12 Legs Travel

A few days ago, in Park City, Utah, Jill and I sat in a theater with about 600 other people for a 5:15 p.m. screening of a movie called “Get Low.” At precisely 5:14, a slender man walked to the front of the room and introduced the film, eloquently and succinctly. The house lights dimmed, and rows upon rows of iPhones went dark, like a mass suicide of fireflies.

When the movie’s opening credits rolled, the words onscreen appeared slightly out of focus. Had we been at a cinema anywhere else besides Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, I would have squirmed in my seat, wondering how long I should give the projectionist to fix the problem before I got up, walked out, and reported the issue to the nearest teenaged employee in an ill-fitting shirt and crooked bowtie.

But before I could get squirmy at this particular screening, hundreds of fellow audience members shouted “Focus!” in perfect unison, as if prompted by the firing of some shared internal synapse, and the credits sharpened instantly. I turned to Jill, and we exchanged a smile.

This moment perfectly defines Sundance for me. It’s not about gawking at celebrities, kanoodling in front of ski-lodge fireplaces or cradling lattes between conspicuously new mittens; it’s simply about experiencing movies in a setting where everyone appreciates them.

I’m often hesitant to tell folks I attend Sundance because I worry about being viewed as uppity or “artsy-fartsy.” But the festival, at least the way Jill and I do it, is far from glamorous. We spend hours standing in lines. We pack snacks and sandwiches in Jill’s camera bag. We lurch from theater to theater aboard crowded city buses. After midnight shows, we make the long walk back to our accommodations in the bitter cold.

This year we rented a room in the condo of 65-year-old ski bunny with two cats. Last year we slept in a single bed in a loft we shared with 12 stoned-out vegans. We found both on Craigslist. We allowed ourselves only two luxuries last week: dinner at Bangkok Thai on Main (an old favorite) and glasses of rye at High West Distillery (a new one).

In a way, our pilgrimage to Sundance is a microcosm of our larger road trip. It would be easy to write off Sundance as an indulgent waste of time if we didn’t so love watching and discussing movies; and it would be easy to classify the festival as unattainable if we weren’t inclined to figure out ways to make it work for our fragile budget and simple-folk sensibilities.

Don’t get me wrong: If you prefer a little glamour with your film festival, you need not go to Cannes to get it; there are plenty of parties and concerts afoot in Park City where you can shed your puffy jacket and rub naked elbows with industry insiders, indie ingénues and guys who look like, and may actually be, Ryan Gosling. You just have to be cooler than us to get in the door.

Luckily for me, Jill is content just walking around in the snow discussing documentaries about cultural anthropologists who exploited the Yanomami in the 1970s. Me, I’m just happy to see my hot-blooded Phoenix girl with a smile on her face in sub-freezing temperatures.

—Scott