![]() “We had started to develop The Blair Witch Project at film school and we got to Sundance and suddenly we had all of this buzz after the first screening. That film was The Blair Witch Project, a collaboration between graduate genre buffs Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez which had, earlier in the year, taken Sundance by storm and encouraged a bidding war among distributors… “That whole period was just such a crazy time,” reflects Myrick when SciFiNow catches up with him. However, there was one notable exception – a little independent sleeper success that sneaked into American multiplexes on 14 July and, practically overnight, became the must-see shocker of the entire decade. The ‘event’ cinema of the May-August period was, therefore, almost entirely underwhelming, with lowbrow comedy such as Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, threadbare monster movie Lake Placid and an awful rehash of the Sixties horror classic The Hauntingoffering little in the way of big screen thrills and spills. Witness the snore-inducing fantasy-farce of Wild, Wild West and, of course, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace which threw months of expertly crafted hype back in the face of anyone who was hoping for a new George Lucas masterclass. To a new generation of filmgoers, the summer blockbusters of 1999 probably seem like they belong to a strange alternate universe – certainly far more dated, and even forgettable, than their relatively meagre 21-year timespan would suggest.
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