They're wrong » Nobody knows where it comes from. Most people can't even define it. But everybody with a film at the Sundance Film Festival wants it -- even though it's never clear that having it ultimately helps a film become successful.
It's "buzz," that ephemeral energy that surrounds a movie and gets everybody talking about it.
Buzz can sometimes descend on a film before its first screening, then disappear somewhere during the second reel. In other cases, a movie arrives with no buzz -- but a great reception by that first audience will make the buzz land like fairy dust.
And in the age of Twitter and Facebook, when audience reactions can flash around the world in an instant, buzz will rise and fall even faster than before.
Buzz is tricky, because nobody can describe how it works. It's created by an echo chamber of press and industry people, listening to each other about what looks promising.
The thing about the people who make buzz, Sundance's oracle Robert Redford told filmmakers in 1999, is "usually they're wrong and that's the beauty of it for us. ... The unpredictability of this festival, and the diversity of this festival, defies getting a grip on it. ... The films that were unsung before and during the festival are very often the ones that go on to have greater success in the market."
Buzz didn't predict "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999 or "Napoleon Dynamite" in 2004.
It didn't foresee Carey Mulligan in "An Education," Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious" (then called "Push") or the environmental commandos of "The Cove" -- all of which entered the 2009 Sundance Film Festival as unknowns but left as the most buzzworthy movies of all. So trying to predict the buzzworthy films of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival is a bit of a fool's errand. As the immortal Fats Waller said, "One never knows, do one?" But let's try anyway.
Here, based on pedigree and a few hunches, are some movies that will enter Sundance '10 with buzz attached. Whether they leave the same way is for the audiences to decide.
"Welcome to the Rileys" » Among U.S. Dramatic competition films, this one has the most heat because of its cast: "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart, James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") and Melissa Leo (an Oscar nominee for the Sundance '08 entry "Frozen River").
"The Runaways" » Another target-rich environment for the paparazzi, this premiere not only stars Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, but a sexed-up Dakota Fanning as fellow rocker Cherie Curie.
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