Skidding through Sundance - a man goes to Sundance Film Festival, 1999 - Brief Article

Coming soon from Miramax--me. You know Miramax, the folks who brought you Gwyneth Paltrow? Well, from one luscious blond to another the torch has been passed. It was the talk of the Sundance Film Festival, the bacchanal that takes over the small town of Park City, Utah, for ten days every winter.

OK, so it wasn't exactly the talk of Sundance. But if you don't count Three Seasons, the big prizewinner shot entirely in Vietnamese, or the fact that Robert Redford still looks good even when slipping on the ice and nearly skidding down the length of Main Street, it was all anybody was talking about.

OK, maybe it was all I was talking about. But that was why Miramax had sent me to Sundance: to appear at screenings of Get Bruce! the documentary about my gay and giddy life in the comedy gulag that will hopefully be entertaining filmgoers in malls around the world any month now.

It's a bizarre learning experience, having a film made about you. Embarrassing incidents and opinions you thought you'd dismembered and put through the wood chipper years ago suddenly spring up, fully reconstituted and ready to unnerve you anew. The filmmakers have so much incriminating stuff that they're already planning a sequel--Bruce: Pig in the City. But that's a cross to bear at a later date.

The task at Sundance was to get people to pay attention to this movie. This would not be as easy as it seemed, even with a sex symbol such as myself in the saddle. Several dozen movies were screening at the festival, and almost everybody you saw was there to promote one of them. In addition to Sundance, which had tied up all five movie theaters and the town library, there were Slamdance, Nodance, Souldance, and Lapdance, alternative-to-the-alternative festivals that tied up all the makeshift screens hanging over the major bars. I would scan Main Street, searching for people who might loosely be termed The Audience. There weren't many.

But the Get Bruce! posters had gone up, and people noticed them. They featured me in a pose that tantalizingly recalled Tanya the Elephant, but they were colorful. And colorful goes a long way at Sundance, where bleakness with a side of angst is often the order of the day. The picture is so showbiz that we naturally figured gay people would find it first. And even though Aspen was running Gay and Lesbian Ski Week at the same time, Sundance was fairly flaming.

One of the top programmers is also on the board of Outfest in Los Angeles, and there was no shortage of gay product or people, all of them wonderfully aware. It started with the clerk at the condo check-in desk. "Nike," he said, eyeing the logo on my huge red duffel bag, "you know they buy endorsements from Reggie White?" Oops. Must follow the sports pages more closely.

There were new movies from Gregg Araki (not all that gay this time and not all that discussed either) and Doug Liman, director of the wildly hetero Swingers, whose latest, Go, features a gay love story involving Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf (much discussed, need I add). An adorable comedy called Trick featured those lovable icons Miss Tori Spelling and Miss Coco Peru--alas, not in love. Edge of Seventeen, a sort of John Hughes picture, had a gay hero and a wonderful lesbian earth mother performance from Lea DeLaria. There was also Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle, a brilliant documentary about the stagehands at the San Francisco Opera (all you'd imagined and more).

What there didn't seem to be any of was AIDS drama, previously a staple of any self-respecting festival. Perhaps filmmakers are taking a breather. Lesbian sex as a metaphor for freedom also didn't put in an appearance. Sorry, girls.

But the local gay populace whizzed in from Salt Lake City for two personal favorites: Beefcake, a paean to the men who put out the muscle magazines years before you could buy gay erotica at the newsstand, and Sex: The Annabelle Chong Story, a documentary about a feminist who, as a political statement, decided to sleep with 251 men over a ten-hour period. I loved her, even though she shattered my old record. And she didn't do it during a power failure when there was nothing on TV.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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