The hottest topic of conversation leading up to this year’s Sundance Film Festival? That virtually no one is actually going to this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Over the past couple of weeks, what started as a whisper has steadily grown into a ear-splitting groan, and with the Festival beginning tomorrow, it’s become a meme that’s too pervasive to ignore.  I had heard either directly or via reliable second-hand testimony that a number of familiar faces (including a celebrity photographer, the film critic for a very high-profile weekly magazine, and a publicist representing a major distributor) were all skipping the festival this year; on the indie/freelance journalist end, reporter Anthony Kaufman took to his blog to detail the five reasons he’s decided not to head out to Utah.

Once the “Sundance: it’s gonna be a ghost town!” chatter had certifiably reached fever pitch, I went looking for Sundance regulars who would go on the record about why they’re skipping the festival this year, and what they plan to do instead. Always the skeptic, I had initially wondered if the Sundance Ghost Town Meme was a fiction invented by publicists and sold to the media in order to cover for what many expect to be a down year for sales. But when it came down to it, 5 out 6 of the people who were willing to talk to me at length and on the record about their planned Sundance absence were at least part-time journalists. Now, I wonder: is there even going to be any media left for publicists to sell fictions to?

In my conversations with five journalists about their Sundance dealbreakers, a number of common threads emerged. I break them down after the jump. If you’ve got your own not going to Sundance story, do let us know in the comments.

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Last month, on the opening day of Gran Torino, I went up to Lincoln Center to participate in a roundtable discussion about Clint Eastwood for a Film Comment podcast. Kevin B. Lee, who also participated in the roundtable, has since adapted the conversation into three video essays: one on Changeling (in which I am extremely quiet; I guess I was playing by the “if you have nothing nice to say…” rule); one on Gran Torino, and one (embedded above) on the look of Eastwood’s films, and particularly his use of light. I’m quiet in that last one, too, but in this case it’s because my knowledge of Eastwood’s filmography was brutally overmatched by that of the Film Society’s Evan Davis, Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine, Akiva Gottlieb of The Nation.

I’ve always had major problems with Eastwood’s work, but being part of the conversation made me excited about going back and watching some of his directorial efforts that I hadn’t seen, including The Bridges of Madison Country, which coincidentally ended up showing the weekend after we recorded the podcast on the WE network, where I gave it about four hours of my life, counting the frequent breaks for Rich Bride, Poor Bride promos. It was worth it.