Evan Rachel Wood (left), Adi Schnall and Elisabeth Harnois play high school students who accuse a teacher of sexual misconduct in the Sundance film Pretty Persuasion, directed by Marcos Siega.

It's another hyped-up afternoon of crowded screenings, celebrity photo shoots and press interviews, many of them situated around Main Street restaurants and corporate sponsored lounges. Siega, a serious-looking artist with a neatly trimmed goatee and closely shorn hair that emphasizes his bald head, sits by himself at a window table in Renee's, a restaurant at Main Street's bottom, near the busy Aquafina Lounge and Premiere Magazine tent. Siega watches the surrounding activity with a sad, uncaring gaze. Actress Elisabeth Shue flits by him; the music is loud, but Siega is oblivious to it all.

A veteran director of music videos and the upcoming Miramax Films comedy The Underclassman and TV shows like Veronica Mars, Siega came to Sundance with what he considers to be his first personal project, Pretty Persuasion, a bitter comedy about Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood), a 15-year-old Beverly Hills private school student who accuses her drama teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual harassment -- and that's just the start of her diabolical plan.

Pretty Persuasion matches 1989's Heathers and 1999's Election in bitter tone, cynicism and laugh-out-loud humor with a climactic dash of moral lessons to set it apart. As happened with those earlier films, Siega expected his comedy to be snatched up by studios.

Prior to the Jan. 20 start of Sundance, Siega was courted by major art house distributors, Warner Independent, Focus Features and Paramount Classics among others, just by the film's sexy description in the Sundance catalogue and the celebrity casting of James Woods, Jane Krakowski and Wood, star of the Sundance hit, thirteen, as the film's pubescent femme fatale. There were requests to screen the film prior to the festival and offers to fly him to Park City on their corporate jet and put him up in their Deer Valley condos. Still in Los Angeles, Siega turned them all down. For one thing, he expected a trademark Sundance bidding war for his film. On a practical note, he didn't complete a finished print until three days prior to the festival's start.

All the distribution buyers and many others came to the Pretty Persuasion premiere screening Jan. 22 at Park City's cavernous Racquet Club, and that's when everything fell to earth.

Because Pretty Persuasion is set in a high school and stars Wood, maybe buyers were expecting something closer in spirit to the bouncy Napoleon Dynamite. But the hard-edged Pretty Persuasion shares little in common with the popular Napoleon, a hit at last year's Sundance.

"I didn't think so many people wouldn't understand it," Siega says, sipping on a glass of water. "They didn't see it as commercial. They thought we were being shocking for the sake of being shocking."

Siega admits that he doesn't understand the entertainment business as much as he once thought. How can someone like Paris Hilton -- arguably a woman, he says, who has become famous due to a sex video -- do what she wants, while his film is derided as extreme. Perhaps it's because Hilton resides inside the corporate castle. She's part of a successful TV show and the author of bestselling books. She's a moneymaker, part of the corporate team. Siega, on the other hand, is what Sundance is presumably about -- an outsider and independent filmmaker. Maybe, he begins to realize, when you are an outsider, you are not allowed to push the envelope. You have to be part of the corporate team first before you take risks.

Siega recounts the basic theme of his numerous Sundance meetings with a downcast face: "Every meeting my producers and I were in with the studios guys, I said to them, 'Listen, I'm not being precious and I want an audience to see this film. But if you want me to change one thing you are not the distributor for me.' "

Told that challenging films, by their very nature, divide audiences, Siega nods his head silently. He never expected Pretty Persuasion to be liked by everyone, although a mother and her teenage children at a Salt Lake City screener were enthusiastic fans. Then again, he never thought all the buyers would be against the film.

"I was shocked," he says, perking up for the first time. "I came in thinking I have a great cast and I think I made a great film. I had a concept and an idea of what to do. I came in holding my head up high. It was a smack of reality to hear that your movie is too shocking.

"One independent studio gave me a list of 17 things to do to alter the film so they would consider releasing it."

The list includes scenes involving teen sex, suicide, racist dialogue and Kimberly's father caught masturbating.

"When I was shooting the film I didn't think of those things," Siega says. "I never thought our film was controversial ... It wasn't until our first screening and reactions I got after the screening from all the studios who had been courting me and asking me to come out after. Then, after they see it, they're like, 'whoa, we can't put this out.'

"It's a movie, and we're not inventing anything. We're just not sweeping anything under the rug. The things in our movie are grounded in reality. That's what satire is. It's the exploration of those public and private morals that exist in our society.

"I watch it all, and I am a total liberal, but I think there is proof of hypocrisy for a studio to look at my movie and say it needs to be completely eradicated for certain elements in order to be commercial."

There have been late-night conversations between Siega and his producers and plenty of soul searching. Sundance did not evolve into the breakout deal he believed it would, but he feels good about himself.

Smaller film companies are bidding for the film. Foreign markets are buying the film, and Siega jokes that its anti-American themes should make the film a big hit in Paris. He's confident that the movie will get releases into theaters. It's just that he thought his film would be the toast of Sundance 2005. Basically, Siega thought his film would be more like Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer's Memphis drama about a pimp (Terrence Howard) trying to leave change his life and become a rapper, which sold to Paramount Pictures as part of a $16 million deal.

Marcos Siega (center) directs Elisabeth Harnois (left) and Evan Rachel Wood in the film Pretty Persuasion.

While Siega debated all that happened over the past week, the good news for Hustle & Flow writer/director Craig Brewer continued. At the festival's finale, on Awards Night, after the volunteers holding high their various signs -- bright pink for VIP, green for Sponsors, purple for Press -- have sat down, Hustle & Flow received prizes for cinematography and the coveted American Dramatic Audience Award, further proof of its mainstream popularity and chances for a successful post-Sundance release.

Leaving the Park City Racquet Club, home to the awards ceremony, on a city shuttle bus, Siega sits quietly with one of his producers. Special awards for "Originality of Vision" were handed out, but Siega left empty-handed. Sundance is finishing much like it started -- a strange, unexpected letdown filled with negative reviews in the Hollywood trade papers and a cold shoulder from the major art house distributors.

On the bus, clearly tired from the past week, Siega shares the first good personal news of the festival. Samuel Goldwyn purchased Pretty Persuasion with plans to release it into theaters later this year. Audiences will be able to judge the film for themselves. More importantly, it will be the film he made -- no cuts or changes.

On the evening before everyone sprints to the Salt Lake City airport to return to New York City, Los Angeles and points in-between, Siega leaves with the realization that his Sundance story did not turn out as glamorously as planned. Yet, deep within his heart, he leaves with a valuable lesson, perhaps more important and long-lasting than any big money distribution deal.

"Sundance has been life-changing for me because I was attached to a studio film that I am going to un-attach myself from, simply because I realize I am much more," he says with determination. "I want people when they see a film by Marcos Siega to know that it is a film I made because I really wanted to make it.

"Prior to this experience, I believed it would be great to make a studio movie and if I didn't love the script, I would make it work. But whatever film I make next, it will be a film I make because I really loved it. I am not going to compromise." ©