Skip to main contentMy mission was simple: Go to Park City, Utah, to watch films at the Sundance and Slamdance film festivals, and to find films for WW's Longbaugh festival (March 25-27) www.longbaugh.com. Sundance, the premier U.S. festival, is a media frenzy fueled by corporate sponsors and made all the more annoying by celebrity-gazing filmgoers who like rubbing elbows with stars and saying they got to see films weeks before the rest of the schmucks out there. I should also mention that Sundance would not give me press credentials (apparently, Willamette Week is too small to matter), so I bought my own tickets. Slamdance, by contrast, did all but get me a hooker, helping me get into every movie I was interested in.
The difference between the two festivals is like high school. Sundance is run by the popular kids who get good grades, play on all the varsity teams, and get crowned king and queen of the prom. Slamdance is run by the kids who skip class and get stoned in the park.
Tuesday-5 pm: I arrive at Park City, where it is cold and the elevation is high, making it hard to breathe. I'm fat and out of shape. This makes for a bad combination. Mental note: Go on a diet, you potbellied pig.
6 pm: With my press pass from Slamdance, I can check out movies from their library. I'll watch Slamdance movies at the condo when I'm not watching Sundance movies (with tickets I had to buy). I still can't catch my breath.
8 pm: I sit down to watch Mall Cop, a quirky, stylish comedy about a security guard at a shopping mall who loses his arm in a freak accident and then attempts to rebuild his life. It reminds me of the early works of Alex Cox (Repo Man) and Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia).
10:20 pm: Sundance and Park City offer free bus service to the various screening venues that are scattered throughout the mountain community. I find myself running uphill to catch one of these shuttles-bad move. With the lack of oxygen from the high elevation and my fat ass, walking is bad enough. On the bus, I can't breathe and my chest is pounding. Will WW pay the cost to have my body shipped back to Portland?
10:40 pm: My first celebrity sighting…David Schwimmer! Talk about disappointments. He comes across like even more of a putz in real life. I want to pimp-slap him on principle, but I still can't catch my breath.
11:30 pm: I sit down to watch my first Sundance film, Michael Kang's The Motel. Setting his film at a no-tell motel in upstate New York, Kang crafts a bittersweet coming-of-age tale about Ernest, a 13-year-old Chinese-American who lives and works at the sleazy motel his family owns. Though it's not a great film, it is good, with some very funny moments. It's nice just to see a film focusing on Asian Americans.
Wednesday-7:30 am: Purchasing tickets online for Sundance was difficult and frustrating, and when it was over I had tickets to conflicting screenings and extra tickets to other shows. So I crawl out of bed and join the people who hang out in front of every venue in town, trying to buy or sell tickets. I feel like a drug dealer when I walk up to a line of people standing in front of the Eccles Theater over an hour before the first show of the day starts. "I got two tickets," I say. I watch weary eyes light up.
10 am: I'm watching the documentary The Aristocrats, trying to remember the last time I laughed so hard. Easily the funniest, most obscene film I've ever seen, it's all about "the aristocrats," an old joke comedians tell each other backstage. Over the years the joke has turned into a sort of urban legend, with comedians offering their own version and constantly trying to make it more profane and vile with each telling. George Carlin's version has a husband taking a shit into his wife's mouth, while Gilbert Gottfried's version involves a father fist-fucking his daughter.
Noon: The most frustrating thing about Craig Brewer's Hustle and Flow, which was picked up by Paramount a few days earlier for $9 million and will go on to win the Audience Award in its category, is that it will never get the Oscar nominations it deserves. Terrence Howard makes the move from supporting actor to the scene-chewing lead man as a pimp with a midlife crisis. Drawing inspiration from such films as Super Fly, The Harder They Come, Menace II Society and On the Waterfront, Hustle and Flow defies genre conventions, and Brewer works with the confidence and bravado of a filmmaker who has invented the wheel. I'm willing to bet most critics will fail to recognize its brilliance.
2:30 pm: I spend the next few hours wandering the streets of Park City, schmoozing and attempting to recruit films for Longbaugh. I run into Boots Riley of the rap group The Coup. He's in town showing his documentary at the Freedom Cinema Festival. I try to work some magic to get him to show his film at WW's festival.
6 pm: Stranger: Bernie Worrell on Earth (which plays in Portland this week; see listings) is an amazing documentary about the genius keyboard player of Parliament-Funkadelic. This is my first official Slamdance screening. The venue is tiny and uncomfortable, but it offers an intimacy that you'll never find at Sundance screenings. I'm sitting in the back of the venue with Prince Paul, Doug Wimbush and Will Calhoun of Living Colour, and right next to me is Worrell himself, who's watching the film for the first time. Stranger is powerful enough on its own, but when you're watching the film with its subject, who is moved to tears, the experience become transcendent.
11:15 pm: I've got a stack of movies from Slamdance that I need to see before tomorrow morning. I spend the next three hours watching parts of four films, the best of which is Sledge: The Untold Story, a hilarious mockumentary about a Steven Seagal-like action hero in Hollywood. The next day I call the film's publicist and tell her I want the movie for Longbaugh. I also run into the crew of guys from the film, including the lead actor and the director, whom I proceed to beg them for the film.
Thursday-8:30 am: Trying to unload extra tickets to Police Beat. There's a meathead next to me trying to sell his tickets. "I don't want to see this movie," he tells me. "I hear it has subtitles and no big stars." The movie is great. Filmed in Seattle and parts of the Oregon coast, it is an almost abstract portrait of an African immigrant working as a cop in Seattle and suffering an emotional crisis that's fueled by an uncertain relationship.
Noon: My brain is already starting to fry, and I haven't even been here two full days. More screenings, schmoozing and trying to be a wheeler-dealer without looking like a wheeler-dealer (not too hard as I gasp for air everywhere I go).
4:45 pm: Back at the condo, and I'm laughing my ass off watching The Dry Spell, a rapid-fire comedy about a pathetic boob who can't make time with the ladies. Every time I think the joke is played out, writer-director John Dowdle and lead actor Chip Godwin deliver another laugh-out-loud moment. I've got to get this film for Longbaugh.
11:30 pm: The one movie I have to see is Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story. The film is not yet done, but director Scot Barbour is screening it as a work in progress at Slamdance. Even in the rough-cut format, Barbour's portrait of the late lead singer of Seattle's brilliant Mother Love Bone is amazing. Wood was the class clown we all knew and loved, a talented genius who died of a heroin overdose at age 24. I think of all the people like Wood I've known, and I find myself crying during the film.
2:15 am: Many of the sidewalks are covered with a thin veil of ice. I run into my friend Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Entertainment and the creator of the Toxic Avenger. We shuffle down Park Avenue, before we both decide it will be better to walk in the road, where there is no ice. "Let's face it, Lloyd," I say to him, "if either of us fall and crack our heads open, Entertainment Weekly will never report it. You're never going to read, 'Maverick filmmaker and angry black critic die after slipping on ice in Park City.'"
Friday-8:15 am: Anyone who needs more than four hours of sleep is a pussy. Besides, there will be plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead.
9:15 am: I'm at the Slamdance press office, and things are not pretty. The opening-night film, a documentary called Mad Hot Ballroom, has just been picked up in one of the more high-profile acquisitions to take place at Park City. The problem is that Variety and other media sources are all but saying it was a Sundance film, when it was Slamdance. The maverick festival "by filmmakers for filmmakers" is beginning to emerge from the shadow of Sundance. Yet most of the media ignore the brilliant films at Slamdance in favor of Sundance films with stars like Kevin Costner and Pierce Brosnan.
10:15 am: Speaking of amazing films at Slamdance, Jenny Abel's documentary Abel Raises Cain-which will go on to win the festival award for best doc-is incredible. Abel crafts a loving an entertaining portrait of her father, Alan Abel, who has built a reputation for himself over the decades as a media prankster. Geoff Kleinman of DvdTalk.com-who's staying with me at the condo-loves the film as much as I do. He gets on the phone with his contacts at A&E and Docurama to tell them they need to pick the film up.
2:30 pm: There's good news and bad news for those looking for Portland's "next Gus Van Sant." The good news is that Miranda July's impressive debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone I Know, has established her as the filmmaker to watch. The bad news is that July has already moved away from Portland, and her new comedy-a quirky character study that evokes Amélie and The Safety of Objects-was made in her new home of Los Angeles. The buzz surrounding the film was big, and July was clearly overwhelmed by the positive response. Get used to it.
4:30 pm: The buses in Park City are free, which is great. The flipside is a hamburger costs $12. I'd be more than happy to pay for the bus if I could find a meal downtown at a decent price.
6 pm: Michael Franti of Spearhead is showing a work-in-progress version of his documentary I Know I'm Not Alone, a chronicle of his visit to Iraq and Israel along the West Bank. The screening room is packed to capacity, with people sitting on the floor and on each other's laps. This is the difference between Sundance and Slamdance. Sundance is a formal-dress party compared with the basement-beer-bong gathering of Slamdance.
11 pm: The Slamdance after-party is out of control. Prince Paul is DJ-ing, and even though there's even less oxygen in the smoke-filled club, I find the energy to dance. Next up is Bernie Worrell, who jams with Living Colour's Wimbush and Calhoun. Oddly, more women approach me during the night than have talked to me collectively over the past year in Portland. In my own hometown, women treat me like a panhandling, syphilitic crackhead. In Park City they treat me like Mandingo.
Saturday-7:45 am: Three hours of sleep and I'm going strong. Granted I don't know what day it is, I haven't showered in-what, two days?-and I've been living off Balance bars.
8:30 am: I manage to bullshit my way into a Sundance press screening of Junebug. Actually, producer Dany Wolf, who has produced many of Gus Van Sant's films, had something to do with me getting in. A quirky comedy about family dysfunction in the South, Junebug is most notable for the standout performance by Amy Adams.
3 pm: I briefly nod off at the beginning of 3-Iron. Maybe this four-hours-of-sleep-a-day thing isn't such a good idea. Luckily, I find my second wind and manage to stay awake during Kim Ki-duk's gorgeous and compelling rumination on the oppressed youth and women in modern Korean culture. In a week of watching films that have consistently blown me away, 3-Iron continues my overall winning streak.
5:50 pm: Waiting in line to see Rock School, a documentary about the real-life School of Rock, I'm reminded that despite the number of exceptional films I've seen, I'm surrounding by useless people who are hogging the precious oxygen of Park City. Two women standing in line next to me are talking about wanting to break into the film industry. One is concerned about her lack of writing skills. "Oh, you totally don't have to be a writer to write a screenplay," says her companion. "Have you ever read a screenplay? There's like, you know, like only 15 sentences per page." I look at both of them, convinced they will both be running studios someday. And although I'm only a few minutes away from watching another great film, I'm ready to go home.
WWeek 2015