harvest being quickly picked off one by one by independent distributors and the

specialty wings of the studios.

The Hollywood Reporter reports festival veterans as saying the film feeding frenzy during the first weekend was unprecedented. Said one acquisitions exec, "The festival is totally front-loaded. [It] might as well be done on Wednesday morning. "

Among the first films picked up for distribution were Scrubs star Zach

Braff’s directorial debut, Garden State; 24-year-old Jared Hess’

Napoleon Dynamite (Fox Searchlight); Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (Focus); and the drama

Open Water (Lions Gate), about divers lost in shark-infested waters. Garden State, a romantic dramedy about a young man who returns to New Jersey for his mother's funeral after a decade away, was actually picked up by not one but two studios, Miramax

and Fox Searchlight, for release later this year in a deal said to be about $5 million.

Dogtown and

Z-Boys helmer Stacy Peralta’s surfing documentary Riding Giants, which opened the fest,

was snatched up by Sony Pictures Classics, which beat out Fox Searchlight in a roughly $2 million deal.

Focus was said to have paid $4 million for Motorcycle Diaries, starring Y Tu Mama Tambien's Gael Garcia Bernal and executive produced by Sundance founder Robert Redford. The Spanish-language film is based on the journals of Alberto Granado, who set out on a road trip in the early 1950s with Ernesto Guevara, the man who would later become known as "El Che."

The Park City, Utah fest continues until Sunday.