Allison the Assistant’s Amazing Adventures: Sundance Film Festival 2009

We arrive in Park City on Tuesday Night. We immediately head downtown to our favorite Beer and Pizza place. While walking, one member of our group swears that he saw Danny Masterson (Hyde from “That 70’s Show”). Since the group member didn’t want to make a scene, Danny was long gone by the time we were made aware of this sighting. Therefore, we decided to come up with a code. Anytime one of us sees a possible celebrity we say “I dropped my cell phone” and everyone has to look around to figure out where the celebrity is. This code worked pretty well later on when I was in the Sundance shop with a girl from my group. She said the code and I looked up to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Pretty exciting! That night I received my festival pass, as well as five tickets for movies I picked out last December.

I woke up early to try to wait list for the movie “Art and Copy,” a documentary about advertising. Unfortunately it was at a small venue and only about 5 waitlisters got in :-(. First time in three years that I haven’t made it into a movie on a waitlist. That afternoon a bunch of us went to “Paper Heart,” my first Sundance movie this year! This film was in the Dramatic competition, but its really a hybrid of a documentary and a romantic comedy. There was real documentary footage along with staged “documentary” footage that included a love story between the main character and Michael Cera of “Superbad” fame. The lead, Charlene Yi, was super cute and totally made the movie what it was. We found out during the Q&A that both Michael Cera and Charlene Yi had to leave the day before, so we just missed them…so sad!  A few people in my group attended “The Yes Men Fix the World,” a documentary about two men who infiltrate corporate events in order to create havoc and expose corporate criminals from the inside.

One of the props in the movie was this newspaper  which was given out as free swag at the screening. When they walked into the condo holding these papers we were all like “OMG, Obama actually did it!” But alas, we were sorely disappointed 🙁

We woke up REALLY early to go to a student meet and greet breakfast. The flyer said it included a “light” breakfast and we were a bit disappointed to receive a paper sack with yogurt and an apple…not the bacon and eggs I was dreaming of…oh well! We got to meet three directors: Robert Stone “Earth Days,” Duncan Jones “Moon,” and Tze Chun “Children of Invention.” We also got to try out a new form of editing technology in which you use interactive gloves to cut together pieces of video. The result is like a music remix, but with video. I almost missed my second movie, a documentary called “211: Anna,” because I thought it was at 6pm instead of 5:30pm. Luckily, we were able to walk in just as the film started. A couple people in my group attended a panel and were invited to a cocktail party hosted by Kuma Games, so I tagged along. Kuma Games is developing a really interesting style of video game in which you can choose at any time whether to play or just sit back and watch the story like a movie. It seemed really interesting, but I’m not sure which format they are planning to release it on. I left the party early to attend a midnight showing of “Mystery Team” which was incredibly funny. The interesting thing about this movie is that it was created by “DERRICK Comedy,” a comedy group that has posted 40 short YouTube videos with over 100 million hits. This is the first time I know of that YouTube stars have made it to the big screen in such a way. Check them out at http://www.derrickcomedy.com/videos/. Their videos are pretty good for amateur YouTube videos.

Day Four