Sundance: Day five
Everybody on Main is sluggish today. The weekend has visibly drained many Sundancers of their energy, and, with a chunk of the celebs flying back home to Hollywood today, the festival of its momentum. I start the day slowly with a couple of back-to-back morning screenings, before moving on to the day’s big interviews.
I meet with Patti Smith in the Music Café. She’s there with fashion photographer director Steven Sebring, the man behind the film Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a biography of the folk rocker. Dressed in a vintage T and a pair of worn jeans, Smith is poised, and perfectly perched on a stool alongside Sebring. All warmth and ease, the singer cheerfully answers questions about the making of the film. She touches on the subject of privacy, which cues praise for Sebring’s unintrusive camera. Next, we chat about endurance and keeping faith in a project (the movie was shot over the course of 12 years). Properly star-struck, I have difficulty stringing words together, but somehow manage to make it through to the end of the interview, asking finally, if Smith is encouraged by what she sees happening in music today. An unequivocal “yes” is her reply. “Just go to MySpace – there’s tons of music there.” The film itself is equally charming. Intimate and cheeky, it masterfully captures the essence of the music goddess, bottles it in down-beaten glamour shots, and presents it to the audience as a force of nature uncorked.
After the gala screening of the Patti Smith film, I grab some dinner and wander over to a big white tent errected next to the mountain ski lifts. Inside, the space has been modelled after Teddy’s, an L.A. bar that is said to be one of the city’s most exclusive spots. The same is true at Sundance. VIP here include Entourage‘s Adrian Grenier, who wanders around scoping the scene a little before camping out at his booth. Fans of the popular ’90s drama Party of Five would have giggled to see Scott Wolf (a.k.a Bailey) buddy buddy with a Sisters and Brothers star. The night ended with a set by Lucas Haines, in town promoting his film Death in Love, co-starring A Beautiful Mind‘s Josh Lucas. Haines sang over the crowd, who didn’t seem to want to pause their discussions for the actor’s soft-sung art rock.
The party moved to Hyde’s after, where the premiere of Clark Gregg’s Choke (based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk) was being celebrated. Dark and fantastic for it, it is not surprising that Choke brought out all the cool kids in town. Kill Bill‘s Michael Madsen hung out at the front of the bar, away from the comfort of bottle service in the VIP area, while his director Quentin Tarantino reclined on a plush couch in the back with a laid-back Woody Harrison, who may or may not have been wearing a sweater dress at one point in the night—over pants that is. Danny Matheson, of That ’70s Show, was in charge of the tunes tonight. Perhaps inpsired by the response to Onyx from the night before, Matheson starts things off with a mix of ’90s rap classics. The bar seems to stay open extra late tonight, with stars being some of the last people to pile out.
By Jennifer Lee
Shown: A still from Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
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