Archive for January, 2002

Tromadance: The Utah Experience Part 3

Wednesday, January 16th, 2002

An online diary of the journey to & from the Shpadoinkliest film festival!

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Now here’s the part where I once again appreciate the beauty of writing down things right after they happen. See, when you do that, you don’t forget what went on all day because you decided to write about it two months later!!! I truly don’t remember now. I think other than fliering, promoting on the street and waving at Troma fans, I ate lunch with Evie and.. damn what was his name? WHY DIDN’T I WRITE THIS DOWN EARLIER? Anyway, then nighttime came. I couldn’t go to Saltlake for the midnight screenings @ Brewvies because I wasn’t old enough. So I sat around like a loser hanging out with other under-aged, underprivileged children like myself. Then the peeps from Salt Lake came back late at night. Then Doug was drunk and sleeping for a long long time. At some point, some people decided they’d play with his body since he was almost catatonic and couldn’t be woken up. Tromadance stickers were plastered all over his body and a dildo was shoved in his mouth several times at some point.

 

Okay, so Lloyd Kaufman calls and I pick it up. I get immediately nervous because I am on the phone with Lloyd Kaufman and he wants to know when Doug is going to take us down to the Phat Tire to set up everything for the third and last film fest day that would begin tomorrow morning. I explained, in feined calmness, that Doug was out like a light and no one could resurrect him. However, we had been notified that the Phat Tire had changed our setup time from 10pm to 1am because of a private party taking place at that moment. Lloyd seemed to take that well and reminded me to let everyone know they’d have to go set up in a couple of hours.

This was not something I looked forward to. It ended up being only April, Rudy, and me (I knew April from Jedi Apprentice; she also lives in San Diego county) ended up going down the cold and icy road, stairs and street to the Phat Tire. There we began posting flyers up and decorating the place at a depressingly slow rate. About 2 hours later, everyone else showed up to help! What a relief. Well, that is, until people started complaining that we had put up the fliers too spaced apart and that we needed to move them all so they covered the entire walls. Ha! That criticism was fun to hear from people who had showed up 2 hours late to help! Rudy and the guy whose name I don’t remember put up the Film Threat banner; they were one of the official sponsors of the festival.

Later, I think it was around 5am (now January 17th), we trudged back up to the condo. My out-of-shape health condition was all too apparent while I panted in agony as I climbed the stairs further and further up into the tiny town that was already 7,000 feet above sea-level. Finally the Troma Condo appeared like a shining beacon of promising warmth and much needed rest. We found a nice spot on the floor in between the bathroom and the balcony to sleep. It was rather cozy. We slept for about 2 hours and then went back to the festival. The time had come!

Wait… Looking at what I wrote, I painted a pretty grim picture of the whole day. I assure you, I had no bad days at Tromadance. Even when I was tired, cold, or both, it always feels good to work for a cause. This cause being the TRUE spirit of independence in cinema and helping to offer the only FULLY FREE film festival and parties on Main Street.

So, as I was saying, I was very excited about my turn at the Tromadance Film Festival finally getting underway. I was also very nervous about how my movie would play. I knew I had never even intended this film to get this far. I had done it for practice. Purposefully choosing a rather silly concept, I had only hoped to get the film played at the school’s film festival. However, the Tromadance audience wouldn’t know that. Would they hate it and think it amateur? Would they even be coherent enough to notice my film was on the screen? Well it was screening during the daytime so everyone should be pretty sober still.

I would just have to wait and see…

More coming soon!

Tromadance: The Utah Experience Part 2

Tuesday, January 15th, 2002

An online diary of the journey to & from the Shpadoinkliest film festival!o1.15.o2

Much to the relief of my nalgas, we approached Salt Lake City! Well, sort of. See, thanks to the Olympics, Greyhound (obviously not an official sponsor) got kicked out of their own station because they would be “holding up too much traffic.” So, our bus arrived at their temporary station (it was a big liquor store/gas station) on the outskirts of town. I never got to see Salt Lake City, although I’m not too broken up about that. We were herded to one corner of the store where some chairs were set up. There really weren’t enough for all of us so Rudy and I got to sit on our luggage in the toiletries aisle.

Finally, the bus for Park City was called. This was it!

While Rudy pondered what could possible be better than drinking a 7up on a bus and sitting next to a sexy old lady, I dreamed about what Park city would look like. What would Toxie be wearing in this cold weather? And how the hell would we get to the condo from wherever the heck the bus dropped us off at?

Less than an hour later, good old greyhound dumped us in the parking lot of a McDonalds. We had no clue where we were. Luckily for us, a European woman had gotten dumped off with us. She was headed to the hostel on Main Street right next to one of the Sundance theaters! Unfortunately, when we asked her, she also did not know where the heck we were.

It seemed we were doomed to spend a week sitting in the McDonalds parking lot, when lo and behold a friendly Utah native drives by in a big beautiful white truck-type thing. He ended up giving us a ride! I have a feeling this is due to the pretty older woman who was standing next to us in the shivering cold, her auburn hair shining in the morning sun.

So anyway, our friendly friend was from… I don’t remember. His name was… I don’t remember. I do remember that he’s a stock broker who moved here to get away from the stress and go skiiing every day if he wanted to. We were very greatful to him for his kindness. Imagine: we thought we could walk there! It ended up being a 15-minute drive down a long snowy highway.

He let us off on Main Street. We were so close! Doug, of Troma, had let us know (we called from McDonalds) that someone would be at the condo when we got there. All we had to do was climb the stairs and go right then left. Easy right? RIGHT??? He failed to mention there were already about 4 sets of stairs that we could see around Main Street, all going up different hills. We tried the one that seemed right. It was not shpadoinkle to carry our fierce luggage up the friggin stairs. When we got up the hill after about a half hour we were lost again. We were standing on a highway, not a little road like Doug had said.

I ran down to make a call to the condo. Busy. I ran into some Troma people. They told me to go hang out with them at Starbucks and then they would walk back with me. Starbucks???? Uh no thanks. I told them my boyfriend was standing like a block of ice on the highway on the top of the hill waiting for me. So they gave me more detailed directions. So I hop-footed it back up the hill and we tried to follow the directions. We got lost again.

We finally gave up and figured we walk down to mainstreet and let a cab driver take us there. We were exhausted. So we decided to take a shortcut down a little alleyway of some tiny old condos instead of the highway to get back to the stairs. Bad idea. I fell about 5 times on the ice and I ended up just kicking my luggage along, letting it slide down the sloped alleyway. The bags will never be the same again.

We lugged it all back downstairs (yay) and called a cab. The cabby got lost too! It took another half hour to find the place because some genius had decided that after building the new condos on Lower McKinley, he/she would rename the street to Rossy Hills Drive! How smart!!! I don’t know how, but we found the place. I was tired. It took us about two hours to find what could have taken us 25 minutes. And I found out that we went up the wrong flight of stairs! The ones we should have taken were further south on Main Street and about twice as high as the ones we took. Maybe it was best that we just paid the stupid $7 to the cabby and let him figure it out.

So here we were. Finally. The Troma condo. About 40 people living in one three bedroom house. We ended up leaving our bags in the ice box that was the garage because our stuff got bumped around too much in the crowded living room. It was a pleasure to see Lloyd’s rules of safety in production were to be applied to Tromadance.

Tromadance Rules:
1.Safety to Humans
2.Safety to People’s Property
3.Host a good festival

Well, by the end of our trip, I learned that safety to property might not have been thoroughly understood by everyone, hehe. I’ll talk about that later. We then went out and stapled some flyers. I learned (mostly from the Tromadance website before my trip than now), that fliering was a Holy War between Sundance and… well everyone else. Sundance has their own kiosks that only SUNDANCe can post fliers and posters on (for some reason no one else is allowed to have their own kiosk). That’s fine, there were about 3 or 4 other kiosks that were for general info.

Problem: Paid Sundance lackeys posted their fancy fliers THERE too! And everytime you put a poster up, you’d come back and some stupid HBO Film starring some big name actor (but supposedly independent, nonetheless) was plastered all over the walls. That meant that poor people, i.e. everyone else had to put up more fliers of their films, even though each one cost them money out of their own pockets. Troma understood this and tried not to post over anyone else’s stuff unless it was from Sundance. This is an important thing to understand if you are a filmmaker who does not yet understand the process of Park City Madness. You must bring friends with you if you are trying to promote your film. You will see that five minutes after you put your poster up, someone will put alot of other paper materials over it. The only way anyone will read your posters is to make rounds up and down the street ALL day putting up more and more fliers to make up for the covered ones.

It’s a horrible way to spend your time, but it’s all you can do to fight Sundance. Remember that they have their own volunteers that do all of this for them. And remember, fliering is important because you can’t pass them out. You can only post them on kiosks. Ask the Troma team. Two of them were actually arrested last year. One had to post bail, the other did his time for three days. Park City Law literally says that FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS EXEMPT to non-Sundance parties for the duration of the festival. So beware. The big guys rule in PC. Make the effor, play the stupid (and environmentally unsound) flier game, or come up with some other cool shtick to get attention. For instance you can do what Alvin Ecarma did to promote Lethal Force. We’ll talk about that later.

So anyway, what else happened? Then we hung out, then we went back to the condo. I don’t remember much of what happened that evening. I wans’t able to attend opening night of Tromadance in Salt Lake that evening because I was under 21 years of age. Damn it all! Ah well. I did read a little of Dune. That would be the last time on the trip I would actually have the gall to read.

Much to everyone’s chagrin, Rudy and I had managed to nab the sofa bed for ourselves. I guess they didn’t like that because they had been here days ahead. Well, poop on you, I guess. I had a shitty day. We were so tired we ended up going to bed by about 11 or 12. I didn’t end up falling asleep until about 3 because everyone was so golly darned loud with their drinking, and their attempted muted conversations and those crazy sexual antics.

Several times, people came into the condo mistaking it for a different one. The draft was not appreciated. All in all though, I was appreciative of having a warm place to sleep that was free. FREE! That’s unheard of in park city! Thanks to all the film festivals, hotels double their prices during this season. There probably wasn’t a place for miles that was under $200 a pop. Whoopie.

Tomorrow would be an important day. It would be the last day before the film festival, so promotion was vital! It would also be the day that we’d have our opening Troma ceremony in Salt Lake to celebrate. I ended up not going. I’ll explain in the next entry.

Coming soon!

Tromadance: The Utah Experience Part 1

Monday, January 14th, 2002

An online diary of the journey to & from the Shpadoinkliest film festival!

Every few days, I will add a page of photos and verbage chronicling one of my days in/to/from Park City, Utah. I took the trip because my film, Safety With Scissors was an official selection of Tromadance! I was proud, and I wouldn’t miss this for the world! I will be posting this diary up slowly over the next few weeks so please be patient. Each entry will be in chronological order (hopefully).

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My boyfriend Rudy and I decided that because we had an incredible opportunity before us, we simply had to sieze it. My film, Safety With Scissors, had made it into Tromadance. Good news! Plus, if we volunteered to help promote the event we could stay at the Troma Condo for free! Problem: How do we get from San Diego County, California to Park City, Utah and back again?

Answer: Super cheap Greyhound 2-for-1 deal! We held a fundraising swapmeet sale to pay for the tickets. What did we sell? Anything donated by my lovely and supportive family. Thanks everyone! Well, for what we didn’t spend with money we certainly spent for the long time traveling and horrible service. It was on average a 21-hour trip there, and another 20 hours back. Was it worth it? YES!

While the exteriors were nice, it was a nuisance to change our baggage from bus to bus, and my butt was extremely numb after the uncomfortable trip. I surprisingly didn’t have too much trouble sleeping when I wanted to, and I had my wonderful book, Dune to keep me entertained while not asleep or watching the countryside go by. Above right, you’ll see Rudy looking very bored and very much like a girl!

Eons later, we arrived in Salt Lake. We were almost there!!!

To be continued.

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In response to seWerCap’s comment on my last post, I write:

“Yeah, I met Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD at Tromadance, indeed. And thanks for the comment. I had already meant Kabukiman at San Diego Comic Con last summer. Case you didn’t know, he’s usually played by Doug Sakman who works at Troma’s NYC office. He’s one crazy cook and I am going to be working on a photo diary of my trip to Utah starting tonight. The diary will go up on my website and I will also post it on my log so check it out if you’d like to see a few pics from da journey.”

Thought I’d paste that onto my log as an announcement of the photo diary.


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