The queer side of Sundance

The Advocate’s arts and entertainment editor, Alonso Duralde, headed to the Sundance Film Festival for a busy four-day stay that would get him and the magazine first glimpses at some of the LGBT movies heading to theaters in 2006, from the Robin Williams-Armistead Maupin film The Night Listener to microbudget documentaries like Small Town Gay Bar. With this online diary, Duralde takes us along on his whirlwind trip through the screening rooms, restaurants, parties, and, um, facilities of Park City, Utah. This is part one of three installments.

Thursday

Given my proclivity for being devastated by the low temperatures and high altitude of Park City, Utah, my mantra for the past several weeks has been “I will not get sick at Sundance. I will not get sick at Sundance.” I now realize I should have been more specific, as I have become sick the day before I leave for the mammoth film festival. Nothing contagious, but my sinuses are draining everywhere they shouldn’t, and I’m going to have to down some major amounts of Tylenol Sinus before I can get onto an airplane without my head going all Scanners on me.

Friday

5 a.m.: Wake up and get dressed to go to the airport.

7:30 a.m.: Take off for Salt Lake City. On the flight, I have a stroke of incredible luck: The couple sitting next to me are showbiz people who are actually charming—he’s a writer, she’s with one of the bigger production houses—and the producer-lady lends me an incredible piece of in-flight reading, a script for a movie that my friends and I can’t wait to see. That’s right, it’s Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson and...well, a bunch of snakes. It’s a title that’s a pitch, and it’s a brilliant concept. Tragically, the stewardess does not land the plane in the script I read, but it was a 2003 draft, so I can hope that this dreadful oversight has since been corrected.

11-ish: Land in SLC. The showbiz couple invites me to hop onto their shuttle van to Park City, a trip that takes about 45 minutes. As we arrive in Park City, I ask the van driver if Sundance is something that the locals look forward to every year. “Oh, God, no,” he replies. “We hate it.” And I can totally understand why—imagine every obnoxious me-me-my-needs-now person in film, television, music, and the Internet crammed into one tiny ski resort town, making hideous demands and wearing hideous ski outfits. That’s Sundance.

To be fair, of course, Sundance is also a great place to see exciting new independent films from around the world. But now that it’s become a destination for Paris Hilton and her ilk, it’s harder and harder to get through all the hype and corporate sponsorship to actually get to the movies. I still remember coming to my first Sundance in 1995, where there was one party every night where you would see everyone from the movie stars to the makers of short films, mingling and dancing to some horrible local wedding band. Now there’s a premiere party for practically every movie, and there are any number of parties each night hosted by car companies and magazines and vodkas. And since Paris might be there, they get crowded and pushy and obnoxious. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

1 p.m.: Settle into the condo I’m sharing with filmmaker-historian extraordinaire Jenni Olson. I note on my schedule that there’s a press screening at 1:30 of The World According to Sesame Street, one of the more buzzed-about documentaries in the festival. I figure maybe I can walk down to headquarters at the Marriott, pick up my press credentials, and make it to the theater, albeit a little bit late.

2:15 p.m.: Who was I kidding? The Sundance press office is well-organized, but there’s just so much to take in. By the time I get my badge photo taken, check my mailbox, and look at forms to get hard tickets to future screenings, it’s, well, 2:15. There must have been a fairly lengthy short film beforehand, though, because I wind up catching most of Sesame Street, and it merits the good advance word-of-mouth. The film looks at how Sesame Workshop imports the beloved kids’ show to the rest of the world, and the specificity they try to bring to each country where the show is aired. It touches upon the controversy around Kami, the HIV-positive Muppet character featured in the South African version, but the film manages to generate genuine tension and suspense in its final third: Will the show get on the air in Bangladesh? Moviewise, I’m off to a good start.

4 p.m.: Healthwise, not so much. My sinuses have been draining down the back of my throat, taking away most of my voice and making the remaining amount of it sound like Tallulah Bankhead. And not to take anything away from Miss Bankhead, but throaty doesn’t really work for me. I nurse a hot tea with honey on Main Street and meet up with publicist Jim Dobson, one of those charmers who seems to know everything that’s going on in all places at once. He introduces me to Malcolm Ingram, director of the documentary Small Town Gay Bar, and his boyfriend, Chris. I’ll be seeing the film later in the festival, but I tell Ingram that I enjoyed his first film, Drawing Flies. It becomes immediately apparent that he doesn’t hear this much, and we bond instantly.

4:45 p.m.: OK, I have a few hours to kill before seeing the Tony Kushner documentary at 8 p.m. I could either take a much-needed nap or try to fight the crowds at the ASCAP Music Café when Rufus Wainwright performs at 6 p.m. And I do love me some Rufus.

5:15 p.m.: Zzzzzzzzzzz.

7:45 p.m.: As I walk into the Yarrow, a ski lodge that has several ballrooms converted into movie theaters for the duration of Sundance, I walk past indie starlet Robin Tunney. She and Alexis Bledel are totally turning into the same person.

8 p.m.: Oscar-winner Frieda Lee Mock’s Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner. Like Kushner’s work, the film is provocative, witty, and angry. The film’s timeline cleverly works in two directions, showing us his life before Angels in America (growing up in Lake Charles, La., before moving to New York as a Columbia undergrad) and after (writing Homebody/Kabul, Only We Who Guard the Mystery…, and Caroline, or Change, among others). One odd thing—Mock shows us Kushner’s wedding with his partner, Mark Harris, but we never hear anything else about Harris for the entire film. He occasionally appears in the background, reading or tending house, but he is never interviewed, and Kushner never talks about him, how they met, his importance to his life, anything. If Harris didn’t want to participate in the documentary, fine. But including the wedding and then otherwise not acknowledging his existence is rather jarring.

9:45 p.m.: In the Yarrow men’s room, of all places, I run into my old friend John Polly, who’s now an editor at Genre. We head over to the Queer Lounge party.

10:05 p.m.: A recent addition to Sundance, the Queer Lounge has immediately established itself as the place to be. During the day, it hosts panels (I’ll be doing one Sunday) and offers space for queer (and queer-friendly) Sundance participants to mingle, schmooze, and relax. And at night, the Lounge parties. This particular party is happening in two rooms, and both are rather full. John introduces me to some of the CBS News on Logo folks. I finally run into my roomie Jenni, and she introduces me to some happening lesbian producers. I see my friend Bob King, who directed Psycho Beach Party, and scads of other gay and lesbian filmmakers and publicists. And then I realize that, nap aside, I’ve been up since 5 a.m. and am fighting off a sinus infection. So Jenni and I decide to bail at 11 and go crash at our pad. Which we do.