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Music Moves In On Sundance Film Festival

Documentaries, live performances featuring Sex Pistols, Santana, John Popper, Matthew Sweet give annual event a varied soundtrack.

Plenty of pop and rock stars will be mingling with the movie makers and stars gathered in Park City, Utah, this week and next for the country's most prestigious film festival.

Joining the movie players searching for the next "Blair Witch Project" at the Sundance Film Festival will be such music movers as punk icon Johnny Rotten, pop-rocker Matthew Sweet and Blues Traveler frontman John Popper, who narrates the short film "Das Clown," about a malevolent toy come to life.

"A lot of individuals in the music industry want to get involved with film," festival spokesperson R.J. Millard said.

The past several years have seen Sundance — which began on Thursday and runs through Jan. 29 — shift from a gritty backwoods showcase to a major movie-business arena where independent filmmakers can make major distribution deals.

Sundance Film And Music Festival?

But with all of the music-related films being screened and all the bands and singers in town, 2000 could be remembered as the year it became the Sundance Film and Music Festival.

Popper will play three times: a solo acoustic set at the by-invitation-only BMG Sundance Music Studio, an electric set with the John Popper Band at a Blockbuster party and a live, interactive version of VH1's "Storytellers" show to be webcast on Thursday at VH1.com. Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, country singer Dwight Yoakam and pop singer Lisa Loeb also will participate in the webcast, which will features a discussion of the musicians' involvement with independent film. (SonicNet and VH1.com are divisions of MTV Interactive.)

Sweet will play at the Music Studio, with the Verve Pipe and soul singer Kevon Edmonds. Hard rockers the Cult and others will play nightly festival parties.

Woodstock(s) Revisited

Academy Award–winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple will screen "My Generation," her documentary exploring the similarities among the youth at all three Woodstock festivals, as a work in progress, hoping to lure funding for its completion. Originally set to feature footage from only 1969 and 1994, the film's focus changed after a fiery riot marred last summer's concert.

"It's a film about that kind of liberation and rebellion that people feel when they get together and they want to have a community," Kopple, who won Oscars for "Harlan County, USA" (1976) and "American Dream" (1991), said. "Woodstock '99 changed things a bit, made it more cutting edge and much more contemporary ... a little more bittersweet."

More Music Documentaries

Kopple's film is one of several music documentaries showing at Sundance.

Rotten (born John Lydon) and Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones will be in the resort town for a screening of "The Filth and the Fury," director Julien Temple's update of his 1980 Sex Pistols rockumentary, "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle" (RealAudio excerpt of Pistols' song).

While "Swindle" told the seminal British punk band's tale from the perspective of manager Malcolm McLaren, "The Filth and the Fury" focuses on the bandmembers, featuring fresh interviews with Rotten, Jones, drummer Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock, who was replaced by Sid Vicious in the Pistols' heyday. Matlock rejoined the band for a 1996 tour. The film also premieres archival interviews with the late Vicious (born John Simon Ritchie), who died of a heroin overdose in 1979.

"The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack," directed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott's daughter, Aiyana Elliott, documents a recent tour by the veteran folk singer and guitar picker. It also explores the history of Elliott, who learned to play from folk icon Woody Guthrie and influenced Bob Dylan, who emulated Elliott's pickin'-and-ramblin' style in songs such as "Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)" (RealAudio excerpt of Elliott version).

Elliott and other singer/songwriters will perform at the Sundance Music Cafe, which will feature onstage dialogue between musicians and filmmakers.

The documentary "Americanos: Latino Life in the United States" takes a look at several prominent figures, including rock guitarist Carlos Santana and jazz bandleader Tito Puente. The film has interviews and live footage of Puente and Santana, who is nominated with his band for 10 Grammy Awards this year for the comeback album Supernatural (1999).

Producer Nick Athas said he is trying to arrange for Puente and singer El Vez to appear at the screenings. Santana is in Europe.

El Ángel De Yo La Tengo

Indie-rock trio Yo La Tengo's "Danelectro 3," an outtake from their And Then Everything Turned Itself Inside-Out (Feb. 22), is the soundtrack to the animated short "Pigeon Within." The film, about a young woman's encounter with her guardian angel, was made by Emily Hubley, sister of Yo La Tengo drummer Georgia Hubley. The Hubleys' mother, Faith Hubley, also will screen seven of her animated films.

Techno mixmaster DJ Shadow scored "Dark Days," a documentary about a community of homeless people living beneath Manhattan (N.Y.) in a subway tunnel.

Thespian Musicians

Several of this year's Sundance films feature musicians as actors. Hole singer Courtney Love, who has had major roles in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Man on the Moon," stars as Joan Burroughs, wife of beat generation author William S. Burroughs (Kiefer Sutherland), in "Beat."

Rapper Coolio appears in "The Convent." Eighties pop icon Cyndi Lauper stars in "The Opportunists," about an ex-convict (Christopher Walken) lured back into a life of crime by an Irish cousin. Drag queen RuPaul narrates "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a documentary about ex-televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, and acts in "But I'm a Cheerleader," about a model high-schooler shipped off to be "cured" of lesbianism.

R&B singer/songwriter and producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds is the executive producer of "Punks," about a clique of gay, African-American friends in West Hollywood.

For a schedule of music-related films at the Sundance Film Festival, click here.

(Staff Writer Brian Hiatt contributed to this report.)

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