Park City Utah is a city where the 3.2% beer flows and there is a multitude of ski lifts, overpriced trinkety gift shops and upscale restaurants/clubs. For 2 weeks every January, shitloads of Los Angeles and New York entertainment industry types invade the town that Redford built maxing out expense accounts in hopes of getting laid while casually trying to find the next Blair Witch. Hundreds of established and wanna-be filmmakers and thousands of other established and wanna-be film buffs descend on this 7,000 ft western mountain town order to see and be seen, all while wearing their most trendy winter clothes and pretending to understand the minute symbolism from the many pretentious films. In our case, we were just trying to figure out how to sell our lil' movie, see the commotion first hand and maybe have some fun in the process. Pretty lofty goals by Sundance standards.

Sundance Film Festival was based on good intentions and up until a few years ago it seemed to be the perfect place for a band of nobodies with a good movie to "be discovered." But over the past several years there has been an increasing amount of big budgeted/big star "independent films" premiering at Sundance and for this reason there has been some backlash from disgruntled small time fucks (like us). When actors from Friends, rappers whose names rhyme with BMX and punky dudes that date Demi Moore start popping up in Sundance movies, it would seem that the fix is in. Because of this, there are a bunch of fringe festivals at the same time/town/venues as Sundance, including Slamdance, Tromadance, Nodance, Exoticdance, Roadance, Freedom Fest etc. All these festivals provide an alternative to big star "independent" films. Each one promising to be "what Sundance used to be."

We submitted Greater Southbridge to Sundance last year as a rough cut and I know that our package was at least opened because the check was cashed, but I'm pretty sure that was about all the consideration we received. We tried again with the finished product peppered with our allegedly impressive press kit, complete with lots of critical praise and laurels. No dice. Our goal all along was to win a bunch of smaller festivals and gain the attention of the big ones. The first part of that equation played out nicely, but Sundance didn't come a knocking. But well known indie film guru Lloyd Kaufman did. Lloyd is the founder of Troma films and is the motor behind all its low budget, cult fav B-movies like Toxic Avenger. His film festival Tromadance invited us to show in Park City. Since everyone from the entertainment industry is in Park City for that week, we were able scheduled a few "meetings" with some potential distributors.

Scott, Justin, Gina, Nick and I had designs on going out. Jerry was actually mulling over taking an Amtrak from Worcester to Salt Lake City. Things were looking good. We got a good deal on plane tickets through a friend of friend and we were off. Unfortunately Nick got held up at Logan airport due to shitty weather, which was a big loss because of his motivational ways. In Jerry's case, he just couldn't risk a big snow storm hitting Southbridge and crippling his loyal shoveling customers. Or as we saw it, he realized that 55 hours on a train by himself, complete with a 6 hour layover in Chicago was a little much for anyone. When we finally arrived in Park City we were a bit overwhelmed, fatigued, diarrhetic and lacking Nick's game plan. After getting lost on the way to Park City we arrived at our unswanky but at very swanky rates, accommodations on the outskirts of town. We regrouped and decided to plaster the town with Jerry's face/screening date & time.

I wasn't long before we got a big dose of stupidity and self-importance. The neo-yuppified masses rotated from spot to spot around town in their Uggies and everywhere you turned there were "industry" types on their cell phones constantly giving out their numbers which all seemed to start with 310. We aimlessly wandered about and before long started seeing celebs. After a few "he's hardly a celebrity" controversies we needed a break as well as some more tacks and tape for the Jerry posters.

Everyone who has a film in Park City is trying to promote it. There is a lot of competition for butts-in-chairs and also visible poster space. As a small team we split up several times and stuck postcards and posters everywhere. On bulletin boards, deli counters, hotel lobbies, restaurant doors, theatre doors and over urinals -- only to be covered up by somebody else's movie 15 minutes later. Conventional wisdom or maybe it was from some filmmakers guide to Sundance book, says that going to the big parties and meeting the right people in order to get the word out to the influential people is the way to go. This was much easier said than done. We tried, I snuck in and got thrown out of a couple parties put on by some big name distributors, we snuck into the Sundance Filmmaker lounge and we had a little success. Some crazy and very teethy (www.JonnyLewis.com) character actor that we met at the Denny's in Salt Lake reappeared, making it even more difficult to sneak into VIP parties. 5 peeps trying to talk or sneak there way into a heavily secured party isn't too easy. The real problem was that despite the copious amounts of alcohol we drank, nobody got their buzz on very well.

Things were fun enough and it seemed like we were making some headway, but you never know about things like this until the dust settles. So we kept on working at it, talking and posting and drinking in our own, hopefully non 310-area-code way. We also kept seeing celebrities. Gina talked to the kid from Rosanne, Justin spied DMX, I saw that meathead who is the brother of Rosanne/Patricia Arquette and is also married to the chic from the "Dancing in the Dark" video. Scott saw some obscure, old/haggish/crazy actress that he did a biography on. There was a "hello and nice to meet you" from Sharon Stone, who looked a tad oily. There were multiple Entertainment reporters bouncing around which should never qualify as a "celebrity spotting" in my book. There was this cool Mexican dude who has been in tons of movies as the "Native American" who took a shine to Gina and ended up hanging with us for most of the week. There was several meatheaded Real World/Road Rules knuckleheads trying to look famous. We saw the chick who hosted some bad dating show on a bus that was allegedly the token black person on Friends. I saw John Sayles talking to some other dude who looked like a real director. I saw the on screen sister/flight attendant of the kid from Almost Famous, who was also in All the Real Girls. She ended up hosting the Sundance awards. We talked to the dude who wrote all those great songs from Hedwig & the Angry Inch. We saw Macauley Culkin smoking several times and at one point he was with my childhood crush, Valerie Bertinelli (the former Mrs. E. Vanhalen). She was a little taken back when Gina told her that I used to sleep with a picture of her under my pillow. There were a lot of "Indie" actors everywhere and although I recognize them and could even pull a movie or two out of my ass that they've been in. One who is worth mentioning was eating breakfast at a lil' nook. Mark Ruffalo, has been called the next Brando and all that crap, but he is a good actor (see "You can count on me") and a pretty good dude. After Gina politely interrupted his meal, he had her sit down and spend some time Q.T. He earnestly seemed interested in our story and wished his movie wasn't showing at the same time so he could come. He and Gina talked about their kids, his wife and agreed that they could indeed be brother and sister and he wished us luck.

Our screening went well. Cisero's is a staple on Main St. in Park City and the crowd on hand was estimated at 150 peeps. We met some press, some of the people we were supposed to meet with didn't show of course, but some did. The crowd seem to like us and many said that we were "too good for Tromadance." The Q & A was pretty typical except that Justin, who I think finally got a little drunk from incessant draughts, got up there and spewed about 12 words in his 30 second speech. "Seeing this F-ing movie, makes me real F-ing homesick, I'm sick of F-ing celebrities and I miss F-ing Jerry. F*ck all the celebrities." We made our new teethy actor friend Johnny cry during the film, so I guess it had to be a success. Now the screening was over, we already met with the people we came to meet and we had one night left in town. I think prior to the Tromadance party we were all ready to go.

Along with our cheap stand-by plane tickets came the problem of squeezing on flights. After returning to the hotel we all realized that our best chance at getting out of Utah was on the 6am flight out of Salt Lake, which meant we'd have to leave before 4am from PC. Scott and Gina felt like bagging the finale party that Troma was throwing but Justin and I could see the forest despite the trees. A couple "You can sleep when your dead" and we were in the rental car. We decided to just make an appearance and hope that the several distributors we talked with/invited back to the party would actually show. We were gonna leave before 11pm and get at least 4 hours sleep.

When we got there it seemed pretty lame for awhile, but then we started to drink and drink with the intent on getting drunk despite the 3.2%. Justin's foul mouth speech from earlier in the day must have helped his PC street cred because over the course of the night several girlies talked and danced and even rubbed on him a little. Scott manned the corner of the bar, draining their Scotch cache, I meandered about talking with Lloyd Kaufman, the guys from Filmthreat and one of the distributors assistants we met earlier. Gina quickly became the pulse of this party, which was filled with goofy fucks wearing Toxic Avenger costumes, karate kitty apparel and martian looking garb. Pretty early in the evening she hooked up with an actress from many of those cult Troma movies (A Potato Chip Tale several sequels to the Toxic Avenger etc) and they danced and tackled people and danced and tackled people all evening. Her new friend/her new friend's boyfriend took a shine to us and kept wishing that Jerry was around. They were deeply moved by GS and made us promise to bring Jerry down to Brooklyn sometime. At some point Justin left his wallet on the bar and I grabbed it before he noticed. For the next 30 minutes he was beside himself looking for it, asking people and worrying aloud. Trying to add to the tenseness and run some interference I kept saying "How are you gonna get on the plane without your ID?" Finally I gave the wallet to Scott and he reached in to pay for the next round right in front of douche and the jig was up.
For the latter part of the evening I was giving away CDs that I "found" in the DJ booth. I gained many new friends and probably could have made some cash back if I wanted, this was the beginning of the end. I knew we'd be leaving soon when Gina tackled the MC and stole some dumb shirts he was trying to give to the audience. It was sometime after 1am and Scott and Justin were on one side of this sprawling party and Gina and I were on the other. It was feeling like we might miss our plane. The cops were there. Scott had to work in the morning. We missed our lil' kiddos. Justin had had enough abuse to last him a few months. There was a good chance that somebody was about realize that I gave away all 12 volumes of "Totally Hits." We were all broke. Nobody was buying us drinks anymore. So with our first official buzz from Utah under our belt we made our way out, complete with a lot of long good byes.

Even though Kate, Ursula, John, Fratus, Jerry and Nick weren't there, we didn't leave with anything concrete, there were a ton of industry scuzzbags in town, everything cost a billion times more than it should have, all and all it ended up being pretty fun. We did meet some cool people. We had the whole Park City experience and next time we'll know better.