Ledger

Nick and I sit in the car, driving down an impossibly flat road. The land outside the car is called Idaho but mimics the moon – huge, flat topped plateaus covered with red sand dotted with canyons.

"No wonder the people on the Oregon Trail kept going," I remark.

In a day or so, we’ll be somewhere beautiful – Park City, Utah. Reason: To blog the Sundance Film Festival for The News Tribune… maybe. It doesn’t matter – we’re going anyway.

We won’t be alone.

Every year, thousands of people in the film business pack up the mansion back in LA and make the trek to Utah for Sundance.

Those people are followed by journalists – both the paparazzi and the ‘respectable’ types. The journalists are followed by publicists, up-and-coming filmmakers, would-be filmmakers, film nerds, students and groupies.

Once there, these people pack the theaters of tiny Park City – watching films with themes that would make a hooker in her tenth year on the job blush: A girl with teeth in her vagina, men who have sex with horses, a man obsessed with a waitresses’ butt.

Aside from the inflated egos, the depravity and the excess, Sundance is something that should not only be experienced, but relished, revered and reviled all at the same time. It’s a microcosm of life – an adventure, best followed without a plan.

After two long days on the road – getting caught up in an Eastern Oregon cattle drive, a stopover for the world’s best Reuben sandwich, a stay at one of the only casinos in the world that operates sans alcohol – we arrive in Utah.

12:30 a.m. Our car pulls up to the Holiday Inn Express in Heber City, about 20 miles south of Park City. Even this far from the festival, hotel prices are high - $130 a night. We’re staying six days, and even though I already figure I can’t afford it, I don’t mention it to Nick.

The next morning – we wake up to a beautiful and bland day in Heber City. As I get ready, Nick writes some copy for the blog. He remarks that nobody has sent us a comment.

We leave the toasty confines of our room just after one in the afternoon, headed toward Park City. The city is surrounded by towering mountains, mostly bare, thanks to the effects of a mild winter and global warming. Even with the warming of the globe, the temperature hovers at roughly 20 degrees.

The city itself mimics a quaint, sleepy little town, surrounded by multi-million dollar homes, condos, exclusive mega ski resorts and monstrous hotels. Many buildings in the city look somewhat the same, that is, each share a common design. Think a planned community in LA with snow.

We find a parking space near press headquarters and catch a bus – the easiest way to get around the festival. The buses are free and in most cases packed to capacity. We arrive on Main Street – clogged with bars, exclusive stores, coffee shops and even a ski lift.

This is beautiful people central – there are more metrosexuals per square foot than any place on Earth; women travel in packs window shopping – ogling pairs of shoes that cost more than many people make in a month.

Those in the film industry stand out, they use multiple Bluetooth headsets at a time.

That night – Nick and I walk down the sidewalk, the air penetrated with the smell of Patchouli, which mingles with and barely covers the smell of beer and cigarette smoke.

We’ve been walking the streets of Park City for at least a half-hour, standing outside clubs and bars – we’ve walked in a few, but leave most of them within minutes. This is standard procedure – Nick and I do the same thing when bar hopping back in Tacoma.

"Let’s try this place," Nick says, pointing to a club named The Absinthe – called that, strangely enough, because they serve Absinthe. Nick explains that "real" Absinthe is illegal in the U.S. so they couldn’t be selling the real thing.

I spot a more interesting sign that seals the deal - $2 shots.

We enter. The club’s blackened windows hid a few things – a lack of people and originality. The walls and floor are painted black. Green and red lasers shoot down randomly on a little dance floor. A DJ blasts music so loudly that it stops being music and morphs into a crime against humanity. A fog machine sits near the bar, doing a perfect job of clouding a one foot section of air behind the coat check.

We’re in some kind of hell – not sure what level or what kind – but it’s pretty clear that this hell is populated with over-inflated egos, plastic surgery and couches protected with velvet ropes.

The ropes in this version of hell keep people like us in our place – and our place is off the couches. The couches are a metaphor for the way things work here: If somebody decides that you’re "somebody" then you’re accepted – or at least you’re allowed to sit down.

Nick and I stand all night.

This isn’t hell, of course – it’s Park City – the only place on Earth outside of Los Angeles where this kind of crap is tolerated. Anywhere else, protesters would show up claiming sexism, racism, or any other –ism you can come up with.

Nick and I walk out onto the club’s balcony. Save for two other dudes, we’re alone. It’s cold – no, scratch that, it’s damn cold. The kind of cold that sears your tongue on contact, freezes spit in seconds, and makes you pray to whatever god you believe in to blow up the Sun, just so you can experience warmth from the flying embers.

"Over here," Nick says, pointing to a large outdoor heater. These things are all over the place in Park City – bus stops, street corners, outside of restaurants. By the last days of the festival, most barely work – appearing battered, abused, overused, and discarded. In many ways, they mimic the life of a blogger at Sundance.

The heater stops working, and we head back downstairs and have more drinks. The night starts out slowly, but before it’s over we’ll rub shoulders with industry elite: a schoolteacher from Indiana, a dude from London who once worked with Hugh Grant, a local woman who carries around a bag of porn and a couple of college students from Massachusetts.

Our blog still has no comments.

The next day – I’m posing as Nick’s photographer so I can tag along for his interview with "Zoo" director Robinson Devor at his condo in Park City. "Zoo" is a film that is both, to put it bluntly, visually stunning and disgusting. The film deals with the famous Enumclaw horse incident, the events of which go in this order: men who really love horses, men who let horses love them, and one man who ends up with a perforated colon and dies after letting a horse love him too much.

After getting lost in the hubbub that is Park City, we finally arrive at the condo. Nick’s nervous, heck I’m nervous for him, but after a few minutes he loosens up and does a hell of an interview.

Our final day at the ‘Dance begins at an early hour for us – 1 p.m. Today’s the day that we’re supposed to meet up with Nick Bubb and friends to watch a screening of Sigma Die. Bubb’s got a small role in the film.

1:30 p.m. - Over a plate of breakfast burritos and blue cheese dressing at a local greasy spoon, I tally up my net worth - $6 in my wallet, and not much more in my checking account. I can eat, drink or sleep, but I can’t do all three.

Thank god for Western Union.

After my money issue is resolved, we head out to meet Bubb at his hotel in Kimball Junction, north of Park City. We’re still supposed to watch Sigma Die – we never will.

Instead, we decide to party like movie stars… albeit movie stars strapped for cash. We ditch the movie star idea and end up hanging out at Bubb’s hotel. Quick rundown of the night: Going to a hotel room containing eight hot older ladies, drinking with new found friends in the hotel’s laundry room until 4 a.m., driving back to Heber City at 6 a.m., passing out exhausted.

We still have no real comments on our blog.

The next day – we’re up and out of the hotel just moments before noon. The drive back will take 13 hours. We’re both exhausted, hung over and just want to go home. For the most part, Sundance is over. This year the festival featured roughly 160 films from all over the world – and we saw three.

Despite that, both of us remark on what an awesome experience the last four days were. It’s not easy being on the bottom of the food chain at an event like Sundance – the constant ass-kissing, the search for the after parties and the long wait times at restaurants. But in the end, it doesn’t matter – the nice thing about being a nobody is you don’t have to try that hard at being a somebody.