But it became independent film’s first real crossover hit. After its million-dollar purchase at Sundance (by some guy named Harvey), it went on to gross $25 million and put Redford’s festival (and the Weinsteins) squarely on the map.

2. Rodriguez’s $7,000 El Mariachi debuts (1992)

That’s right — it cost less to make Robert Rodriguez‘s groundbreaking Spanish-language gunslinger tale than Arnold Schwarzenegger probably spent that year for moisturizer on the Terminator 2 set. The movie’s critical and box-office success (it ended up grossing $2 million) proved that you didn’t need a Hollywood-sized production budget to make a stylish action thriller. It inspired countless other wannabe independent directors and ushered in a decade of micro-financed filmmaking (i.e., maxing out your credit cards to pay for your film stock; see No. 9, Kevin Smith‘s Clerks).

3. Reservoir Dogs launches Tarantino (1992)

The premiere didn’t get off to a great start. “I was sitting next to Quentin,” recalls Lawrence Bender, Tarantino’s longtime producing partner, “and I was really nervous because the gate on the projector was wrong. The movie was screening not just on the screen but on the walls around the side. I said to Quentin, ‘This is terrible.’ He said, ‘Relax, it’s OK.’ He was trying to make me feel better. But I was literally sweating. And then, the film broke. The power went out. Everything just went black.” They got the picture up again, of course, and the rest is film history. Tarantino’s reboot of the gangster genre-flick wasn’t just a Sundance smash — it rewrote the rule book on what an independent movie could be.

4. Hoop Dreams shoots and scores (1994)

The documentary that made documentaries hot, Steven James‘ nearly three-hour story about high school kids with NBA dreams, grossed an unheard-of $9 million.

5. Harvey Weinstein loses Shine — and his temper (1996)

Some great films unspooled at the festival that January — Welcome to the Dollhouse, Big Night — but the most entertaining spectacle took place at an Italian restaurant called Mercato Mediterraneo. It was there that an upset Weinstein got into a dustup with Fine Line’s Jonathan Weisgal over the distribution rights to Scott Hicks‘ schizophrenia drama, Shine. Weinstein reportedly shoved Taplin into a corner and loudly accused him of swiping the rights out from under him. According to Peter Biskind‘s Down and Dirty Pictures, Harvey’s exact words to Taplin were, “You f—! You f—ed me! You bid me up … you f—er!” The incident has since become an overblown industry legend (Entourage did a parody). But Harvey got the last laugh. Miramax scored international rights, and the film was a huge hit overseas.

STORY: Robert Redford at 77, More Acting, a Possible Exit From Sundance and Poignant Regret

6. Roger Ebert gives Justin Lin a thumbs-up (2002)

During a Q & A after a screening of Justin Lin‘s Asian-American crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow, an audience member criticized the film for being “empty and amoral for Asian-Americans.” Ebert, who happened to be in the audience, was livid. “Nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, ‘How could you do this to your people?’” he yelled as the rest of the audience cheered him on. Lin, who went on to direct four Fast & Furious films, remembers chatting with Ebert in a corner of the theater afterward. “We were this little film with an Asian-American cast — distributors were going out of their way to kick us,” Lin recalls. “But Roger said the most important thing was to go out there and be passionate. I appreciated him saying that.”

7. The swag invasion begins (1999)

It started, harmlessly enough, with a VIP pass to a free Estee Lauder hair and makeup treatment. “I couldn’t find a place to get my hair done,” recalls Lara Shriftman, the publicist who threw Sundance’s very first swag parties. “So we set up a beauty suite. That went so well — about 200 people came. The next year we rented a house and branded it Motorola and hosted high-profile events with Hugo Boss.” Within a few years, swag suites became so ubiquitous at Sundance — and so over-the-top, with some celebrity goodie bags packed with as much as $50,000 worth of gifts — that the festival began an anti-swag campaign, encouraging stars to boycott the free stuff.

8. Four Weddings and a Funeral kills (1994)

It cost only about a quarter of a million dollars to make. It ended up earning a quarter of a billion, which makes Four Weddings and a Funeral one of the most profitable films ever to screen at Sundance.

9. Kevin Smith‘s Clerks earns an R rating (1994)

There wasn’t an iota of nudity in Smith’s microfinanced (the $27,000 budget came from Smith’s maxed-out-credit card) black-and-white comedy about a bunch of New Jersey slackers working in a convenience store. But the dialogue was so outlandishly and inventively profane, the film ended up getting slapped with an NC-17 rating. For Miramax, which bought the movie after Harvey Weinstein caught its final screening at Sundance, the harsh rating turned out to be a PR bonanza. Writing the opening chapter in Miramax’s guerrilla marketing playbook, Weinstein hired O.J. Simpson lawyer Alan Dershowitz to spearhead a publicity blitz that made the movie a cause celebre well before it hit theaters. The MPAA ultimately reconsidered and changed Clerks’ ratings to R.

10. Sunshine strikes it rich (2006)

Sales agent/lawyer John Sloss knew he had a hit even before Little Miss Sunshine‘s screening was over. “It was playing huge,” he later recalled. “I knew everyone would want it. Just before the lights came up, I said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. It’s going to get ugly. [Distributors] are not going to leave me alone until they get it.’ So my assistant and I drove out to a Ruby Tuesday for a few hours. They have the bottomless salad bar. You just don’t get that in New York.” The movie ended up setting a still-unbroken Sundance sales record, going to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million. It turned out to be a bargain. The film wound up grossing more than $100 million.

11. Gay films find a platform (1991)

“Queer Cinema” — movies by gay directors about gay characters — was always embraced by Sundance. “Not only embraced, you could say it began there,” says veteran indie director Ira Sachs, who is screening his sixth film at the festival this year (Love Is Strange). “I was at the first screening of Todd Haynes‘ Poison in 1991. I was at the first screening of Rose Troche‘s Go Fish at the Holiday Village Cinema in 1994. I wanted to be Rose and I wanted to be Todd. I think that’s how movements happen. You aspire.”

12. Blair Witch blankets Park City (1999)

Producers of the original found-footage horror movie plastered fake “missing person” posters, with the faces of some of the film’s cast, all over the festival. The stunt certainly helped generate attention. The film sold for $1.1 million to Artisan, then went on to gross $140 million.

STORY: Sundance Trend, The Zom-Com

13. Kids does all right (1995)

Larry Clark‘s quasi-documentary drama about sexually super-active, morally stunted high schoolers in New York City got slapped with an NC-17 from the MPAA and ignited a firestorm among critics. The New York Times called it a “wake-up call to the modern world.” The Washington Post, on the other hand, called it borderline child pornography. By any other name, the film ended up grossing $20 million.

14. 9 Songs does the impossible — shocks Sundance (2005)

This melancholy Michael Winterbottom romance followed a young London couple over the course of 12 months and nine concerts. It also happened to feature the first unsimulated sexual intercourse ever shown at Sundance. It remains the most sexually explicit non-pornographic film ever released. Winterbottom shocked Sundance again in 2010 with ultraviolent The Killer Inside Me.

15. The Dude fights dirty (2009)

Film critics are supposed to be passionate, but Variety‘s John Anderson actually came to blows with film publicist Jeff Dowd after a disagreement in a coffeehouse parking lot over the artistic merit of documentary Dirt! The Movie. “I go into the restaurant and John is sitting at a table,” recalls Dowd (who, incidentally, is widely believed to be the inspiration for The Dude in The Big Lebowski). “He comes around the table and throws a right-hand cross, then a right-hand jab to my nose. He’s fast. He used to be a boxer. But I’m a wrestler. He barely rocked me.”

16. Trade wars erupt (2000)

Variety and THR both get into Sundance scrapes. First, Variety‘s Dan Cox is arrested for disorderly conduct after he can’t get into a CAA party. Then, THR‘s critic Kirk Honeycutt nearly gets into fisticuffs with Courtney Love, after Love grabs his wife’s camera and throws it to the ground. Honeycutt and Love reportedly made up afterward.

17. Banksy paints the town (2010)

The elusive British graffiti artist visits Sundance, leaves masterpieces everywhere.

STORY: 8 Thoughts, Predictions and Trends to Look for at This Year’s Fest

18-23. Sundance’s six biggest legal brawls

Kurt & Courtney, Nick Broomfield‘s documentary about the death of Kurt Cobain, got pulled from the 1998 festival after Courtney Love threatened to sue. That’s just one of many suits that have swirled around Sundance: A 2004 filing for $10 million by Napoleon Dynamite‘s producers over the contracts signed at Sundance with Fox Searchlight; a suit over Michael Keaton‘s failure to appear at the 2008 Sundance screening of The Merry Gentleman; no fewer than four lawsuits over 2009’s Grand Jury Prize-winning drama Precious, between The Weinstein Co. and Lionsgate over disputed North American rights; a defamation suit filed by real estate mogul David Siegel just before the 2012 festival screening of The Queen of Versailles, a documentary about his life that filmmakers were billing as a “rags-to-riches-to-rags story”; and an $11 million suit filed in 2012 by a branding agency called Hype Creative Agency over an event that never took place at Redford’s Park City restaurant, Zoom.

24. A camel walks Main Street (2013)

To promote his movie Egypt Through the Glass Shop (which wasn’t even screening at Sundance), filmmaker Next Anyextee takes a camel ride through Park City. Police cite him for obstructing traffic.

25.-29. Biggest Sundance Bombs:

Hamlet 2 (2008)

BOUGHT FOR $10 million

BOX OFFICE $4.8 million

Happy, Texas (1999)

BOUGHT FOR $2.5 million to $10 million (depending on whom you believe)

BOX OFFICE $2 million

Girlfight (2000)

BOUGHT FOR $4 million

BOX OFFICE $1.5 million

Introducing the Dwights (2007)

BOUGHT FOR $4 million

BOX OFFICE $400,000

Grace Is Gone (2007)

BOUGHT FOR $4 million

BOX OFFICE $50,000

30. CAA’s XXX party (2013)

At Sundance, unsimulated sexual conduct is sometimes permitted on the screen (see No. 14) but offscreen, even the simulated sort is frowned upon (it is, after all, Utah). So when CAA threw a party with pole-shimmying Vegas burlesque dancers, some of them wearing strap-on penises, it did not go over well. Nicole Kidman was so put off, she promptly left. “I think I prefer it out here,” she was heard saying.

Update Jan 21, 9:30 a.m. Updated to include new moments to celebrate the 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival.