Slamdance – Day 2 January 16

It’s Friday and screenings at Sundance and Slamdance have begun. As I walk down Main Street, I notice that our posters have all been taken down. Every square millimeter of placard space is covered with other posters and flyers. Films that aren’t even playing in Park City have posters up. Poster domination is out of control. I sit through a couple sponsored events and learn about aspect ratio and color bit rates, then make my way down the hill into Sundance-land. Police and security guard the celebrity lounge. White tents fill Main street. The smell of money permeates. In the press of the crowd, about half of the people hold a cell phone to their ear. I try to call Atom, our press person. She’s picking up Anna at the airport. But the signal keeps failing. Finally, I resort to texting, and that fails twice. The cell phone capacity of Park City is overloaded. A few months ago, while Anna and I were still finishing the film, I kept asking myself why we were making our film. No one will want to see it, I kept telling myself. Because the subject of Insex and PD’s footage is so extreme and taboo. But here, people are genuinely interested. So I find myself sitting on the bus next to a nice upper middle class woman whose business sponsored a couple of Sundance films. And she wants to see our poster. So there I am unrolling a 17 X 26 picture of Koko in the tank and talking about Insex and the Patriot Act and it’s all rather extraordinary. After meeting up with Atom and Anna, we make our first trip into the “step and turn” room at Slamdance headquarters. This is where filmmakers and cast members stand in front of the “media wall” and get photographed. The “media wall” is a large white backdrop filled with the logos of all the Slamdance sponsors. “Step and turn” is a phrase that describes how celebrities walk in front of a pile of photographers. They take a step and turn to the cameras, take another step and turn to the cameras. This is truly a new phase of my notoriously unfamous life. After the sound of camera shutters stops, we skirt into the next room where the noise of Happy Hour blasts out the door. We talk sales reps with a couple of Slamdance staff, screaming over the music to hear each other. On our way out, some teenage volunteers at Slamdance get wowed by our Graphic Sexual Horror T-shirts and we get their sizes and promise them shirts tomorrow. Afterward, we wonder if it’s a good idea to have underage teens sporting T-shirts for a film they clearly will not be allowed to watch. . .

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