On a cold Utah night in February 2006, I was sitting next to Alan Arkin in the backseat of a black town car when my Blackberry began buzzing. We had just witnessed the rousing Sundance Film Festival debut of our movie Little Miss Sunshine at the Eccles Theatre. “I hear you had a tremendous screening,” Tom Rothman, then chairman of Fox, bellowed from his office in L.A. “Congratulations. We…”—meaning Fox Searchlight, the specialty division he oversaw—“better get this one,” he begged/threatened, before hanging up.

After an all-night negotiation with multiple bidders, Searchlight indeed won the distribution rights by putting up $10.5 million, at the time the biggest sale ever at the festival. But that seems like peanuts compared to CODA, which sold to Apple in 2021 for the almost unimaginable price of $25 million—and, of course, went on to win the best picture Oscar. The difference was that the CODA sale took place not in a Park City condo after a rapturous public screening, but via Zoom after the film was viewed on laptops in a “virtual” festival.