Who needs to jostle with Harvey Weinstein for seats in a packed Park City movie house now that you can enjoy Sundance from the comfort of your iPod?
Organizers of the indie world's biggest confab are joining forces with Apple to make dozens of the short films screened at this month's fest available for purchase online.
The agreement announced Friday will allow cinephiles to download 33 narrative, documentary and animation shorts at $1.99 a pop for a period of three years beginning Jan. 18, the day the festival kicks off.
Filmmakers will receive 67 percent of the profits and also retain all rights to their works, including the option of selling them to other distributors. The remaining revenue will be divvied up among iTunes, the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Channel.
Meanwhile, Sundance will stream all films available for download—and 14 additional shorts—for free on its Website (sundance.org) for three months, from Jan. 18 through Apr. 18.
In addition to the shorts, iTunes will also offer free podcasts of select Sundance panels, as well as musical performances from dozens of A-list parties and promotional events taking place during the 10-day fest.
Sundance overlord Robert Redford says the partnership with iTunes is just another avenue for the world to explore the best and brightest of the indie film scene.
"I have [always] felt that if people really care about independent film, they should pay particular attention to short films, the best indicators of what is coming down the creative pike," the actor-director told the Hollywood Reporter.
For those lucky enough to have a short accepted in this year's festival, officials left it up to the filmmakers to decide in early December whether to participate in the iTunes deal. While 33 of the 71 filmmakers singed up, the rest opted out, for reasons ranging from technical and rights concerns to worries about qualifying for the Oscars.
True to Sundance form, the shorts available for download cover eclectic subjects and include a documentary on German motorcycling, Motodrom, to a CG comedy about a street rat who falls for a lab rat, One Rat Short.
Don't expect, however, feature films to be making the online rounds anytime soon. Sundance is still considered a buyer's market, with many of those movies competing snapped up by Hollywood studios before they even hit the screen.
The iTunes-Sundance collaboration comes just days after Apple announced that Paramount was making 250 films, including Chinatown, Tomb Raider and the Star Trek flicks, available for download via iTunes. Previously, only Disney movies were for sale.
Aside from the usual cast of celebrities, product pushers and other hangers-on, this year's Sundance promises screenings of 122 movies from 25 countries—a list winnowed down from 3,287 feature submissions—of which 82 will be making their world premieres.
Some of the more notable entrants: Grace Is Gone, a drama starring John Cusack as an Iraq war supporter whose wife is killed in the conflict and must break the bad news to his two young daughters; The Good Life, starring Chris Klein, Zooey Deschanel and Bill Paxton in the story of a "mostly normal" young man who meets a mysterious girl while running an old movie house in a small town; Rocket Science, about a teenage boy with a stuttering problem who joins the debate team after falling for the squad's captain; Joshua, which stars Sam Rockwell and Vera Famiga as a couple whose world is turned upside down when their precocious eight-year-old son can't accept the arrival of his newborn baby sister; and Broken English, starring the Queen of Sundance herself, Parker Posey, as a woman who finds she's the last singleton among her friends until she falls for a quirky Frenchman.
On the non-competitive side, there will be high-profile screenings of films featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Savages),Gwyneth Paltrow (The Good Night), Samuel L. Jackson (Black Snake Moan, Resurrecting the Champ) and Lindsay Lohan (Chapter 27).
The Sundance Film Festival runs through Jan. 28.