every year myron and i scoot ourselves to park city where for ten days we devote our lives to the elite fleet of dedicated sundance film festival drivers. the film fleet, we are called, sacrifices sleep, sanity and sometimes self-respect in order to shuffle around filmmakers [the best], celebrities [the unpredictable], and their "people" [the worst]. each driver is issued a sponsored suv and a license to disobey traffic laws and idling ordinances so long as they have a vip in tote.
our objective is to get celebrities from point to point efficiently while making them feel important. traveling in a caravan helps. caravans garner the attention of fans and paparazzi, and celebrities love big crowds so they can pretend to loathe them. at sundance, everything is a status symbol, especially the acuras. they are kind of like swag you don't get to take home. if you roll up to an event in an acura you are definitely somebody. filmmakers don't know this; they are simply gracious for a ride. celebrities of course know it and their people definitely know it, and boy do they abuse it. we spend a good portion of every festival analyzing the publicist type. these are people who value status the most and experience it the least. it's a cruel dichotomy that breeds a wrath of nastiness that trickles down to everyone beneath them. especially drivers.
for the first few days of the festival i stage at the airport greeting cast & crew and escorting them to their cars. whenever a transportation debacle occurs, it is usually because a publicist got involved. they have a talent for creating chaos so they can chew somebody out. things they love: blaming, bossing, and abusing people. what i discovered about them this year is that they respond to the golden rule, if you catch my drift.
to enjoy sundance it is necessary to shrug off the nastiness and embrace the experiences.
what makes sundance particularly memorable for me is the occasional quality conversation and behind-the-scenes observation. unfortunately i can't write about them.
2012 highlights:
tracy morgan's questions.
tracy: what is the tallest mountain in the world?
driver: mt everest
tracy: do you think these mountains are taller than everest?
a driver watches on as a rapper eats a hundred dollar bill to show off how much money he has.
david duchovny gets start struck while meeting skippy.
joyriding in the back of a 14 passenger party van while jimmy fishtails his way through snowy streets.
bunking with dane and carter [10 day slumber party].
a lesser known celebrity explaining why she is arranging her own airport transfer (instead of having her people do it) explains, "everything here has been arranged by a sea of clowns."
and that pretty much sums it up.
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| film fleet perspective |
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| that's me to the left |
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| that's me to the right |
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| no parking. except for you. |
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| jimmy |
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| myro |
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| no sleeps |
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| lunch sleeps |
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| party rock van |
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| main street meet up |
HA! Awesome. Sounds like an adventure as always.
ReplyDeleteBag the celebs, my eyes were affixed on the blue galoshes!
ReplyDeleteGlad to have found your blog. Nice recap. I used to babysit for all those Sundance people's kids when I worked for a Park City babysitting service in high school and my first couple of years in college. I found that the kids were usually pretty decent but it was the 40 year old wife of a producer/celeb/writer who was the weirdo. For some reason all the people I sat for had one thing in common...they never wore a bra.
ReplyDelete