Sundance: The Little Film Fest Is No Longer So Little : Movies: Unknowns still dominate the competition, but premieres and special screenings add a glitter that only Hollywood could appreciate.

A solicitous and protective parent to the independent film movement for 16 years, the Sundance Film Festival is now confronting a familiar crisis: What do you do when your kids get bigger but still want to live at home? The festival’s answer is an equally familiar one: You remodel and hope for the best.

Sundance’s dramatic and documentary competition, the traditional heart of the event, is still largely reserved for first-time filmmakers whose names are known only to their immediate families. But the festival’s usual storm of premieres and special screenings of work commercial enough to show up in town with a distributor already attached has this year reached almost blizzard proportions.

All told, with both Miramax and Grammercy accounting for five each, the New Line/Fine Line combo weighing in at eight, and Sony Classics, Goldwyn, October and even Castle Rock and Disney displaying their wares, close to 30 films fit into that elite spoken-for category.

The numbers make it inescapable that Sundance has outgrown its traditional role as a discovery place for unknown talent. With 100 features and 56 shorts on its schedule, it has become the country’s premier showcase for any and all films that don’t quite march to Hollywood’s drum, whether they be known or unknown, American or foreign, likely to make millions or fated to fade away.

In fact, as a sizable portion of the L.A. film community digs out their parkas and boots and heads north, one of the ironies of Sundance’s increased popularity is that it’s become just the kind of high-quality but focused film festival Los Angeles ought to have but hasn’t managed to pull off.

One of the indicators of Sundance’s popularity is that it’s become the world-premiere spot of choice for high-profile films with an independent bent. “An Awfully Big Adventure,” the latest from director Mike Newell and his “Four Weddings and a Funeral” star Hugh Grant, will debut, as will “Search and Destroy,” the first film from artist David Salle, and the movie version of Jim Carroll’s cult item, “The Basketball Diaries,” with Leonardo DiCaprio graphically reminding us that it’s no fun to be a junkie.

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Though the festival opened Thursday night in Salt Lake City with another world premiere (Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise”), several of Sundance’s out-of-competition films arrive with reputations gained at other fests.

From Cannes there is P.J. Hogan’s biting, enormously funny Australian “Muriel’s Wedding,” plus the disturbing “Once Were Warriors,” the highest-grossing film in New Zealand history. Antonia Bird’s “Priest” was considered one of the discoveries of Toronto, and the Macedonian “Before the Rain” won the Golden Lion at Venice. And a veteran of the New York Film Festival, “Crumb,” the engrossing, inordinately revealing film on cartoonist R. Crumb, looks to be the class of the documentary competition.

Most telling to Geoffrey Gilmore, Sundance’s director, are the new items by filmmakers whose careers were given a boost by the festival in previous years. These include the latest by three winners of the fest’s Grant Jury Prize: “Safe,” from “Poison’s” Todd Haynes; “The Wife,” from Tom Noonan, whose “What Happened Was” won last year, and the intricate and tasty noir knockoff “The Usual Suspects” from “Public Access’ ” Bryan Singer.

“The independent world has really flourished, and the filmmakers are really pushing me not only to discover work but to give their second and third films added visibility,” Gilmore says by way of explaining the expanded number of high-profile screenings. “We now have a greater breadth of constituencies to deal with, including European filmmakers who want to be seen. It’s a lot of pressure to respond to.”

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Though Gilmore knows the importance of taking care that “good films by unknown filmmakers aren’t getting lost,” when some films come into the festival with chic invitation-only parties already in place, it remains an open question whether they will totally overshadow the humble folk in the competition, whether in a sense the tail will start wagging the dog.

Independents, however, are a hardy breed; they know how to fight for attention, and filmmakers are getting increasingly media savvy. One of the unheralded dramatic competitors, Linda Kandel’s “Naked Jane,” sent out a little flip book of a scene from the film to attract media attention (it worked), and the filmmakers of Canada, subject of a Sundance tribute, have sent out postcards announcing “Photo-Op with RCMP (Mountie) . . . Bring your own horse.”

What all this means is that Sundance keeps getting bigger and bigger, with tickets selling out faster and even a counter-event, grandly called “Slamdance ‘95, Anarchy in Utah: The First Annual Guerilla International Film Festival,” scheduled for today through Jan. 27 in Salt Lake City. On the downside this year, however, is the absence of the funky Z Place, the festival’s longtime meeting place, turned by its owner into a crafts mall. He must be the only person in town not bullish on the future of American independent film.