Essays · Movies

Sundance Blog: Look Who Showed Up Early to the Party

Sure, the 2009 Sundance Film Festival doesn’t start until Thursday night. I decided to get into town on Tuesday. And while there are no films, that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories to tell.
By  · Published on January 13th, 2009

sundance-waiting-header

Sure, the 2009 Sundance Film Festival doesn’t start until Thursday night. And sure, absolutely no one of note, press or otherwise, is supposed to arrive until tomorrow afternoon. But screw it, Pete from /Film and myself decided to get here nice and early. Upon arrival we found Park City to be an incredibly quiet scene, the calm before the storm of Hollywood-types and moviegoers arrive this weekend. It gave us an opportunity to survey the landscape a bit and eat at a restaurant that will be packed this time next week.

The real oddity was the nice weather we’ve encountered here in Utah’s premiere ski town. When I left Cleveland, Ohio at 6am local time the snow was falling, the roads were terrible and the de-icing process on the plane left us 30 minutes behind. Two hours later I deplaned in Minneapolis to catch a connecting flight to Salt Lake City. What I did not expect was that Minneapolis was running a fever of 16 below zero — my lungs hurt just walking along the jetway. But alas, it is 34 and sunny in Park City, with some lingering snow and ice on the ground — near perfect festival weather.

The slow day of advanced prep. also allowed me to work up my first video blog, which can be seen below. Despite my battle with a wicked cold, my subpar on-screen skillset and the fact that I edited it all together in about 10 minutes (I’m testing my limits here, people), I appear to have pulled it off. Alright fine, it’s lame. Check it out below to see a bit of Sundance-related news and be sure to do your worst in the comment section below.

To follow all of my Sundance updates, feel free to subscribe to our Sundance 2009 RSS feed or bookmark our Sundance 2009 homepage.

Related Topics:

Neil Miller is the persistently-bearded Publisher of Film School Rejects, Nonfics, and One Perfect Shot. He's also the Executive Producer of the One Perfect Shot TV show (currently streaming on HBO Max) and the co-host of Trial By Content on The Ringer Podcast Network. He can be found on Twitter here: @rejects (He/Him)