PARK CITY, Utah – Security is tight, with two rent-a-cops guarding the only downstairs entrance. None of the windows open wide enough to allow an adult body to squeeze through. So Kid Protocol must go through the front door.
Using the phone-to-the-ear strategy, he strides past the crowd, past the publicists, with their guest lists, and through the front door. A security guard briefly grabs his jacket, but Kid pulls free. He is in, suddenly surrounded by throbbing music and a jostling crowd.
Kid Protocol, a k a Alex Mamlet, is a professional party crasher. He has turned a bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of confidence into a kind of performance art. Each one of Mamlet's break-ins is recorded on digital video, by his partner Amir Bar-Lev with the camera, and Mamlet wearing a wireless mic.
The Sundance Film Festival in Park City was his stage this week.
The two said their exploits will be webcast on TNT's Roughcut.com sometime in February. Bar-Lev and Mamlet also hope to sell their footage to Comedy Central, or use it to make a short film.
In terms of celebrity and media heat, Sundance has become one of America's biggest cultural events. Increasingly, the films no longer matter, at least compared to the parties. For many, it is the social events that count.
And the parties themselves have become ever more elitist, with those not part of independent filmmaking's clique finding themselves literally out in the cold. And so the once-collegial Sundance festival has developed a hierarchy: There are those who have invites and those who don't.
Though the cynical might think Mamlet and Bar-Lev are in this for the free mini egg rolls and beer, they insist that their party crashing is a political act.
"What we are trying to do is defeat the whole notion of the VIP, of the guest list," said Bar-Lev. "All of that has polluted the film world. The eventual goal is for Kid Protocol to become a kind of Harry Houdini. He'd vow to be behind George W. Bush at the inauguration and he'd be there."
In the meantime, there is an HBO party to sneak into – a relatively minor challenge. Mamlet waits until the publicist/bouncer gets into a heated argument with an insistent, but uninvited, reporter and sneaks behind her.
"There are some basic strategies," Bar-Lev said a few minutes later, safely inside a posh restaurant. "There's the upside-down guest list read, the fake invite, creating diversions. But the fundamental principle is confidence. If you act like you belong there, you'll get in. if you have one iota of doubt, you won't."
At Sundance, Mamlet claims a 100 percent success rate – 18 barred doors, 18 crashed parties. He and Bar-Lev have invaded parties sponsored by Variety, William Morris, Showtime, Hugo Boss, the Independent Film Channel and NHK.
Mamlet and Bar-Lev initiated the project last September at the Toronto Film Festival, where they were screening their film Fighter. The film festival offered them a camera and a small budget to document their experience. Despite having a film in the festival, they found themselves shut out of many events.
With the camera running, Kid Protocol found his way into the most exclusive parties. He snuck through a maze of hallways to emerge in a Miramax-sponsored banquet, complete with lobster dinner, commandeered a limo and borrowed a chef's uniform to make his way into an invite-only event.
"A waitress came up to me and said, 'We need more quesadillas,'" Mamlet said. "I told her, 'I don't even know where the kitchen is.'"
All the world's a dance: Slamdance was started in 1995 by a group of filmmakers whose films were rejected by Sundance. Nodance was started in 1998 by a filmmaker whose film was rejected by Slamdance.
And Digidance, Vandance, Tromadance, Lapdance and the half-dozen other Park City festivals? They also sprang up in Sundance's considerable shadow. The explosion of film festivals in Park City may be a sign of things to come.
Nearly all of these underground festivals are making use of new digital projection technologies. With digital presentation becoming increasingly compact and affordable, showing film and video is increasingly becoming a do-it-yourself phenomenon.
It seems that anyone can challenge the status quo, be it an independent film festival such as Sundance or a commercial theater chain in a major city. Slamdance even offers advice on how to launch your own film festival.
"Last year, a bunch of us got together, put a sign on the door that said 'Sundress Film Festival,' and popped a few tapes into the VCR," said Dan Mirvish, a Slamdance founder. "That's how easy it is to start a festival."
The programmers of the mini-fests will argue that Sundance, and now Slamdance, have grown too powerful to serve the needs of filmmakers. But does it help filmmakers to showcase their work in an underground Park City festival?
Industry execs, after all, have more than 120 Sundance films – most of them world premieres – to choose from. Nonetheless, Jim Boyd, the founder of Nodance, believes his festival serves his filmmakers.
"We don't promise our filmmakers that their films will find distributors here, but we do promise that we'll work as hard as we can to get them some exposure," he said.
Nodance claims to be the first all-digital festival, having used only digital projection since it was founded. This year, the festival has one 120-seat theater and two 50-seat theaters. Boyd said attendance has doubled.
With the theaters shrinking in size, maybe the next move is to skip the theaters altogether, as the Dances in Your Pants Festival is doing. The festival includes short films that can be beamed to your Palm Pilot.
In any case, all of the underground festival directors seem to agree that Sundance is the bully on the block. Mirvish said at least 10 festivals co-sponsored the Festival Summit, a wrap party for participants in the various non-Sundance festivals, showing solidarity against a common enemy.
"Sundance got a lot of bad press for being mean to us, like when (Sundance Institute President Robert) Redford called us parasites," said Mirvish. "We've learned from that; we are supportive of all of the other festivals. If they can organize their own screenings, more power to them."
No wannabe millionaire here: Hypnotic continued to make Park City news, announcing the winner to its Million Dollar Film Festival. The contest champ, David von Ancken, will be given a $1 million production deal with Universal Studios, a partner of Hypnotic.
Von Ancken's short Bullet in the Brain can be seen at the site.
Digital? Who cares: Has digital projection arrived? Many have been impressed with the high quality of Sundance's digital projection.
Perhaps more impressive is that few are talking about projection at all; the different formats don't seem glaringly different from one another.
More evidence of the ascension of digital projection came at a Sundance screening of Scout's Honor. Tom Shephard, the film's director, apologized to the crowd at his first screening.
It seems the high-definition tape of his film didn't arrive in time, and he regretted having to screen the film's 16mm print.
