Files from Utah
Fade in: Mormon country, thigh-high snow. A group of film critics exits the theater overwhelmed by excess. The obsessed, possessed, suffering, terrified, depraved, elated, satiated, vulnerable, perverted, yearning, stupid, calculating, and fearless are on screen. Erotica, with a purpose. Violence, with a purpose. Three films in eight hours disorients.
Cut to outside the theater where a Sundance Film Festival volunteer waits at the shuttle stop. Shaun, star of Butt Pirates, a West Hollywood stage play, says he is here pitching his first feature. He wants to direct but he’s an actor by trade. In Butt Pirates, he places a party favor in an obscure orifice and makes it do what party favors do. This, he says, will be a scene in his film. Mental note: move away from Shaun on bus.
Better to sit beside Barry, a San Francisco film critic by day, Pippi Lovestocking by night, who wants to talk about Frat House. The Miramax Films scout behind us scowls and says it could have been better constructed. Barry agrees. He has several wigs in different Pippi styles at home. Right now his San Francisco feet are wet.
Scene two: Dissolve to inside the Shadow Ridge Resort foyer. Move aside to let a large man in a cream coat pass by, stare at Nick Nolte’s Hollywood hooded eyes. There is Donahue having a beer at the bar. Here is that booker you met last night at the party. You don’t remember his name: he doesn’t remember yours, but he greets you like you’re his best friend and you return in kind. You are starting to hate yourself. The booker is excited by a film. You know he’s excited because he says the word ‘Exclamation’ at the end of the sentence.
Scene three: Cut to the media theater. Here, over 10 days, the press screens about 40 of 103 films and documentaries in competition. How these titles are chosen is a mystery. A good number will be in theaters in six months. Several American entries have the budget and shine that theoretically take them outside the independent label. ‘Buzz’ surrounds some. Whether buzz is a byproduct of what the media can easily see or whether it’s about the film, is fodder for shuttle conversation. No wonder The Full Monty got lost last year.
The remaining films are accessible only if the spoiled, lazy, deadline-driven media are willing to wait in the snow for an hour for a shot at a seat at the public screenings. Sometimes it’s worth it. America has managed to turn the word ‘independent’ into a marketing tool; the verite independent often subsides on the sidelines, in the form of Bruce Sweeney’s Dirty, for example.
But quibbling at the mechanics of the u.s. pr monolith under the Park City sunshine, the hail, the rain, the gentle never-ending godforsaken snowfall, is uninteresting. There is too much to see to care. On screen and off, the passion is sometimes witless, sometimes wielding impact, surprising, bone-crushing, beautiful. The quality of storytelling is raw but lyrical and everybody, everybody has something they want to say.