The Sundance Film Festival has sold out of 1996 ticket packages a month before the world's biggest showcase of independent cinema begins.
Festival publicist Saundra Saperstein said most of about 2,000 passes that went on sale in early November were snapped up within days."Demand just keeps getting higher," said Saperstein, noting the increasing popularity of the 10-day fete.
Tickets to individual screenings are still available, Saperstein stressed.
But package offerings that have disappeared in recent days range from the popular $125 Daytimer Package - granting admittance to 17 screenings before 6 p.m. - to the $2,500 Fast Pass, which allows access to every film, panel discussion and party. Other sold-out packages included ones priced at $450, $550 and $1,100.
Single tickets have not gone on sale yet, and festival organizers are bracing for a rush that last year overwhelmed ticket outlets, swamped phone circuits and left many would-be festivalgoers in the cold.
Local patrons - who typically account for about 40 percent of festival attendance - can buy tickets in Salt Lake City and Park City beginning Jan. 8. Two days later, Sundance will begin taking phone orders, many of which came last year from an estimated 8,000-plus out-of-state buyers.
A 20-ticket limit has been imposed for next month's festival, which runs from Jan. 18-28, after lines to ticket counters at the Crossroads Center in Salt Lake and Park City's Kimball Arts Center backed up for hours before the 1995 festival.
Saperstein said the Salt Lake store will have three times as many ticket-issuing computers as last year and the number will be doubled in Park City.
She said increasing interest in the 11-year-old festival isn't limited to the audiences that typically include studio executives, agents, actors, screenwriters, journalists and amateur film buffs.
Filmmakers, too, have turned up in greater droves than ever.
This year marks a 35 percent increase over last year in the number of films submitted to the festival - about 500 feature-length dramatic movies and 200 documentaries were viewed by the event's six-member screening committee. Fewer than 200 were selected, including 55 world premieres and 32 U.S. premieres.
Fifty-seven entrants from a field of 1,200 short films were chosen for the festival, too, which this year will also screen 30 "World Cinema" features, its usual Independent Feature Film Competition (with 16 documentaries and 18 dramatic works) and an "American Spectrum" slate catering to domestic productions made outside of Hollywood's studio system.
Though lodging is still available, local hoteliers say the week of the festival is largely booked.
"We have a fair number booked a year in advance," said Hugh Daniels, proprietor of a 10-room bed-and-breakfast that is sold out for the festival. Similarly, the 182-room Yarrow Hotel is full, said general manager Joe Jafarian.
Nancy Volmer, a spokeswoman for the Park City Chamber of Commerce-Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the last 10 days of January rival Christmas week, Park City's busiest period and a time in which most of the resort town's approximately 10,000 beds are usually spoken for.
She said a Los Angeles Times reporter who came to Park City on the spur of the moment during 1995's festival "ended up staying in Kamas (15 miles away)."
The press contingent, which numbered more than 200 in 1995, has been one of the event's fastest-growing elements.
"I'm already at a higher level of (press credential) applications that I was at the end of December last year," said Saperstein, who said she says `no' to applicants more frequently this year.
"What I try to do is create a balance between local, national and international media as well as mainstream publications and those that aren't mainstream."