Sundance Diary: The Final Countdown

I realize, in looking at my early entries, that I’ve been doing a lot of bellyaching about the altitude and the attitude at Sundance, so let me lay this one on you: After Saturday’s PlanetOut Queer Brunch, I was making my way down Main Street with some friends when it suddenly started snowing. And we’re talking big, fat flakes, the kind that cover hats and mittens and stylish black parkas. These giant snowflakes were scattered about by the wind, the kind of wind that blows snow onto your tongue and that inspires writers to use the word wafting. Bear in mind, I’ve spent most of my life living in Atlanta or Dallas or Los Angeles, three places where snow occurs rarely or never, so I’m totally unjaded about this particular brand of precipitation. For that one moment, the din of deal-making and product-whoring and scene-making was drowned out by my own internal soundtrack of Vince Guaraldi.

Monday, January 23

8:35 A.M.: I wake up feeling more rested than I have since arriving in Utah, and decide to dash over to the Eccles to see if I can snag a press ticket for the 9:15 A.M. screening of writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s new comedy Stay. I don’t know much about the movie, but my buddy Jack Plotnick (Girls Will Be Girls) is in the cast. And besides, I’ve always been a fan of Goldthwait’s directorial debut, Shakes the Clown.

9:13 A.M.: Holy mother of Robert Redford, I make it on time and I get a ticket. I give Jack a big hug downstairs before dashing up to the balcony to find a decent seat. As I get settled in, my cell phone rings—it’s devoted reading-attender Dave Kittredge, who’s calling me from about 25 seats to my right, so I pick up my stuff and join him for the screening. Stay turns out to be a hilarious and shocking comedy about a woman who finds herself haunted by a bizarre sexual moment in her past (and I’m not telling you what it is) when her fiancée demands that there be “no secrets” between them. The first two thirds of the movie are consistently, gut-bustingly hilarious, but there’s a chunk of fairly serious drama to get through before a funny, happy ending. A return to the editing room to smooth out the abrupt shift in tone could easily turn Stay into a much-talked-about outrageous comedy for grown-ups. (And Jack, incidentally, gives an exceptional performance as the heroine’s meth-abusing straight brother.)

10:55 A.M.: I’m chatting with indie producer and acquisitions exec Eric d’Arbeloff (Super Size Me) in the Eccles lobby before I realize that I need to make tracks, and pronto, to the Prospector Square to catch the world premiere of Small Town Gay Bar. I had told my festival chum (and the film’s director) Malcolm Ingram that I’d be there by 11, and at this point I’m going to have to dash to make it by 11:30, when the movie starts.

11:29 A.M.: One seemingly endless bus ride later, I go running into the lobby of the Prospector. I can’t find the usually helpful publicist Jim Dobson anywhere with my ticket, but I spot Malcolm in the lobby and just follow him into the house. I plop down into an aisle seat in what turns out to be an islet of cool lesbians—archivist Kim Yutani, whom I’ve known since she worked on Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up, is sitting two seats to my left; and behind me are filmmaker Silas Howard (director-star of By Hook or by Crook and former guitarist for Tribe 8) as well as producers Steak House and Valerie Stadler. Their short film What I Love About Dying is screening before Small Town Gay Bar, and it’s a moving and funny salute to Kris Kovick, a legend in San Francisco’s spoken-word scene whose sense of intelligence and irreverence carries her through to her own death of breast cancer. After the short ends, it’s time for the feature, and I hope for one last time that I like the movie, because I’ve had a great time hanging with Ingram and his boyfriend, Chris, and I really don’t want to have to go the “Hey, congratulations on getting it finished” route. (Another thing to say to someone whose movie you don’t like, per festival veteran Jenni Olson, is “You must feel so excited right now.”)

1:00 P.M.: No need for euphemisms—I’m blown away by Small Town Gay Bar. Maybe I was expecting something sort of whimsical or “inspiring,” but Ingram has crafted an ode to what we really mean when we call ourselves a “gay community.” Looking at two bars in Mississippi—one that’s about to be sold and one that’s about to reopen—the film shows us how, for people who live in rural areas, the local gay bar is the only place where people can go to be themselves and find other people with whom they have any kind of kinship.

And in addition to introducing us to the drag queens and butch dykes you might expect to see in a documentary with this title, Ingram takes his camera into the belly of the beast, interviewing religious hatemongers Fred Phelps (who gets just enough screen time to become wholly ridiculous, not that he wasn’t already) and Tim Wildmon. In perhaps the film’s funniest sequence, Wildmon—whose father Donald founded the American Family Association, where Wildmon fils also toils—professes a live-and-let-live philosophy about gays while the film’s queer interviewees remember how Donald Wildmon and other AFA members would write down license plate numbers of cars that visited gay bars, then would read those numbers on the radio the next day. Ultimately, Small Town Gay Bar is a powerful portrait of gay men and lesbians who refuse to decamp for gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, or even Dallas: They choose to stay and fight—to lead the lives they want to lead in the place they’ve always known as home.