Park City High School students will get a boost from the cast of “The Darwin Awards” and a jet-propelled car.

The magenta-colored car used in the movie’s opening sequence has been autographed by cast members, and will be auctioned on eBay. Proceeds will go to the high school’s student outreach program.

How hot is Lance Bass?
In flames, actually. Bass, former member of the band 'N Sync, dropped by the SkiHouse hospitality lounge at the Canyons Ski Resort in the early days of the Sundance Film Festival. While browsing the "Booty Parlor" sex boutique, he unintentionally set his coat on fire when he dropped it over a candle.
Guess the Booty Parlor was a bit too hot to handle.

Bling!
Justin Timberlake, who stars in the Sundance movie "Alpha Dog," dropped by the lounge in his snowboarding gear, with Cameron Diaz in tow, to grab a $35,000 pair of diamond & platinum sunglasses by Nefarious.
We wonder: If he fell and crushed them while shredding, would they cough up another pair?

Being a sponsor at the Sundance Film Festival doesn't buy you the world.

Officials at Starbucks Coffee, a sustaining sponsor at Sundance, must have been surprised when they learned that one of the movies in the World Documentary competition, "Black Gold."
The British doc is a critical look at how little of that $4 you spend on your venti mocha latte actually makes it to the Third World farmers who grow the beans.

Starbucks went on a charm offensive, setting up interviews with Sandra Taylor, the company's senior vice president for corporate social responsibility (try fitting that on a business card). The company also put out a press release that reassuringly states that "Starbucks believes that coffee farmers should make a living wage and be paid fair prices."

Another sale at Sundance: Miramax has reportedly picked up "The Night Listener" for more than $3 million.

Robin Williams stars as a radio host who looks into the story of an abused child (Rory Culkin) that may be a hoax. Patrick Stettner ("The Business of Strangers") directed the movie, based on Armistead Maupin's novel.

The death of actor Chris Penn will likely cast a pall on Wednesday night's premiere of "The Darwin Awards," in which Penn co-starred.

The movie stars Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder as investigators for the Darwin Awards, which "salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally kill themselves in really stupid ways."

Penn was found dead Tuesday in his Santa Monica condo. He was 43.

PARK CITY - Another example of why Sundance is different from other film festivals, this one provided by German director Wim Wenders before the Tuesday night premiere of "Don't Come Knocking":
"I'm used to looking at people in tuxedos. Even Sam [Shepard] would wear a bowtie."

Standing ovations aren't unusual at Sundance. But it's rare that the subject of one film publicly heaps praise on another.
After a screening of "American Blackout," an examination of the disenfranchisement of the black vote in American politics, a soldier profiled in another Sundance documentary, "The Ground Truth" made a gift of his dog tags.
Pfc Herold Noel walked down to the Holiday Village Cinema stage to offer his tags to Democratic Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. McKinney was an early critic of President Bush and was targeted for defeat in an election where Republicans crossed over in the primary and voted for her opponent. She was subsequently re-elected.
"Us soldiers support you any time. We got your back," Noel told McKinney as she accepted his heartfelt gift.
- Sean P. Means

For this Sundance moviegoer, Monday was a day of stark contrast.
Joey Lauren Adams, who wrote and directed "Come Early Morning," about a Southern woman's poor relationships with men, said at a Q&A follwing the Salt Lake City screening that her movie took five years from writing to finished product (which only happened two weeks before Sundance began!)
But "Subject Two," a reimagined version of the Frankenstein story, was a three-month project, according to writer/director Philip Chidel. It was shot in three weeks on top of Colorado's Aspen Mountain, in a "hut" with no running water or indoor plumbing.
Another major difference between the two, which probably helps explain the long/short of it: Adams had trouble getting funding; Chidel pretty much had no funding.
- Anne Wilson

    In a panel discussion Monday afternoon, Hollywood filmmakers and Internet bloggers were on the offensive, and the news media was their target.

    In the face of corporate consolidation and the race for ratings and subscription numbers, the question was whether the media is abandoning its job while movies and alternative media were taking up the slack.

    News gathering by mainstream papers and networks is changing, argued the panelists, who included filmmaker Stephen Gaghan ("Syriana"), Vanity Fair National Editor Todd Purdum and Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who nearly was indicted for not revealing his source in the Valerie Plame case.

    "You have to remember that the media is in a number of simultaneous crises, any of which can destroy the meaning of the traditional media function," said Eric Alterman, author and blogger for MSNBC.com.

    Those crises include the trend toward tabloid stories, an obsession with celebrity news, the corporate ownership of news outlets, and falling revenues of newspapers and TV news divisions, he said.

    "The people put in charge of these media companies are not journalists," Alterman said. "They don't fight back. And so the Bush administration has been able to get away with a tremendous amount of abuse."

    But with the advent of the Internet and personal journalism, readers and TV viewers have been turning to the Web or to movies like "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill their appetite for news.

    "The blogosphere . . .can make every man a king, every person a publisher," said Purdum, who used to be a national correspondent for the New York Times. "We are in some tectonic plate shift. It will never be the way it was."


    - Vince Horiuchi

   An excited and anxious crowd filled the Eccles theater Monday night for the world premiere of Terry Zwigoff's newest cinematic oddity, "Art School Confidential," a dark comedy about life in a New York art school.

    Perhaps it was the one time a character actor like John Malkovich was treated like a rock star.

    Dozens of people walked up to the co-star of "Art School Confidential" inside the theater with bulbs flashing and fingers pointed. At Sundance, the premiere event for independent film, a quiet (but brilliant) actor like Malkovich can have a throng of groupies.

    Then the lights dimmed and the movie started. What unspooled is hard to explain. What began much like a warped version of a campus comedy slowly spiraled into a dark and sometimes maniacally funny take on our perceptions of art and commerce and how the two tragically intertwine.

    I'm not sure what to think of the movie as a whole - it has to sink in for a day or two for me to make up my mind. Two things are certain: It's often funny in the way you expect a Terry Zwigoff movie would be (he directed "Crumb," "Ghost World" and "Bad Santa," so that should tell you something), and the lead, Max Minghella, who plays the young art school freshman and protagonist, is not as obsessive and full of angst as he should be for the role.

    When the lights came up, the audience reaction was more subdued than I expected. The applause was there, it just lacked the kind of wild enthusiasm that says, "This is a Sundance hit."

    It's one quirky movie that's going to be a tough sell to a wider audience.
- Vince Horiuchi

Festival director Geoffrey Gilmore has added a new line in his usual pre-show admonitions about turning off cell phones.
"And don't text things," Gilmore told the audience Monday night before "Forgiven." "It's not invisible, so cut it out."

Sundance has its second sale: Warner Independent Pictures bought Michel Gondry's spacey "The Science of Sleep" for a reported $6 million.

The deal went down early Monday, after the movie's premiere late Sunday night.

The movie stars Gael Garcia Bernal as a man whose dream life frequently busts into his real life. Gondry, who wrote and directed, is best known for directing "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

    Liz Phair delivered a rousing short set of songs Sunday night at the Q Television Network Party in the Queer Lounge. The lounge's third festival event drew a host of familiar faces including Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Jonathon Tchaikovsky and Trevor Morgan from the Sundance Film "Off the Black." The party also honored the films, "Open Window," "Factotum," "Steel City," " Allegro, "Flannel Pajamas," "The Proposition," and "Special."

    Celebrities were offered access to the VIP lounge, designed by Barclay Butera. The room was packed and buzzing about the celebrities' appearance - all of whom were hiding toward the back, almost squatting on a short, black, semi-circle sectional couch that wrapped around a large mirrored coffee table.

    With temperatures dipping into the single digits, and the doorway to the VIP lounge jammed with onlookers, many of those inside the swank spot ignored the no-smoking signs and ashed directly on the cream carpet.

    - Michael Westley

    One of the Sundance Film Festival's most anticipated films, a psychological mystery-thriller called "The Night Listener," debuted to muted enthusiasm Saturday night in Park City. The film stars Robin Williams as a popular New York radio host who becomes intrigued with a listener, a 14-year-old Wisconsin boy dying of AIDS after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of his parents.

    Williams wasn't at the Eccles screening -- he's shooting a movie in Canada -- but screenwriter Armistead "Tales of the City" Maupin was, along with Williams' co-star, Toni Collette. The actress plays the boy's mysterious adoptive mother, whom Williams begins to suspect is fabricating her son's existence.

    "How do you prepare for a role like that?" an audience member asked Collette afterwards.

    "Oh God," answered the Oscar-nominated actress. "I don't know how I prepared."

    "She's Toni Collette," interjected director Patrick Stettner. "She can do anything."

    -- Brandon Griggs

   

Comedian Bill Maher likes Utah. Really!
The host of HBO's politically-charged talk show, "Real Time with Bill Maher," has taken his share of shots at Utah culture on his series. But after showing up in the Beehive state for the first time for a standup gig at Kingsbury Hall Saturday night, he did have one nice thing to say about Salt Lakers — well, sort of.
"There's a lot of hip people — even in Red states," he quipped.
Sunday night, Maher was in Park City to launch his new Amazon.com-sponsored Internet talk show, "Fishbowl with Bill Maher," with guests Stephen King, author Armistead Maupin and musician Rob Thomas.
After the show, Maher (who complained all night that the lodge he stayed in didn't have any food) and King had more fun at the expense of our great state.
What did Maher think of his first visit here?
"I think it's cold and there's no food," he said without missing a beat.
King remembered being in Utah while filming "The Stand" in 1993.
"I made a miniseries in Utah, and we were here for eight weeks. I thought it was six months, and I ate more fruit salad in Utah," he said. "This is the fruit salad capital of the world. Fruit salad in jello."
To which Maher replied, "I would have given a left nut for a fruit salad," he joked.
"That's what was in my fruit salad!" King declared.
Said Maher, pointing to the master of horror: "It's scary how funny he is."
- Vince Horiuchi

The Angel Moroni trumpeting a lesbian-themed screwball comedy? Only at Sundance.
Maria Maggenti’s comedy “Puccini For Beginners” -- about an opera-loving lesbian who falls for a guy and a girl simultaneously -- opens with some nice New York scenery. But the money shot, over which the movie’s title is seen, is a perfect view of the gold Moroni statue from atop the Manhattan temple.
In the post-show Q-and-A, Maggenti said it was a coincidence. “That was B-roll,” she said. “We had to use whatever we shot.”

The guest list for Saturday night's late (till 4 a.m.) Motorola party:
Elisabeth shue
Michael Rappaport
Jessica Biel
Scarlett Johannson
Josh Hartnett
James Van Der Beek
America Ferrera
SuChin Pak
Rhona Mitra
Lizzie Caplan
Chazz Palmenteri
Darryl Hannah
The Police
Sting and wife Trudie Styler
Rob Thomas and Marisol
Joe Reitman
Annie Duke
Andrew Keegan
Shannon Elizabeth
Eve
Adrian Grenier
Lance Bass
Joe Francis
Paris Hilton

   An audience full of black leather jackets at a Sundance screening is nothing new. But when you cover those jackets with chains, metal studs and Dead Kennedys patches, and top off the look with an old-school mohawk haircut (not the "faux-hawks" favored by posers), you have an audience like Sundance hasn't seen before.

    The Salt Lake City screening Saturday night of "American Hardcore," a documentary about the history of the American hardcore punk scene of the early '80s, brought out old punk rockers with their children, young punks wanting to learn about the past and old Salt Lake City scenesters like Brad Collins, former owner of Raunch Records.

    In the post-screening Q&A session, director Paul Rachman and writer Steven Blush said how important it was for them to show their movie in Salt Lake City, where part of the scene dissected in the film thrived back in the day.

    "I always liked this town," Blush said, recalling a trip to Utah with a band called No Trend. "I knew it had a real serious subculture going. That's why it was important to show the film here (in Salt Lake City) and not just to those [expletive] up the hill [in Park City]."

    During a lull in the questions from the audience, Blush came up with one of the best filmmaker comments I've heard in a while.

    "We're under contractual obligation to do this, so you have to ask questions or we're going to go out drinking," Blush said.

As director Patrick Stettner left a screening of his new film 'The Night Listener,' all the cameras on the red carpet started clicking. One of the photographers greeted Stettner and said "We met in the Hamptons," as he reached out his hand to shake the director's. It was then that the other photographers realized that the guy with the media credentials standing next to them was movie critic Roger Ebert.

Instantly, all the cameras turned away from Stettner on the red carpet and onto Ebert in the press box.

The Queer Lounge opened its doors Friday night with fresh design and more space.

The opening party, Glamdance, honored gay film ''Wrestling with Angles'' and spotlighted the talents of the East Village Opera Company -- an eight-piece rock opera company from New York City.

The party attracted ''Queer Eye for the Straight Girl's'' Honey Labrador as well as designer Barclay Butera whose sleek, low-flung and modern tastes give the lounge a hip, though welcoming feel.

As many as 500 people swarmed the lounge's three main rooms in Park City's Gateway Center between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The swank and sexy VIP lounge and neighboring video lounge sit across the hallway from the stage and main dance floor, which kept bumping to the tunes of a host of Salt Lake City DJs including J-LUVV and Nebula. The five bars, hosted by Absolute, kept the spirits flowing freely throughout the night.

Volunteer staff -- many of them familiar faces in the Salt Lake City gay community -- wore baseball T-shirts that bore the Queer Lounge logo on the front and "I See Queer People" printed on the back.

The Queer Lounge is open to all during the day. Special events, concerts and film-related receptions are held in the evening and are typically open only to credentialed festivalgoers or by invitation.

For more information on the lounge and a calendar of the week's events,visit: http://queerloungeonline.com.

-- Michael Westley

Sure, celebrities are picking up thousands of dollars worth of swag at exclusive houses, but the "little people" are not entirely shut out of the promo scene. In fact, Park City's Main Street offers several of opportunities for regular folk to snag some (albeit less swanky) swag.

For example, relax with a complimentary shoulder massage or manicure provided by Spa Chicks on the Go at the Aquafina Lounge (305 Main St.) or collect free bottled water and lip oil. Pop in at the Airborne Lounge (427 Main - look for the fellow in the purple 'germ' suit) and warm up with a cup of herbal tea or sample the effervescent Airborne product. Other promo houses offer a chance to play video games (Intel), wine for those older than 21 (Turning Leaf) and T-shirts, lip balm and candy (VW).

Official Sundance houses don't necessarily offer swag, but open the door to film-related chatter and experience. These houses are also open to noncredentialed festivalgoers on a space available basis, so be sure to check out the Sundance House (Kimball Art Center), Music Café (Star Bar), Film Center (Main Street Mall) and the Filmmaker Lodge (550 Main ). Most sponsor houses are open from approximately 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Tommy Lee and free tequila are a potentially explosive combination, but the Motley Crue drummer and reality TV star made himself scarce early at a post-show party at The SkiHouse, a hospitality suite at The Canyons.

Lee led a strange amalgam of rockers, including members of The Cult, Velvet Revolver and Good Charlotte, through an hour-long set of covers such as The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" outdoors in The Canyons Village before heading into the private party where Patron tequila was flowing for all the guests and whole bottles of the stuff followed Lee into a VIP area tucked away from the crowd.

Some guests bemoaned the lack of celebrities (other than the rockers) at the party, while rumors of the Rolling Stones playing a party at Stein Erickson Lodge led some partyers to leave early in search of Mick and Keith.

- Dan Nailen

The early reviews of the festival's trailers have been a collective yawn.

The trailers, designed by a studio called Digital Kitchen, show paper-cutout figures being placed in a three-dimensional diorama - sometimes we see the hands manipulating the figures, sometimes not. One of the trailers depicts the fall of Icarus, with the hands holding a lighter to the figure's paper wings.

Though pretty, the trailers don't have the fun and energy of past years' trailers, where humor usually dominated. Last year it was the controversial animated shorts by the Web studio JibJab, and a few years ago there was a funny set of trailers featuring animal footage to define different aspects of the movie industry.

There is entertainment value in the animated loop that plays on the screen between shows. It continues the paper-cutout theme, except the cutouts are sitting in a theater audience. There's even a bit of a "Where's Waldo?" element, since a close inspection of the figures reveals Napoleon Dynamite and his brother Kip, "Super Size Me's" Morgan Spurlock stuffing his face with french fries, three characters from "Kung Fu Hustle," and Robert Redford.

- Sean P. Means

Two questions asked at nearly every Q-and-A session at Sundance: "What was your budget?" and "How many days was your shoot?"

A decade ago, filmmakers were thrilled to answer both questions - especially when they could play film-budget limbo by telling how low they could go. (Kevin Smith's "Clerks" was made for around $27,000, while Robert Rodriguez said his initial budget on "El Mariachi" was $7,000.) Filmmakers also like to brag about how it all got done in three weeks or less.

But filmmakers now usually avoid revealing their budgets, lest a possible distributor mistake the budget for a sale price.

Writer-director Brian Jun, surprisingly, revealed during the Q-and-A for "Steel City" that his budget was "less than $1 million." Joey Lauren Adams gave an unusual but unhelpful answer after the screening of her film, "Come Early Morning": "Honestly, I never saw a budget. I would like to know the answer to that question."

Now the shooting-schedule question is sometimes considered out of bounds. When asked in an interview, "Right at Your Door" writer-director Chris Gorak declined to answer, on the advice of his producers. The thinking is that if a distributor knows how long the shoot was, the bean counters might extrapolate the size of the budget.

- Sean P. Means

Star-studded parties are not the only place to catch live entertainment during Sundance. The Starbucks Salon at 449 Main St. in Park City, offers an array of cultural events. Through Thursday, the salon will present artists such as Imogen Heap (who recently scored the closing sequence of ³The Chronicles of Narnia²) as well as photographers, pianists, composers, actors, singer-songwriters and panel discussions. Tickets are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis at the salon. A full schedule is available at http://www.StarbucksSalon.com

- Jane Gendron

One of the most anticipated movies of the festival, "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," premiered to a solid reception Friday afternoon at the Park City Racquet Club. Written and directed by Dito Montiel, the film stars Robert Downey Jr. as a middle-aged writer revisiting the tough Queens neighborhood of his youth after a 15-year absence.
Downey subverts his usual high-wattage screen charm to play an emotionally shuttered man tormented by the troubled past he left behind. The film also stars Rosario Dawson, Shia LaBoeuf, Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest.
Afterwards, Montiel and producer Trudie Styler brought the cast forward for questions from the audience, although Styler's husband Sting remained seated in the third row, partially hidden under a ski cap.
Downey Jr., looking relaxed and jovial in a woolen cap and goatee, seemed content to hang in the rear of the pack of actors onstage, letting Montiel do most of the talking. When an audience member finally asked Downey a question, about whether he plotted his character's arc, the actor leaned into the microphone and blurted only, "No."
— Brandon Griggs

There's not much glamour if you're on the other side of the lens.

So many photographers were crammed into the assigned press area at the premiere of 'Friends With Money' that they had to jockey for position just to get a shot of Jennifer Aniston and co-star Catherine Keener as they were wisked into the Eccles Theater on Thursday.

"When the celebs showed up it turned into a mosh pit! I was trying to take photos, with people in my way, trying to not get knocked over" reports sltrib.com multimedia photographer Robert Hirschi.

"The shots I got are shot by shooting under the arm of the guy in front of me, standing on my toes and shooting around and through heads. It was quite a challenge to get a photo."

Air America Radio may not be available on any Utah startions, but the left-leaning talk-radio network will be in Park City this weekend.

"RadioNation with Laura Flanders" will be broadcasting Saturday and Sunday, 5-8 p.m. Mountain time, from Main Street. If you want to listen, go to http://www.airamericaradio.com.

The curtain goes up tonight on the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. (OK, so there's not really a curtain at the Eccles Theatre - just a short animated loop on the screen. It's a metaphor. Deal with it.)

Before Sundance begins, the air in Park City is thick with anticipation for what will come out of the movies and madness to come. Here are 10 questions that should be answered by the time it's all over.

1 - Will tonight's opening film, "Friends With Money," produce as big a paparazzi circus as the last time Jennifer Aniston was here, in 2002 with "The Good Girl" - when the crush to get the four billionth photo of Jen and Brad Pitt delayed the movie 25 minutes?

2 - Which celebrity will be the first to try the "don't you know who I am?" routine on an unimpressed Park City cop?

3 - Will Ralph Nader get booed when he shows up for the documentary about him, "An Unreasonable Man"?

4 - If the answer to No. 3 is "yes," will the heckler later be revealed to be Al Gore (also the subject of a Sundance doc)?

5 - What movie will be the festival's designated train wreck - the one so bad people will go see it just to bear witness to the carnage? (Last year it was the "Memento"-ripoff thriller "Between"; before that, it was the Bob Dylan all-star vanity piece "Masked and Anonymous.")

6 - What movie will be the transcendent work, the one that has viewers walking a foot off the ground as they leave the theater? (Last year, it was "Me and You and Everyone We Know.")

7 - How long will the average person stand shivering outside Harry O's before deciding that 15 minutes at a lame party isn't worth this?

8 - When will people learn that the documentaries are, top to bottom, the best part of Sundance?

9 - How many people will kvetch that "Sundance has become so crowded/commercialized/celebrity-driven"?

10 - How many of those same whiners will be back next year?