Sundance and Prop 8

As the academic portion of my graduate program ends in December, the experiential part will begin, and we will all go off to serve full-time internships in arts organizations.

I will be going to Park City, Utah, to work a seasonal position at Sundance Film Festival. (I'm thrilled!) I love festivals, but I don't actually know a lot about film, or what is going on in the organization, so I signed up for Google Alerts. Now I get a list, delivered daily to my inbox, of all related news articles with the words "Sundance Film Festival."

Thanks to google, I'm now up to date on the PR hot potato proposition 8 in California has turned into for Sundance. This is the upshot: Utah is full of Mormon influence and money. Many activist groups are angry about the sway the Mormon church seems to have had in passing prop. 8, revoking gay rights to marriage. Consequently, there has been a push among gay-rights activists to boycott Utah, to punish the Mormons.

Sundance reps are issuing statements that reconfirm the festival's consistent commitment to independent and diverse voices through creative work. Sundance has long been a liberal advocate of films with gay subject-matter, no question. So a boycott should exclude the festival, right?

It gets more complicated. Sundance utilizes for screenings a local theater owned by Cinemark, whose CEO is a "yes on prop 8" $10,000 donor, and also uses a Marriott hotel for festival headquarters, whose CEO Bill Marriott is also a prominent Mormon church member and prop 8 donor. (Full story here.)

So Sundance money, or indirectly the money of those who attend Sundance, is going toward these companies that advocates would call "the enemy." Is Sundance wrong, then, to do business with "enemy" companies?

My first instinct is to say the answer lies in how closely tied we perceive the leadership's personal values to be with company values. If the CEO donated his own personal money, to support an issue the company had no position on, is there no problem? (Cinemark has said the opinions and personal donations of their CEO have no bearing on the position of the company.) Possibly. But it is also possible a CEO's personal decisions reflect on his company inseparably.

We don't want civic leaders to be involved in sex scandals. Why? Because that would reflect poorly on the rest of us, who pay his salary with public dollars. Or because it proves he has values not in line with ours, rendering him unable to do his job the way we would like. Either way, we might agree the personal values of other types of leaders in the public eye cannot be entirely separated from their professional work.

Granted private companies are held less responsible to the people than are public officials. But we vote on who stays and who goes, just the same; in one case with our ballots in an election, in the other with where we spend our dollars in the free market.

So Sundance has a choice, to not spend its dollars with a company whose leadership holds values the festival finds morally reprehensible.

But perhaps this is a case of the ends justifying the means. Sundance Film Festival is a fundraiser for the Sundance Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission is to support and develop independent artists and audiences around the world. Sundance has a good mission, and to accomplish it, it needs screening theaters and hotels. And in a restricted geographic region, there simply aren't a lot of options.

Who they choose to do business with is inevitably a value statement, but in this case, is one that is overshadowed by the stronger value statement Sundance makes with its history of supporting and nurturing filmmakers of all ethnicities, backgrounds, and sexual orientations. By giving a launching platform to minority voices, they do better than they would if they refused to do business with differently-valued parties entirely.

(learn more about Sundance here.)