ABSTRACT
Sex, Lies, and Videotape screens at the Utah/US Film Festival, January 1989 1989 would prove to be another year of big-budget blockbusters for Hollywood, with movies like Tim Burton’s Batman, Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as sequels to previous hits including the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2 (Richard Donner), and the time-travel teen comedy Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis). The fans attending the United States Film Festival in Park City, Utah, that year, however, were looking for something different, something smaller and more personal. The festival had started twelve years earlier in Salt Lake City based on the idea of celebrating independent American movies made outside of the major studio funding and distribution structure. The festival had moved to the skiing resort of Park City in the early 1980s, and since 1985 had been run by the actor Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, an organization likewise devoted to nurturing new and diverse filmmakers outside of the main commercial movie industry.
