"It's very intense," says June 2007 fellow Sophie Barthes of absorbing input from half a dozen impassioned, idiosyncratic creative voices. "But I believe it's the feeling you have when you're going to face an audience after your movie . . . and I would rather this take place now than after."

"They disdain consensus here," says frequent advisor Keith Gordon ("A Midnight Clear").

For this very reason, the fellows are advised not to do any actual rewriting during the lab but to take a few weeks after leaving to let all the input sink in and filter down to the 10% to 20% that they may actually apply to their next draft. And anyway, it's inevitable that not all the creative personalities are in sync -- one combative fellow decried an advisor's philosophy of how film is there to please the audience as "fascism."

"What you find with these mentors is they're very much believers in the Socratic method," says James Ponsoldt, a 28-year-old Athens, Ga., native who brought a devastating drama called "Refresh, Refresh" to the June 2007 lab. "Where it's not about 'I'm the teacher, you're the student, this is what you should do.' It's very much about enabling the writer to come to conclusions on his own but planting the seeds."

Togetherness is key

Everyone -- even the volunteer drivers who fly in from around the country to chauffeur attendees back and forth from the airport -- eats, drinks, thinks, talks and breathes movies. They stay in cozy, wood-paneled cabins scattered around the hills above the little town and eat three catered buffet meals daily under a giant white pavilion.

Satter, the ever-present, warm, pixieish den mother in sneakers, jeans and faded blue "Comfort of Strangers" sweatshirt, wanders around the tent, taking stock and talking process with her writers and advisors.

One afternoon, 85-year-old Stewart Stern ("Rebel Without a Cause") holds timed writing exercises for fellows and advisors (something he flies in specially to do every year). At night, anyone interested can attend a screening of an advisor's movie or that of an attending fellow -- for instance, 2007 attendee James Ponsoldt's "Off the Black," which had screened at the 2006 festival. Animated post-screening Q&As with the writers-filmmakers often spill over into late-night deliberations at the nearby Owl Bar.

The advisors claim to be as revitalized by the experience as the fellows. Many of them thrive on the "therapeutic" nature of the interactions and flush with the potential of artistic license, wonder why they couldn't bring some piece of Sundance's communal oasis back to L.A. with them. (Former advisors Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen are trying to do just that with their writers collective, 1*3*9.)

Some, like lab artistic director Todd Graff ("Camp"), first came as screenwriting fellows, graduated to the directing program and then returned to the Institute as advisors. Several build their coming year's assignments and shooting schedules around making sure they can attend the lab. Satter says that as early as 1991 she had to start turning down volunteers for advising slots.

"These people, they're exhilarated," says Barthes, a French documentary filmmaker who entered the program with her deadpan existential comedy "Cold Souls," which had already attached Paul Giamatti as producer and star. "They're like, 'This is what we went through 20 years ago. I can see it in you -- everything!' "

Although the Sundance screenwriting lab exists in a kind of magical bubble outside the cold realities of Hollywood filmmaking, many determined fellows have successfully made the transition. And the institute sustains its support for years, offering to help secure financing, make advisors available to read future drafts, stage public script readings and provide small fellowship grants.

"It's a real utopian view of what the industry could be," says Egoyan. "We sometimes forget this sacred responsibility that film has to communicate a world that we wouldn't see otherwise. And it seems that Sundance is really dedicated to that, to telling the stories by individuals who are committed and passionate and are prepared to take risks."