Geoff Gilmore WAS the director of the Sundance Film Festival – which just concluded in Park City, Utah about 10 days ago. This was their 25th anniversary. Mr. Gilmore opened the Festival with a statement on The State of Independent Film & Festivals and a few days later he chaired a panel titled “The Panic Button: Push or Ponder” (available in 2 clips, each 30 minutes long, here and here on YouTube). These are not exactly the most optimistic perspectives — from the titles and in the substance. What’s his problem?

The Sundance Film Festival was founded by Robert Redford 25 years ago for one purpose: to introduce independent films to Hollywood so that independently produced films that had a slightly less corporate tinge could get the benefits of the Hollywood distribution apparatus. That was the premise then and that’s how it works today. But the evolution of technology since 1984 and the changing social context of new audiences engaged with new technologies is essentially rendering Sundance irrelevant. That in a nutshell is Mr. Gilmore’s problem.

Let’s be clear about the premise of Sundance. This is the film market to end all film markets. If you can get thousands of people to go to Utah in the winter, to a village that can’t hold that many people, where everyone comes back sick from exhaustion and too much close contact with others who have runny noses — if you can do all that, then you must have a magnet. Compared to Cannes? Cannes in the spring? It is totally amazing that Sundance has become the economic and financial powerhouse that it has, given all the things it has had to overcome. And people – filmmakers, their publicity managers, their sales agents, their friends, their moms and dads, and – most especially – the buyers from the Hollywood studios and a few from the indie film labels that still play that game – they are all there to fulfill Mr. Redford’s dream: to introduce independently produced films to the Hollywood marketing juggernaut.

That’s really over. The Hollywood marketing juggernaut still works – if you have gone through the process of becoming, in the words of Stephen Holden, the NYTimes critic, “a work of industrial entertainment.” So if you have been researched, refined, rescripted, digitally enhanced, loaded with special effects, drowned in soaring or throbbing musical scores recorded by vast orchestras; if your actors are celebrity vehicles whose choice in food and clothes and lovers can be carefully orchestrated to bring visibility and audience awareness to your project – yes, then you can be fodder for the global reach of the multi-hundred million dollar marketing machine that gives us Fast and Furious (IV) which is a sequel to films I and II but a prequel to film III and a huge hit in Japan. These are indeed works of industrial entertainment. And that’s what Hollywood does.

Sundance: do you want to introduce independent film to that? It’s not that some of us wouldn’t like to go along for the ride. It would probably be fun, but it’s really that they don’t want us. They can’t afford us. Their economics can’t deal with our small markets, our unknown stars, our vital themes and the energy of our filmmakers. We could catalog all this: their advertising costs are up; the audiences for their ads are down; their youth target has other ideas about entertainment and passing time. We know all those arguments like the back of our hand.

But what we (in the indie film community) don’t fully appreciate yet is how badly beat up they are, on what a crumbling foundation they rest. We all point to the theatrical release and say — “if we could just get to the theater, we could sell DVDs and have a life.” But it does not work that way for them, and it definitely does not work that way for us. There’s no fixed ratio for converting theatrical box office to DVD sales – in fact, just to be technical about it – it’s a non-linear relationship that results in zero impact for a $5 million movie, but tens of millions of DVDs if you have a $200 million movie. The fact is that theatrical exhibition doesn’t sell our films.

There’s a group of businessmen, with Mark Gill in the lead, who still want to get swept up by the Hollywood marketing engine and who, along with the Hollywood divisions labeled “studio independent”, scour the market for films like Juno or March of the Penguins. Mr. Gilmore, you ran that panel discussion, and you must have seen how those paths have closed and you heard them talk about the shrinking business and the falling sky. Please, spare us from them.

The independent film community is not shrinking. Mr. Gill said: “The number of films dropped from 600 last year to around 300 this year – and it will fall even more.” What he left out was that he meant the number of films that had a Hollywood style theatrical release. The indie film community will continue to grow its body of work. South-by-Southwest, the Austin, Texas festival, just screened 1,500 submissions to find its program this year. Sundance reviews two or three times that many. And the growing number of festivals who carefully screen and jury independent films only adds to that flow of community vetted product every year.

The Sundance Film Festival had a mission 25 years ago and it was an important one. There was no other way to audiences than through Hollywood. Today there are many choices and many distribution opportunities that match costs of production with revenues from distribution and end up better for filmmakers. Sundance’s original mission is not as compelling now as it was then. And that’s why Mr. Gilmore has a problem.