Alas, while Sundance played a pivotal role in Reservoir Dogs’ future success, the film’s first screening was a legendary disaster.
It’s always a great honor to have your independent film premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
It was a complicated process bringing the film to the festival, with the final print reportedly shipped a mere three days before its first screening, and the film was plagued by a faulty projection, misbehaving lights, and a power outage at a crucial point.
Founded in 1978, the Utah-based film-centric event is a cornerstone for some of the biggest, most exemplary indies of the past few decades, and Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut is one of the movies that helped establish this film festival as the place where careers foster and grow and young, up-and-coming filmmakers become some of the biggest names in Hollywood.