Sundance Memories (if I've got them)

Sundance, to those of us on the other side of 40 (well, maybe I should admit to 45... well, maybe I... ++ Never Mind ++) seems like our idea of what 25 year old Melrose Avenue habitues do when set loose on the Strip with too much money.

It's more crowded than Soho in New York on a weekend, when the Bridge and Tunnel crowd bus in from New Jersey and Long Island in a desperate search for *** fun ***. The most boring parties are the ones you stay at for more than an hour. The most exciting restaurants are the ones that you can't get into for two hours.

And, actually, aside from an unfortunate stomach virus that knocked me out for a few days, I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Now, I was there to do work -- sorta. I was teaching in the Film Center (which was called the Digital Center last year, but still was in the basement of the Main Street Mall), giving a series of talks on Storytelling through Editing. One of them was about picture editing (if you've taken my Intermediate Editing class, you've gotten the longer version of it -- 16 weeks of it, as opposed to 60 minutes). Another was about using sound and music to do the same thing. The classes were jammed packed, and enthusiastic. I'll tell you, it's enough to give a guy a severe case of the "feeling gratified."

As for the films I saw... well... there's a story there. But the long and the short of it is that I saw... well... none. I didn't do my due diligence and I was counting on getting in with some other USC people. But the tickets were in even worse supply than last year (which was my first Sundance, and the reports then that getting tickets was worse than ever). Most of the big films will be coming out in the next few months anyway -- in fact when we went to see the incredibly disappointing Walk The Line a few days ago, they were running a trailer for Thank You For Smoking, which played at the festival. The really interesting films were running in the World Competition and the Dox and, for all I know, down the street at Slamdance.

USC students and alumnae were all over the place. The USC party was actually a complete and total gas. Then the Jennifer Aniston party after that was incredible. Well, not really. Well, actually, I wouldn't have the foggiest notion. I don't get invited to any of those parties.

Next year, would someone please invite me to a party where there's going to be a photographer?? I don't want to be photographed, I just want to be at a party that rates a photographer.

Anyway, I'm back to work now. It looks like I'm going to be co-editing a genre film in the next few months. More on this in future posts, but I figure I can rest after I'm dead.