Here Comes Sundance...

The 2003 Sundance Film Festival opens tonight, and Park City, Utah, is ready. The volunteers are trained, the theaters booked and the hotel rooms are going fast.

"We're going to be stuffed to the gills," says Shawn Stinson of the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau. "Everyone here in town is excited."

Well, maybe not everyone.

Seems the average Park City visitor stays five nights and frequents the local ski resorts five times. The average Sundance attendee stays six nights and hits the slopes just once. Says Stinson: "People who come to Sundance don't ski."

Of course, they don't. They're too busy watching movies. (And, likely, keeping an out eye for event bigwig Robert Redford.)

Through January 26, more than 200 feature films and shorts will be unspooled at the U.S.' leading film festival and all-around schmoozefest. That statistic does not include flicks to be screened by Slamdance, No Dance and, appropriately, SchmoozeDance, to name just three alternative fests that will crowd the tiny resort town (population: 7,300) during the next 10 days.

"It's a really fun time of the year up here," Stinson says. "It's exciting. It's mayhem. It's great people watching."

In all, 20,000 out-of-state visitors and 14,000 Utah residents are expected to descend on Park City. (E! News Live will feature daily coverage with reporter Patrick Stinson, including live interviews from January 21-24.)

The vibe is that the 2003 edition of Sundance will outstrip 2002 in both attendance and, maybe even, deals. Last year's festival was handicapped because it was held just months after the September 11 terrorist attacks and just weeks before the Winter Olympics, headquartered in neighboring Salt Lake City.

Already, reports say, Sony Pictures Classics has snapped up Masked and Anonymous, a satirical look at a benefit concert with a far-flung cast including Jessica Lange and Bob Dylan.

"It's gonna be busier," says journalist Eugene Hernandez. "I can just tell."

Hernandez, editor-in-chief of independent film Website indieWIRE, is marking his own, personal tenth anniversary covering Sundance. He says his calendar is quickly filling up with screenings and sure indicators of a boom year, parties. According to Hernandez, 2003 should be the craziest--in a good way--since 2000's so-called dot-com Sundance, when new media types were more numerous than snowflakes (and, as it turned out, just as fleeting).

Reached at his rented Park City digs Thursday afternoon, Hernandez reported that all was relatively quiet on the Sundance front--for now.

Says Hernandez: "Today is sort of the pre-first day."

To be sure, Sundance's opening day doesn't consist of much--except an opening night. Levity, a drama about a paroled convict with Billy Bob Thornton and Kirsten Dunst, will kick off with a sold-out, 7:30 p.m. screening at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City.

The Park City madness begins in earnest Friday morning, when movies start running at 8:30 a.m., and don't stop running until after midnight Saturday.

Stinson says he has got his tickets--he's looking forward to catching Good Fences, with Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover as the patriarchs of a black family who crash the mighty white Connecticut suburbs in 1973. Hernandez is looking forward to Party Monster, Macaulay Culkin's big-screen return, Comandante, an Oliver Stone documentary about Fidel Castro and Camp, a Fame-style musical set at a summer camp, among others.

Robert Downey Jr. (The Singing Detective), Katie Holmes (Pieces of April), Kevin Spacey (The United States of Leland), William H. Macy (The Cooler), Al Pacino, Téa Leoni and Kim Basinger (People I Know) and Dustin Hoffman and Sundance alum Edward Burns (Confidence) are all big stars with Sundance entries and premieres.

Slamdance, the most established of the anti-establishment Park City events, will counter with its own high-profile slate. It'll open its ninth annual fest Saturday with the world premiere of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a documentary based on author Peter Biskind's study of Hollywood filmmakers in the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Sundance, which has honored everything from Clerks to You Can Count on Me, before sending them off to mainstream success, will crown 2003's crop on awards night, set for January 25.

While execs hope Sundance can again help launch a box-office phenom the size of 1999's The Blair Witch Project, the locals hope Sundance can bring something more practical--like, a tidy, little blizzard. (Park City residents are said to bank on snowfall during the fest.)

Says Shawn Stinson: "Three-feet minimum would be great."

Not that Sundancers would ski on it.