Nuclear Sundance

A personal look at the festival as it celebrates its 40th year

There are many serious issues to discuss, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell a story about a lighter, fun experience I had years ago. Don’t worry, there is a national security hook in here somewhere.

The Sundance Film Festival began forty years ago this week. I learned that from a Washington Post article over the weekend. The Post interviewed a half dozen artists about their memories of Sundance.

Strangely, the Post didn’t ask me.

Fourteen years ago, I attended the festival to be part of the premier of Countdown to Zero, a documentary made by the still-new Participant Media, founded by Jeffrey Skoll. I wasn’t actually invited to attend, but I was in the film and thought that this would be my first and likely only chance to go to Sundance. So, I flew myself out.

Well, actually, Ploughshares Fund paid for the trip. I was just starting my third year as president of the foundation and things were going well. As the board had intended when they hired me in March 2008, we had expanded the small, San Francisco-based organization by opening a Washington, D.C. office, hiring policy staff and had successfully established the fund as a player in the Washington debates over nuclear policy. Donations were up and so were our grants.

We had forged a close cooperative relationship with the new foundation that Skoll had started, the Skoll Global Threats Fund. When he decided to make the documentary in partnership with Bruce Blair and the Global Zero group Bruce had founded and lead, they asked me to sit for interviews on the history and consequences of nuclear weapons. The filming went well. The director ended up using a lot of what we discussed as part of the narrative thread of the film.

So, I wanted to be there for the premiere.  I flew into Salt Lake City on the morning of January 24, checked into my hotel and headed straight for the Park City ski slopes. In those days, United gave you a free ski pass if you skied on the same day you landed. The skiing was fabulous; I had a lot of fun; and, I caught up with the Global Zero/Participant Media crowd that night.

The next day, we all gathered for the premier. It was my first and only time on a red carpet (I’m second from the left in the photo above) and I was definitely a minor character in the event. All the attention was on Jeff (in the center of the photo), the producer Lawrence Bender (who produced many of Quentin Tarantino’s films and is the guy in the t-shirt to the right of Jeff), director Lucy Walker (standing next to me, third from the left) and most prominently, Valerie Plame (fourth from the left), the well-known former CIA agent whose cover was blown by a Bush administration angry about what her husband, Joe Wilson, had been saying about the disastrous war in Iraq. If there was a star in the film, it was Valerie.

By coincidence my talented niece, Emily Peck, was also at Sundance for the premier of an indie film she starred in, The Four-Faced Liar. She joined us for dinner, just capping off a wonderful few days. (Emily now works in Los Angeles as an actor, producer and teacher at Leslie Kahn & Co. Acting Studio.)

We all had a great time at the festival. The audience received the film very well. Our hopes were high that we had produced the next Inconvenient Truth, and we celebrated in style at a group diner that night.

Although I’ll never forget the experience and the film was well received by critics and audiences (see Rotten Tomatoes averages, above) it never rose to the level of a transformative moment, despite aggressive promotion, screenings and all our best efforts. It encouraged the movement towards the elimination of nuclear weapons but didn’t dramatically expand it. Certainly nothing that could rival the well-funded campaign by conservatives and defense contractors to build a new generation of these mass destruction weapons, not get rid of them.

The lesson may be that a film can capture a moment but not create one. Oppenheimer is a recent example.

It is still one of the best documentaries made on nuclear weapons. Here is an extended clip of the film: