In true Sundance fashion, there was a pre-party for the film, an intimate little dinner that was blown out to include hundreds, followed by the movie itself, and then an after party featuring a set by the Honey Brothers, a band that includes both Grenier and Gold. At 3:15am they were finally ready to play, but Grenier could not find - I am not making this up - his drumsticks. Some were finally obtained, and the show, as it always does at Sundance, went on.
Just about everybody who comes to Sundance brings a little something besides a love of movies, and it is all on display in the ad hoc parade that is Main Street: the impossibly tall woman with the impossibly tiny little dog with booties on; the corpulent Ronald McDonald with a huge US dollar sign in bling around his neck; the PETA protesters shouting slogans at a crowd whose members not infrequently wear fur. It can be a little bewildering.
"Do you have any idea what we are doing right now?" said Paul Giamatti as he walked down Main Street during his one day in town to promote Pretty Bird, a movie about the fight over custody of intellectual and physical property. Giamatti carried a look of wonder and confusion as he was photographed in various media locations. Now sitting at a table outside the MySpace Celebrity Lounge with a bottle of MySpace Ketchup on the table, he was pretty obviously in the midst of a branding moment, as everyone was.
Cue Paris Hilton. She is a fully integrated media company now, with clothing, fragrances, guerrilla pornography and, this being Sundance, even a movie for sale: The Hottie and the Nottie. Everybody wants Hilton - the rock band Bravery, MySpace, even Bon Appetit magazine - and she is now as much a part of the fabric of Sundance as obscure documentaries about people you had never heard of.
There has been no big bolt of theatrical lightning this year, no Little Miss Sunshine or Once. There are movies that will find both audience and distribution one way or another - Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, seems perfectly confected - but others that rode in on a wave of hype have been just sitting there. After the premiere of What Just Happened?, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Bruce Willis and Robert De Niro, people said nice things. But the answer to the question posed by the film? Not so much.
Some of the attendees simply took Park City for what it is. Jason Reitman, the director of the runaway hit Juno, acquitted himself nicely in a charity hockey game on Sunday. Tom Bernard, the Sony Pictures Classics executive who might have been out frantically shopping, played as well.
"I would much rather be on the rink than fighting the line to get into a premiere at the library," he said. "This is safer."
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