By Roger Ebert  (Sundance Journal) on January 22, 2010

There’s something I left out of my first post from Sundance. I thought it might come across wrong. Something else happened at the press conference with Robert Redford and John Cooper that meant a great deal to me.

After the event was over and everybody was standing up in the aisle and pulling on their goose down jackets, I looked up and saw Redford making his way through the crowd. He wanted to say hello to me. He as he wanted to welcome me back to Sundance after the three years I missed. “You were here at the start,” he said. “You’ve always been a help to us.” Well, it’s true. But in fact the story says more about Redford than it does about me.

I was here when Sundance was known as the U.S. Film and Video Festival. It’s not remembered that there was actually some resentment when Redford reinven ted the festival. In opening that first Sundance, he said he was an independent, too. That inspired some raised eyebrows. Redford had for years been one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Yes, he had the “independent spirit” in the films he directed. But he didn’t have indie budgets.

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