Utah

Monday

Gavin Smith

Sundance memories

From our US edition

In 1969 Robert Redford purchased 5,000 acres of land in the mountains of Utah and built a ski resort. In 1981 he founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute to cultivate new voices in American independent film through annual directing and screenwriting labs (alumni include Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson) and to provide financial support for select projects. In 1985 Redford took over the US Film Festival, based in nearby Park City, and brought it under the Sundance umbrella. In 1989, the festival had its breakthrough with Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Sundance became a film-industry fixture for talent scouts, acquisitions executives and journalists, particularly those inclined to go skiing in their downtime.

sundance

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Let Utah be Utah

From our US edition

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Salt Lake City, Utah Here I sit in a Salt Lake City coffeehouse, wishing I’d donned the uniform (white shirt, black tie, nameplate) of a Mormon missionary. Now that would throw the ambient hipsters for a loop. Last time I buzzed through the Beehive State was the dawn of 1984, when I fled the Imperial City on the Potomac after 30 months legislatively assisting Sen. Pat Moynihan. I went to Washington a left-of-center populist and returned a novice in what Henry Adams called the Conservative Christian Anarchist party, of which he mistakenly thought himself the only member.

utah