The Act - A film by Susan Kraker & Pi Ware

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blogged by Pi

January 10-February 10, 2005

Pre-Sundance - To tell you the truth, before going, we hadn’t said anything to each other, but Susan and I were both dreading Sundance. Ten days in Park City meant we would be away from our aging cat

for ten days, away from our new script (Wait for the Laugh) for ten days, away from our rent-sustaining day jobs for ten days, and away from the extremely reasonable Southern California weather for ten miserably cold, wet and windy days. And what was Sundance anyway? Some over-hyped festival crowded with hangers-on and wannabes, desperate souls clamoring for a glimpse of X, Y or Z Celebrity, and Robert Redford shuttled in a limo from venue to venue preaching about the value of independent visions to a crowd full of cynical acquisition execs waiting to outbid each other on the next sell-out indie imitation of Hollywood so they can create happier, greedier corporate shareholders. So while we had been as pleased as punch about being accepted into the Sundance Film Festival because that could help our careers and allow us to make more films, we were not, to say the least, thrilled about the politics and bullshit of what we perceived the festival to be.

We mentioned to our friends who had premiered their short films in Sundance 2004 ("The Vest",

"Infidelity in Equal Parts", and "Foo Foo Dust") that we were considering not going the whole time, or not going at all, and they looked at us like we were completely, utterly, and totally INSANE. So we went the whole time. And all that bitterness we had harbored and that jaded perception that we’d conjured up after listening to 2^nd hand accounts of how Sundance wasn’t ”like it used to be”…. melted away like snow on a sunny day.

Which, by the way, is what Park City had for 7 of the 10 days we were at Sundance. Sun that is. I mean, we had begged, borrowed and stolen every piece of warm weather gear we could get our thin-blooded hands on, and yet, when we arrived, it was open-jacket weather every day for 6 days in a row!

Arrival and Check-in - The Salt Lake city Airport was foggy, but that didn't stop the shuttle service from cramming us and 7 other people (editor of Hustle and Flow, low level execs, Asian girls who spoke no English) in a van with an ex-alcoholic driver who needed a lot of attention and made those self-deprecating-jokes-that-really-show-his-horrible-regret-at-how-he-once-lived-his-life-and-how-he-might-have-wasted-his-prime-away and tying our luggage up on top and sending us up the hill to Park City, where it was no longer foggy.

The family we stayed with for the first five days, The Gitlins, were amazing. A family of film buffs and stand-up comedy fanatics, we couldn’t have asked for a more perfect match. And their house was a six minute walk from Sundance headquarters. Which was the first place we checked into once our suitcases were settled.

Short film liaison, Christie Machan, gave us our first gift bag (CD’s, a hat, a thermos), and oriented us on the layout of Park City—where the theaters were, the differences between the city buses and the Film Festival buses, how to catch a shuttle to your out-of-town screenings of your film, and some general advice on how to best take advantage of the madhouse that is Park City from January 20-January 30.

The first official screening of our short film, “The Act”, wasn’t until a week from the day we arrived, so that gave us plenty of time to pass out promotional postcards, talk to people about our film, and seek out film executives and name actors to whom we could give a DVD copy of “The Act”. Our goal in attending the festival, you see, was to further our career in film, or at least increase the opportunities to further our career. So while Sundance was indeed a great opportunity to sit in a movie theater all day and see America’s emerging cinematic voices, we focused our efforts on networking and told ourselves we’d see the films when they came to the art houses in L.A.

Therefore we skipped the early screening of the Sundance opener, Don Roos’ Happy Endings,

starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and instead chose to rest, eat some vitamins (everyone gets the flu at Sundance), and organize our schedules around the press events, sponsored brunches and parties. And then we caught a city bus and headed out to our very first Sundance Film Festival party—the famous opening night bash up the hill and waaaay around the bend at the Snow Park Lodge.

“Sorry, you have to have a hard ticket to get in,” said the Sundance honcho, dressed in the green and orange volunteer jacket. She took an extra step to her right, accentuating her blockade of the passageway.

“Yes, but these are the vouchers to get the hard tickets.” We held up the vouchers that the Sundance liaison had given us. “We couldn’t exchange them for hard tickets because you guys closed Will Call early.”

Leaning, we could just see the flashing lights of some outrageous party filled with film executives waiting to fund our next feature film. “But we’re directors with a film in the festival. Look!” We held up our hologram-secured badges, gave her our promotional materials for “The Act”, showed her our pictures in the Sundance catalog.

“But this festival is for us. This party is for the filmmakers. And we’re filmmakers!”

So we were thrown out of the first event we tried to attend. And we were angry. So I wandered over to a group of folks huddled about a heat lamp and asked, as I lit a cigarette and scoffed with disgust, “Does anyone have an extra hard ticket to this party?”

And as quickly as the door had been slammed in our faces, it was open again. We met people, networked, gabbed, drank free vodka, and took home some of the cool little fake ice cubes that blinked orange when you turned on its LED light and dropped it in a drink. And they gave us a free hat.

Main Street: Walking along Main Street the next day we passed by Kevin Corrigan (The Slums of Beverly Hills, the sitcom Grounded for Life), who I had met outside a camera seminar at the Director’s Guild of America last summer. Kevin was happy to see us and happy to take a DVD copy of “The Act”—which later we found out didn’t work in his computer: a word to the wise, spend the extra $500 on DVD replication, not duplication. At this point we also began promoting an hour-long screening time that had been given to us as a gift for having signed “The Act” up for the Sundance Online Film Festival, which was on Tuesday the 25^th.

Sundance Filmmakers Lounge, the first Friday night – we sat mostly with the same Filmmakers Alliance folks that we knew in Los Angeles, and on the one hand I thought to myself, why not just have a party in L.A., but on the other hand, I noticed that even though the people hadn’t changed, our conversations had. The things we talked about were more intense, significant; people opened up in ways that were impossible to do in our more guarded Los Angeles world. There was a feeling of specialness, not at the expense of others, mind you—there were no elitist feelings surrounding me the way they had when I was a teenager attending Phillips Exeter Academy—but rather there was the excitement of, well, summer camp.

Robert Redford spoke to us that first Friday night.

The room was packed with directors, press, a few arms holding video cameras high above the crowd, tilting their fold-out video screens down to guide them. Redford took the microphone. “Some of these things I attend because I want to, and some of these things I attend because I have to. This is definitely…. What?”

Someone in the front of the crowd was talking to a friend, and it had thrown off Redford’s concentration.

“I’m sorry, what?” he asked politely. The woman apologized, waving off her interruption as wholly unimportant.

“Oh,” Redford got it. “I’m sorry, I’m just open to anything tonight.” And he continued right on with his speech.

And though it was a fairly insignificant moment with respect to what he’d come there to do: communicate the importance of supporting the Public Broadcasting System as it comes under attack from the right-wing-powers-that-be, that was the first moment of many that proved to me that Redford was not some Hollywood phony being shuttled around in a limo, not some over-ambitious athlete who had surpassed actual, talented actors with his good looks to become a movie star. Redford was a true actor, and his senses had been attuned to the stimuli of the moment. He wasn’t angry that he’d been interrupted. Quite simply, his focus had been pulled away. “Leaving yourself open” is a technique that actors (and spiritual gurus) use, and Redford had it so ingrained in him, that he used it without thinking, even while giving a speech at his own film festival.

Now I don’t know why I had this pre-Sundance deep-seated attitude that Redford was a Hollywood phony. I consider two of the films he directed (Ordinary People and Quiz Show) to be American masterpieces, I receive emails from him about once a month asking me to protect the BioGems—beautiful areas of the American landscape—and he narrated an amazing but obscure documentary on Chaco Canyon,

a Native American (Anasazi) city crafted by architectural genius so profoundly connected to centuries of astronomy that you could not help but conclude this culture was one of the most advanced people on Earth. So even though I had all the clues pointing me toward the fact that Redford was a truly great man, my internal cynic had resisted. The rest of Sundance amounted to an utter erosion of my skepticism. If you asked me now, I would say that Redford is one of my very few heroes.

Sundance Directors Brunch with Robert Redford:

it was Saturday morning; we got dressed and walked out into the crisp, unpolluted air. The houses that lined the suburban street were colorful Tudor-looking five bedroom affairs with attractive turrets, emitting a fairy tale subtlety to the absurdly named Annie Oakley Drive. The buses waiting to take us to the Sundance Lodge (40 minutes away from Park City) were parked about 5 blocks away from the Gitlin’s house. Susan and I climbed aboard the bus and selected two seats in the front—with a little shelf to place my leather bag, Susan’s purse and a stack of postcards (gotta love that anal retentiveness!) Kirby Dick then got on the bus. “Kirby!” we screamed. Kirby is one of the best documentarians in America (Twist of Faith , Chain Camera, Sick, Derrida), but more importantly, his daughter, Lena, went to the high school where Susan and I teach, and we watched Lena grow up from 9^th-12^th grade. And Lena was at Sundance! (But not on the bus.) Kirby is a great guy to hang with, he’s always calm, collected, observant, and easy to connect to. Susan and I really enjoyed talking with him throughout festival.

With a deep rattle and spitting exhaust, the bus lugged out of Park City and up into the winding, hilly realms of northern Utah. Coming from the stucco strip mall architecture of Los Angeles, most anywhere appears beautiful by comparison. But Utah’s snowcapped mountains and tree-lined lakes are stunning regardless of where you’re from. And the majestic beauty of the surroundings we traversed communicated clearly why one of America’s most famous movie stars would escape here and to nowhere else in the world. I turned around and saw seventy-five directors, all giddy with excitement, talking to each other. Next to Kirby was a woman named Kara Miller. She was Jamaican, but living in London. She had a short film in Sundance ("Elephant Palm Tree"

whose synopsis went something like 'After a 50 year old menopausal ex-beauty queen gets shat on by an elephant, she decides to ask her cheating husband for a divorce.') and another in Berlin. She was talking to Kirby about footage she’d shot in Cuba but never actually cut together as an actual film. It was a documentary about jiniteras, naïve island prostitutes whose desire to snatch up a husband is unendingly rejuvenated foreign boyfriend after foreign boyfriend. The material was fascinating, and Kirby was trying to convince her to go ahead and make the movie out of it. I wondered how many other conversations like that were happening during that bus ride. Like a convention of top businessmen and women, this bus was filled with souls who would shape the future.

“This is your dream, Pi,” Susan whispered to me. ”You’ve dreamt of this for years, and now you’ve achieved it.”

The bus turned hard right and began the serious business of mounting the great hill of the Sundance resort where Redford lived. Dappled sunlight broke through the fir and pine. A brook trickled down the side of the road, a low wall of snow lining the current.

“Technically,” I said. “That’s not correct. My dream was always of bringing a feature here to Sundance and getting into a bidding war. But this is… better. Look around. This is the powerful difference that one man can make. On this bus… these are culture-makers, all together, going to be celebrated and honored. This is done by a man who has no other motivation for creating the Institute and the Festival than the desire to do something good. This place is not some exercise in vanity, it’s not like he’s propagating his own image over and over. It’s an honest attempt to do something with all his fame, all his fortune, and it’s an attempt to have that something be significant. This is better than my greedy dream. This is an honor.”

The food was amazing. Pistachio encrusted halibut. Pear, gorgonzola and baby greens salad. Fresh squeezed orange juice. Prime rib. And a giant cookie with the Sundance logo painted in frosting over top. We again sat with Kirby and Kara. But flanking our right side was Tom Putnam, a fellow Filmmakers Alliance member and the famed director of last year’s most successful short film, “Tom Hits His Head”, which is an autobiographical account of a strange year in Tom’s life following a bump on the head: paranoia, hallucinations, obsessive internet shopping. I don’t know why, but Tom reminds me of a studly librarian

. He has a serious countenance, a low voice, a quick wit, Midwest good looks without the corn-fed height, and he’s the product of a strict Baptist upbringing (his brother is the lead singer/songwriter of the indie-pop wonder, The Standard). Tom is also a Filmmakers Alliance member as well as someone who made his Sundance short film (“Broadcast 23”

) through Fox Searchlight, as we did.

So it was natural that we hooked up before the festival and interviewed each other for the Filmmakers Alliance Magazine, and natural that we spent a lot of time with Tom, who became a good friend by the time summer camp, er, Sundance was over. If you get to know him, you’ll see that Tom has a subtle, wounded quality about him. His pain is perceptible beneath his sharp wit—I see it sometimes in the miniscule pauses he takes before he responds, or in the thoughtful moments while walking with his head down—different from the neurotic planning in which his ambition enlists him. Tom’s an idealist, a dreamer who’s been damaged, and his sense of humor, his dry wit, his quirky jokes are an attempt not only to defend against the pain of the past, but to heal the present as well. At one point during the festival, we were at a strange party in an upscale furniture store off of Main Street—large Americana renditions of cowboys, maps and cars constructed of old license plates

next to warm lamps and velvet chairs; a Tori Amos-style pianist belting out emotional melodies—and Tom was feeling disheartened about his lack of mingling/networking/socializing at Sundance. He had already left the upscale furniture store party—partially because we’d heard that the New York Times was hosting the furniture store party, and in fact the NYT was nowhere to be found, rather a new and obscure indie website called IndieIN was hosting, so the party turned out to be “less important” than we’d anticipated—to seek out greener pastures.

Susan and I, in our new role as alternately-neurotic-alternately-zen filmmakers had hit a momentary calm and chosen to stay instead of chase the party, and anyway, I figured, all the industry folks touring the Saturday party circuit would eventually tour here. So Tom had left to seek out a “Slamdance party” that was supposed to be a lot of fun, but which turned out only to be a rumor of a party and not an actual event. So he’d returned—disappointed. By that time I’d had my fifth glass of a drink, Red Bull

and Vodka

, (new for me, but according to the VH1 special I’d seen on cable the night before old news by 1999) and had melded into a drunk-but-amped talking machine ready to meet anyone and yap their ear off about film. Tom said to me, “I need to hang with the master. I’ll follow your lead. I can’t do this schmoozing thing.” Of course I immediately gave Susan credit for all my socializing skills, and pointed out Susan where—of course—she was making a group of people laugh. Instead of heading out into the social fray as it were, I paused to tell Tom more about what Susan had showed me.

Tom had given us a ride home from the Robert Redford brunch (where Susan had, of course, talked to Redford, made him laugh, given him a “The Act” DVD and praised his directing), and during that car ride, Susan had been telling Tom some intense, personal anecdotes about her life, my life, our life together. Tom had been a touch guarded, replying in monosyllables, and prompting Susan to later worry that Tom didn’t care for her as a person. I knew, however, that it was nothing about how Tom felt about Susan. Susan’s great. Everyone likes Susan. And if they don’t like her, they usually get into a conflict with her. There had been no conflict in Tom’s car. Tom, I sensed, had been in self-protection mode. What Susan was saying would have affected him deeply because Tom is a sensitive soul, but somehow he needed to minimize that power in order to protect himself. He didn’t know us that well, after all, but because we had so much in common with Tom, Susan and I had shotgunned the intimacy.

So I decided to tell Tom about how Susan had taught me, purely by example, about giving of oneself. “I became a substitute teacher because I needed to pay the rent,” I told him. “And I felt horrible about it. I mean, here I am, a genius filmmaker (in my own estimation, right?) and I have to lower myself, degrade myself and work for a living as a substitute teacher in the fucking Los Angeles Unified School District.

Like a punishment. So when I got in the classroom, I didn’t want the kids to touch me, or even get near me. They’d approach the desk, and if they got too close, I’d yell, ‘Stay on the other side, thank you! That’s far enough!’ I was scared of them. Some of it because of the media’s always exaggerating reports of gang violence in schools, but most of it because, ‘What if they find out about me? What if they learn my first name? What if they find out where I live? What if they discover personal details about my life? They could use all that against me!!!’ Which is all true, you know, they could. But when Susan came to substitute teach at the same school and I observed her during my free periods, I saw that she immediately gave them personal details about her life. And she was experienced, she had taught deaf gang members in the Bronx for years. You know, a tough job. She knew. And she immediately put herself out there in a way I had refused to do. She did everything I was afraid of. And you know what the kids did? They could have stalked her or made fun of her or egged her house or stolen her car, but you know what they did? They trusted her. And they listened to her. And they came to her for advice. They opened up to her. You know what I’m saying? They responded to her in kind. She gave of herself, Tom, and they gave back. That’s what she taught me. You know, when you give of yourself, if you do it whole-heartedly, there’s only about a 1% chance that someone will use it against you, because there are a couple evil people in the world. But 99% of the kids or the people that you give yourself to will respond in kind, or at least be really, really impressed and respect your honesty.” (Now, of course, when we looked over at Susan, she was actually sitting on the piano bench with the pianist,

accompanying her in a duet.)

I didn’t have to connect the dots between my substitute teaching and my ability to meet and talk with people in a film industry setting—Tom got it. And he thanked me later for it. Tom may be occasionally guarded, and when he sits with friends and bats around the banter oh-so-wittily at the dinner table it may be in part to exercise his brain and in part to avoid profound subjects, but Tom Putnam also uses his intelligence in my absolute favorite way: to take something significant to heart. As the years pass, I become more and more disenchanted with disenchantment. I find that the cynical ones are gifted men and women who squander their gifts in selfish ways. So when someone as clever as Tom, someone capable of creating hip art, current art, on-the-edge art, when someone as stylishly artistic as that is also smart enough to take to heart a 2^nd hand lesson, it gives me hope not just for humanity in general, but for my neighborhood: Hollywood.

They put Susan in a corporate sponsored Mac makeup chair (the makeup company, not the computer) and began brushing, applying, fawning. I poked around the waiting room, bored, watching as giant portraits of Sundance celebrities inched out of a huge printer: Adrien Brody looking vulnerable, Chevy Chase looking child-molesty under a wall mounted deer head, Heather Graham on Main Street. Then I recognized the AFI FEST publicist, Rebecca Fisher, as she entered with two guys who looked like filmmakers.

Rebecca and I had talked a lot before and during the AFI FEST, so I was happy to see her. I gave her a big hug, and then she didn’t introduce me to the people standing in front of us. We all stood there in an awkward silence.

“Yes,” she replied. Back to awkward silence. Rebecca grudgingly added, “Would you like to meet them?”

As they were standing two feet from me, I felt kind of silly. Of course I’d like to meet them, if only to avoid this ridiculous awkwardness. I held up my filmmaker pass to show them my name since they looked like they were from Europe. “I’m Pi Ware.”

And that’s when I lost my cool. “Shut up!!! Are you serious?!” I was shouting at him. “Are you really Thomas Vinterberg??!!!”

“Man, you don’t understand! That’s amazing!” I whipped out a Solitude

postcard from my coat pocket. “The Celebration

was the reason that we shot our first feature how and when we did. Here, it’s called Solitude. It’s nearly Dogme-95! We just got distribution…” and I blathered on and on about how his film had inspired us and how amazing he was, and lo and behold, he expressed great interest in seeing Solitude.

“Here, let me give you my office number, and you can send the film to me in Denmark.” He searched for something to write on. I handed him another Solitude postcard.

“Oh, and would you sign it?” I was bubbling over like a kid. “You know, autograph it?”

A bemused smile crept over his model good looks. “Yes, okay.” And he signed the postcard, adding a smiley face next to his name. “You can contact my assistant, Claus.”

I dragged Vinterberg over to Susan in the makeup chair and introduced him, and then he was gone, but, man, I’m smiling about the whole affair even as I write this. Gotta love Sundance for once-in-a-lifetime opportunities like that.

Filmmakers Alliance Party: Crowded little space with free drinks and no snacks, which put a damper on Susan and my plan to eat only free meals at Sundance. Lots of great folks, and I made my most serious effort to promote the Tuesday digital screening of “The Act” at the Sundance Digital Center. Lots of postcard passing out, lots of repeating the question, “May I give you a shameless plug for my movie?” This was the one party where we had the authority to invite guests, and we invited our generous hosts, Susan and Lee Gitlin. It was curious to find out that Lee and I had a lot of the same favorite jokes. He also told me great stories about living in Mormon Land

, including “The Summer The Mormon Girl Across the Street Discovered Sex and Other Screaming Orgasms at 2 a.m.” and “The Time I Rented My Home to Strippers to Piss Off the Judgmental Mormons in Salt Lake City.”

I found myself spending a lot of time with the Gitlins, staying at home and chatting with them about film, stand up comedy, or, my favorite: their unique personal histories: he was brought up a Long Island Jew, she a Kansas Catholic, and they had both converted to staunch Baptists—independently of one another, without saying a thing—after dating for a few months. They felt the coincidental conversion was a sign from God and they got married at age 19. Then they got rid of all television, never went to movies, stopped drinking, and both became private investigators. Eventually however, they felt that the religion was too strict for them and their three kids, and they drifted away from the Church. If you saw Lee, you’d never guess he had been a mullet-styled, mustachioed teetotaler, for now he’s a shorn-headed X-treme athlete looking guy with matching silver hoop earrings in each ear. Anyhow, they were extremely generous, and Susan and I hope to stay with them in future Sundances.

Digital Screenings of “The Act”: hung a poster in the mall that hosted the digital center. Passed out still further postcards, and filled the theater 1/3 – 1/2 of the way for each of the three consecutive screenings. They all went well, and several people spoke to us afterwards, having been deeply affected by the film.

Actress Thora Birch

wandered by and asked us about sound mixers and cinematographers, as she is getting ready to shoot her first feature film. It’s a 10 million dollar budget, and she’s never made even a short. Eef.

Our manager, Steve Crawford, at 9 Yards Entertainment, was also at Sundance, and we had an opportunity to spend some time hanging out with him before our screenings. We met Crawford after an AFI FEST screening of "The Act", when he presented us with a card of his. At first we thought that he must be some low-level Hollywood hanger-on freak, because who would come up to us after a screening and be all interested and stuff? Much to our great surprise, Crawford turned out to be from a reputable company, to be quite intelligent, to be very passionate, to have a keen eye for film scripts, and despite all that to really really like our work! He hadn't stalked us at AFI at all, he had discovered us! We were so excited about having Crawford aboard our filmmaking team, that we considered marrying him at Sundance. We were in Utah, after all.

Here is a list of the celebrities/critics that we were able to foist the DVD on:

Our screenings: We played before a feature film, Love, Ludlow.

Apparently there had been a kind of split between the writer/financier and the director, because there seemed to be two camps of people involved in the same film, and they weren’t happy with one another. The writer was an ebullient and friendly fireman named Dave Paterson, and the director, an acting teacher from NYC, Adrienne Weiss.

We ended up joking around with and spending some good time with Dave Paterson and his family and friends, who are great, genuine folks. One of the best jokes of Paterson's script involves a nervous guy wooing a stern girl from Queens, and he says, “You know, I heard it takes more muscles to frown than to smile.” “That’s how I work out,” she retorts. Paterson documented his time at the festival in a blog (that’s still running). (I recently read another expression:, “It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn’t take any to sit there with a dumb expression on your face.”)

Roger Ebert:

If only Roger Ebert reviewed shorts on his TV show. We kept running into Ebert. First at the Sundance Marriott Headquarters, where he nonchalantly sat down at the table next to us. (I don’t know if your family watched “Siskel and Ebert” in religious conjunction with “The Muppet Show” every Sunday when you were growing up, but mine did, and Ebert has always been an integral part of my cinematic education. This was a big moment for me!) This was minutes after the news of Johnny Carson’s death broke, and Ebert was pretty shaken up about it. In between attacking the keys of his silver laptop (12” PowerBook G4, god I love Apple’s laptops!) he regaled us with accounts of being on the Carson show and being completely torn apart by nerves.

The next time we ran into Ebert was before a morning screening of “The Act” and Love, Ludlow. He took the cast and crew of Love, Ludlow out for a photo session, and invited Susan and I to pose for his camera afterwards. Which we did. And it would have been fine, simple, easy, except that Ebert had this arty concept of composing our short-and-tall figures behind a snowbank which we first had to climb, and which, of course, was crunchy and hollow from all the recent sunshine. So we broke through the surface, tripped, soaked our pants, fell over. “Only for you, Roger!” Susan called out. Crunch, smash, fall. “You’re the only one who would get me to do this in my good pants!”

After the screening we again saw Ebert as he wound his way out of the theater. “It was beautiful,” he said of our short. “Thank you for making this movie.” Susan and I floated to the bus, grinning ear to ear, and headed to our next free meal. And what a meal. It was a meet-the-press event where atop a red table they’d perched a fondue fountain cascading dark chocolate over three tiers of silver, and into which we dipped strawberries, bananas, canteloupe and Susan’s favorite “Peanut butter rice krispie treats!”. It was a good day.

Click here to see the picture of us that Ebert posted on his website.

Our final encounter with Ebert was at the awards ceremony, where we chatted with Ebert for a good twenty minutes about Woody Allen, World War II, anti-Semitism, Phillip Roth, and Todd McCarthy who came over to us right at that moment. “Todd McCarthy, the most famous critic in America,” said Ebert. “Oh, wait, I’m the most famous critic in America, you’re the most important.” Ebert introduced us to McCarthy, who didn’t seem that interested in chatting with us, as he was really focused on getting the inside scoop from Ebert. We took our leave, and watched the ceremony which had some surprises, including a special jury prize for an editor, which meant the ceremonies had to pause and wait for the editor to rush in from the overflow room. One thing I clearly noticed about Sundance, if you ain’t a director, and you ain’t a celebrity, and you ain’t press, I don’t care if you spent 13 months in a dark room sculpting out a film’s narrative, or you spent 5 years coming up with the original idea, executing it and constantly rewriting it into a script, you ain’t getting’ special treatment. It’s in the Sundance mission statement that this festival is about the directors, and they’re stickin’ to it. And in a way that’s elitism and that’s unfair because film is such a collaborative medium. Elitism is good for the elite, I can vouch, still savoring the taste of that pistachio-encrusted halibut and chocolate fondue fountain. And I don’t feel horribly guilty about the special treatment Susan and I received because we’re definitely the authors of our short. (And we were able to give some of our free tickets to our wonderful producer, Samuel Dowe-Sandes and wonderful composer, Andrew Gross, who attended Sundance with us.)

But for other films, where there was a great writer and a not-so-great director, it’s a damn shame. Elitism is created within the distribution of resources. If all that halibut and chocolate were split up between the directors and the writers and the editors, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. We’d all leave the banquet hungry. Or rather, they’d use the money to buy plenty of food, but it’d be whitefish and cheap-o chocolate in a bucket. They’d diminish the specialness of the events. Is that right? Is that good? My financial advisor (a fellow Exeter graduate) and I once had a conversation about elitism and the distribution of resources. I asked him if he’d seen Sling Blade,

and he immediately soured.

“I hate movies like that, with the mentally deficient… where everybody cheers when the mentally deficient achieve a level of ability that’s average and everyone’s excited about it, like some great human feat has been accomplished. I can’t stand that. It takes a huge amount of resources to get under-performing people up to a near-average level, just as it takes a huge amount of resources to get people who are high achievers to reach their full potential. Why should we be diverting away resources that could help talented, intelligent or athletic people achieve new heights? Why, as a society, would we handcuff progress just to raise the lowest common denominator and inch or two?” I’ll admit that intellectually he had a good point. But it tasted bad. Throngs of goose-stepping Nazis conjured themselves into my imagination…

Family: As a great surprise, support and added bonus, my parents and my sister came to Sundance. Having their presence there was amazing (when they bickered it made me feel at home, when they teared up before our first screening it made me feel accomplished), and we all stayed in a condo during the second half of the festival, a family vacation as it were. My mom came up with a great line when folks saw her "The Act" badge and asked her what she did on the film. She'd say, "I produced the director." Nice one, Ma.

It was great to spend some quality time with my sister, Sheridan, walking briskly through the winter town, eating snowflakes and then consuming loads of free sashimi (yes, sashimi!) at an IFC party that our friend, Jerry Rapp, got us passes to. We all got drunk and played a movie trivia game

complete with the host, sexy-yet-bored bellhop babe, Jeopardy-style-displays, and buzzers like1980's garage door openers. We also went to the Kodak party, and waited in line for half an hour with Don Roos and cinematographer Clark Mathis (both very cool, down-to-earth people) and then, once inside, Sheridan and Susan danced to a classic rock cover band while I huddled beneath heat lamps on the patio smoking cigarettes with other filmmakers (and slipping a DVD to a programmer of the Cannes Film Festival!). I was very impressed with the accessibility, good humor and ego-less attitudes of nearly every single filmmaker I met at Sundance and Slamdance. That was a fresh and new experience for me. Why it was that way, I don't know. Was it simply that everyone was in a good mood? Or are the creepy, desperate filmmakers who feel you're always in competition with them not allowed entry into Park City? Maybe both? Whatever the case may be (probably because we'd already gotten programmed at the premiere festival in the U.S. and had nothing further to worry about) there was a palpable sense of mutual generosity and collaboration among filmmakers.

When we left the Kodak party, we got yet another free hat. In total, we came home with 19 hats we hadn't taken to Park City.

The End: My hands hurt from typing. I think that I’d better post this blog soon, or I’ll never stop, and it will already be time for next year’s Sundance report. It’s hard to let go of writing, to stop, say it’s finished, when you know that it’s so hopelessly incomplete. I am just too neurotic, my brain too feverish, my experience in Park City too vivid to ever transcribe it in full.

As a final note, I have to say that Sundance exceeded my hopes. Showtime offered to buy “The Act” for their women’s channel, and upon our return to L.A., KQED also offered to buy it. Peter Rice at Fox Searchlight gave us the go-ahead on completing the sale, the trick is—as it usually is—in the legality of contracts, unions and broadcast rights, which are pretty sticky in a shorts made through Searchlight, unfortunately. So we’ll let the, gulp, Fox lawyers decide our fate.

Unfortunately, also upon our return to L.A., we learned that Susan’s mother had passed away while we were on the plane. I won’t go into much detail as to our trip back to New York and the subsequent service, except to say that Susan put together a beautiful and moving memorial to her mother, the woman who has so blessed my wife with such a dynamic personality, the woman who taught her never to be invisible in a room, the woman who is the inspiration for our next script, the woman who many loved, but few, as clichéd as it sounds, ever understood. We’ll miss Barbara Kraker. May her soul rest in peace.