Here are 12 easy steps to your own festival drawn from my experience with slumdance.

Step 1: Come  Up With A Catchy NameIn the first week of December 1996, actor Keythe Farley, who appears in a feature film I write and directed, Hang Your Dog in the Wind, was in a funk about us not getting into the Sundance Film Festival. Angry and a bit depressed, Keythe struck upon a notion:" Why don't we just re-title the film 'Sundance Festival Winner '? That way they'd have to call it that on theater marquees. "

I told Keythe this was a brilliant idea, but it would likely be prohibitively troublesome to use the word "Sundance." Perhaps a name close to that, though, to create the illusion of "Sundance" would be a good idea. We immediately started calling out derogatory sound-alike names for "Sundance." After we free-associated through some predictable and obscene ones, Keythe chimed in with "Slumdance." The room got very quite. That word was like a virus.  We looked at each other, forming the same, new, absurd idea in our minds. That moment, for better or worse, was the birth of Slumdance. We had the name, the rest would come.

Step 2: Go To Park City
A few days later, Stan Nakazono and George Kelly (respectively, the producer and assistant director of Hang Your Dog in the Wind) were roped into the scam. On Friday, December 13, we arrived in Park City for two-day location scout. One of our first stops was the Chamber of Commerce. A kind of woman in charge there heard what we had planned and immediately said, "No. You can't do it."

She listed many reason why we shouldn't come back to Park City: The Chamber and the rest of the city government consider Robert Redford to be a "god"; the Police Chief would never grant us a Master Festival Permit, and without one we couldn't call ourselves a "film festival"; the Sundance Film Festival would consider us a hostile presence - and we wouldn't want that, would we?

But she could sense that we weren't about to stay home. She advised us that if we did give it a shot, at least we should stay away from Main Street.

Step 3: Head Straight To Main Street
We headed straight to Main Street. Stann, George and I walked up and down both sides of the street asking everyone we saw if they knew of any property that would be available during Sundance for "private screenings." Fortunately, almost everyone who lives in Park City is a real -estate agent, and we got many leads.

Most rooms we viewed were just 2,500-square-foot white boxes of empty office space - not exactly the environment we were looking for to stage our event. Who wants to party in a cramped little box except the people who go to Sundance parties?

On the second day, however, just two hours before our plane was to leave, we finally found the perfect Main Street location: a basement that long ago was a Mrs. Fields cookie factory. We walked around the 6,000-square-foot space in amazement. It was dingy and ugly, with rooting ceiling tiles, a water stained floor and the look of, well, an abandoned factory.  It had hallways that led nowhere, so many rooms that you could get lost at first, and it came with a desperately price lease of  $1,700  - by far the lowest amount we'd yet been quoted. And, to boot, it was directly across the street from Slamdance, and just a few doors up from Egyptian Theater, the heart of Sundance. We took it.

Step 4: Create A Web Site
The good news about creating a web site is that it's cheap and easy. And there is no bad news. For www.slumdance.com, I spent $100 to register the domain name , $75 to get the first 30 days of service and $25 to buy a CD-ROM of cheesy line art. I downloaded a free beta version of Claris Home Page (www.claris.com ) and went to work.

As everyone else enjoyed the holidays, I stayed up at nights turning my anger and bitterness at the commercialism of the indie scene into something resembling satire. The web is fine vehicle for satire-click, laugh, click, laugh, click,-and before you know it, people are enjoying your rants about Sundance and Miramax, and you have about a thousand new friends who are also filled with anger and bitterness. (Oh yeah, it helps if the indie WIRE, the associated Press of the independent film community, announces your website's  debut to their 3,500 subscribers.)

Step 5: Become The Enemy
The website debute was the official announcement of slumdance, and it occurred on January 8 - just ten days before the Slumdance Experience (named in cowardly compliance with Park City's moratorium on the word "festival") was to start. Programming Vagrant Douglas Glazer and the rest of us knew that we couldn't manage to slog through many hundreds submissions in that time. One very bad idea we had originally was just to accept everything, without even looking at it, but after the hangover wore off we realize that sweet but insane plan wasn't going to curry favor with audience.

So I designed the entry form on the website to be an audition. You had to believe in your work to geo into the Slumdance, and we could judge your entry form by its creativity to determine if we would even look at your film. It was a snotty thing to do, but reality demanded it. We e-mailed the senders of the most entertaining forms (you can see samples on www.slumdance.com) asking them to FedEx their tape to us.

Dough and the rest of the Vagrants look at about 200 films and selected 30 for inclusion in Slumdance. The sole criterion for a film: It had to turn us on. The main thing to remember: avoid thinking,"Who am I to judge other artist work?" It'll only slow you down.

Step 6: Ethics Are For The Privileged
One of the innovations we had our hearts set on the Slumdance was the "Built Your Own Festival" Experience. We dreamed of setting up a Tent City, where a guest could select from a number of movies and get a private screening immediately on one of a number of monitors.

The problem: We need many monitors an VCRs, preferably a good quality. The solution: the 30-day Free Rental Program at the Good Guys electronics store in Salt Lake City. Under this unique plan (which the Good Guys call a no-question-asked "guarantee" ) , you can get monitors and VCRs for free,   as long as you "purchase" them and then take them back within 30 days for a full refund. In addition to monitors and VCRs, Slumdance also rented a ninety digital camera, which made it easy to put pictures on website every day.

Step 7: Find Your Audience
When you start your own festival, one development might surprise you: too many people. Before Slumdance's first day, we were naturally concerned that nobody would show up, but then we were surprised when the lobby became packed with impatience guests on opening night. And the, well, nature of some of the guests confused us. What was the furcoat-and-cellphone crowd doing at Slumdance?

We knew we had to do some weeding. So far our opening ceremony, Keythe and I engaged in that time honored Hollywood tradition: ass kissing. Except Keythe and I actually dropped our pants and literally kissing each other asses. That stunt cleared out half the people in the room. Those who stayed were our kind of people: guests who either appreciated theatrical satire or just enjoyed watching adult kissing each other's bare asses.

Step 8: "Can You Say Starfucking?"
The last issue of filmmaker thoughtfully probed the issue of whether it helps to seek stars for your low-budget debut feature. Don't worry about puzzling this out when you start your own film festival. Stars are good. They usually don't stay long, there are no SAG concerns, and somehow they lend credibility by their presence.

Tim Robbins, fresh from receiving honors at a Sundance ceremony that celebrated him as that festival's guest of honor, showed up on Slumdance opening night.  He smoked a cigar in the screening room, but still it was good to have his picture to show the press, who would suddenly look upon Slumdance with new eyes.  (if John Waters shows up at your festival, be sure your camera is ready. At Slumdance, he managed to tour the entire place, trailed by his own photographer and get out the door in 2 minutes flat.).
When the mainstream entertainment press comes around, don't even bother to tell them how innovative your festival is or try to get them to see some of your films.  Just roll off a list of stars who have stopped by -- that's all they're interested in, and it's the quickest way to be rid of them.

Step 9 : "Wear fashionable attire"
A few days before we left for park city, Vagrants Ann Closs and Saadia Goddard (who, with Rachel Hauck, were responsible for the art direction in the Slum ) went out shopping and came back with the Official Hat of Slumdance; a safety-orange beanie ( from Army Surplus) with a smiley -face  patch glued onto it. The orange smiley hats were the ugliest things any of us had ever seen, and we promptly put them on our heads.

Those hats turned out to serve two functions during Slumdance. First, all of the Vagrants were easily identifiable on the streets , even from very far away, aiding our promotional efforts. Second, the hats were soon in high demand-- and we had every limited supply. We wouldn't sell the hats, no matter who asked or how much was offered, but we told people that they could get them by becoming full-time volunteers for slumdance. It worked. We enlisted more than a dozen needed bodies as Vagrants during the Experience, and it would be foolish to believe the hats didn't have something to do with it.

Step 10: Don't Lose Your Focus
As your festivals build in momentum, you will probably notice a strange thing happened to you: You Forget that the whole thing started as a promotional effort for your film. As Slumdance grew to become a mecca for Park City visitors sick of the schmooze Scene elsewhere, I became convinced that we were providing a Sanctuary, not just an alternative film festivals, and I was hesitant to pollute our Sanctuary  with  self promotion. Beware of this happening to you -- it really ticks off the people associated with your film, who are the ones who threw down with all of the original hard labor that got your fest off the ground.

The people associated with Hang Your Dog in The Wind were probably right to be disturbed. I was so busy with Slumdance that I didn't call a single acquisitions executive.

Filled with the grass-roots Slumdance vibe, I was more worried about the 'real' people, and the film actually got a stunning response from our Park City audiences. We had to add an unscheduled screening to accommodate the people who had heard about the film by word of the mouth and came by the Slum to ask for it. That added screening was standing-room only, and I was surprised to see that people actually stood through the whole film.

Step 11 : Write An Article For Filmmaker
There's no such things as bad publicity, but there's no better publicity, than the kind you write yourself. After you pull off your alternative festivals, you'll have enough cred and insider knowledge to qualify you to write an article for Filmmaker . Exploit this opportunity. mention your movie's title at least three times.