John Cooper, Sundance’s director, acknowledged in an interview that his festival’s 35-year history will be forever intertwined with Mr. Weinstein, who reached a settlement with the actress Rose McGowan after a 1997 festival encounter that she has since described, on Twitter, as rape. (Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Weinstein has repeatedly denied “any allegations of nonconsensual sex.”) But Mr. Cooper also said that the fallen mogul’s impact on Sundance had long been overstated.

“Nobody on the ground here ever gave him a crown,” Mr. Cooper said. “He was just the loudest and the media followed and built him up.”

Tom Bernard, the co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, who has attended Sundance since its inception and shepherded such celebrated indie films as “Whiplash” and the current Oscar contender “Call Me By Your Name,” said in an interview that the festival had matured and diversified in ways that the news media often ignored. “Sundance coverage tends to play into a mystique that just isn’t true anymore,” Mr. Bernard said.

Sundance’s anything-goes aura was established in the 1990s and the 2000s, when independent film reigned as the epitome of cool. Fueled by the DVD boom, almost all of the big studios created specialty divisions and poured money into Sundance distribution deals, leading to all-night bidding wars in luxury condos around Park City. Marketers for fashion labels, cellphone companies and vodka brands scrambled to capitalize on the heat, setting up gifting suites that attracted celebrities with no connection to the festival. (Paris Hilton, most infamously.) Films took a back seat to the circus.