The Yarrow Hotel is a kind of Sundance bubble, a place where only industry and journalists are permitted. There are two screening rooms here, each of which hosts five shows per day, plus a bar, restaurant and snack counter, along with cushy chairs, couches and a gas fireplace (a helpless defense against the blasts of cold air flowing through the hotel's always-open electric front doors). While Entertainment Tonight and People magazine play Shoot That Celeb on Main Street, the Yarrow, a mile away, is where Sundance's most important tastemaking happens. At the Yarrow, critics decide whether to throw their thumbs up or down, and sometimes where execs decide to make a bid for the new title by the hot young filmmaker. Gossip and opinions spill out from the screening rooms and into the halls, making this a great place to eavesdrop. Once or twice a festival, you can trace the course of a film heading from anonymity towards the front page of your daily entertainment section and, eventually, a theater near you. Little Miss Sunshine, Blair Witch and Napoleon Dynamite were all hits here before they made it big out there.
There's a Yarrow pecking order, and some tribalism. Critics from larger magazines and newspapers gather in clusters with execs from the more powerful distribution companies (if former New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell is in the building, everyone leans in – with Roger Ebert a regrettable absentee, Elvis is the Yarrow's reigning charismatic). Festival programmers look for industry execs to chat up, in the hopes of scoring films for their events. The online press strike up conversations with everyone. And the international media seems slightly more diligent than the rest of us (I’ve heard Spanish, German, French and (I think) Swedish so far). Once the lights dim, however, we are all equal: writers in search of the Next Big Thing, and that perfectly witty lead.
