In front of the cameras in Park City this week are the stars and directors of Sundance movies, but in back (or bottom) rooms are vaster pit crews than ever I could have imagined. This afternoon I went to the subterranean world that is the basement floor of the Marriott Park City, where publicists for all the major films have dank media suites. It was grim down there, half-deserted now that the festival is all but winding down, but behind the door of suite 140 sat the media team supporting Alan Ball's "Towelhead." "Towelhead" is a major theatrical release for Ball, in the wake of his success with "American Beauty," and "Six Feet Under."

Ball's cheerful and lanky LA publicist, Michael Lawson, welcomed me in and showed me to a chair, while at a crowded dining table two other young men sat at laptops writing furiously. Nearby was a rep from Warner Independent, the film's distributor, a young man in glasses who kept looking at his watch.

The room looked lived-in, worn out. Not dirty exactly, just used. The armchair I was sitting in had been occupied just an hour before by a writer for Entertainment Weekly, and before that, who knows? Just about every writer from every major news organization had made the rounds here and in other suites. And now I was one of the last.

Seated on a sofa across from me was a quiet, attractive, well-made-up, young African-American woman. Unlike the others in the room, she didn't acknowledge my presence as I arrived but simply fiddled attentively with items of ablution in a clear plastic case on the table: lotions, blushes, and creams, it looked like. Every once in a while her cell phone would ring, and she'd speak in tired but not unpleasant tones into the tiny receiver.

The woman's name was Ashley Dorsey, and she was there, she explained to me, "to touch up Alan and Peter (Macdissi, who plays the Jordanian-born father in Ball's film). Touch up? Touch up, I thought. Right. Oh, yeah. I do print journalism. I used to do public radio. (I remembered well with some chagrin the phrase: "she/he has a face made for radio.") Even though I've also been involved intimately with film, it had never occured to me (duh!) that folks at Sundance level would be traveling with their own stylists. Another little fall, for me, from the heady rungs on the ladder of grace.

"Actually, I work for a lot of people up here," explained Dorsey, who is a "senior makeup artist" for MAC cosmetics. She'd been around town since this past Sunday and had touched up a gazillion people, including directors Morgan Spurlock, Amy Redford, and actress Safron Burrows. Dorsey, who hails from Houston, said that she travels all over the world to touch up celebrities, and that her favorite celeb to "do" was Missy Elliott. "My least favorite," she said, "are backstage runway models." She blew breath out of her mouth with an exaggerated phew. "They're tough," she said.

What would it be like, I wondered to myself, to be the person behind the projected image of beauty during a film's publicity? Would it feel like a life lived well? Would it feel as rewarding, say, as being the makeup person on an actual film? In p.r., you're always one step removed from the real thing, one more layer of cover-up on top of layers and layers of other concealers.

Dorsey began packing up. She was headed home on a flight later today. But when Alan Ball---perhaps the least self-conscious and egoistic person I have ever met---came into the room, Dorsey made sure to leave him with a bottle or two of MAC swag. Hers seemed less a empty gesture of advertisement, though, than genuine kindness. "Some toner for your face," she said, gently. Some lotion. A couple of other things.

"Because," she said, "you can start not just feeling but looking tired when you've been out too long on the road."
-----Julie Checkoway

Labels: make-up