Every year Sundance and Park City seems a little less exotic, and a little more of an orchestrated Mardi Gras. When I first came here in '93 I thought, "Wow, cool." Now I'm going, "Hmm, yeah ...okay." This festival used to be run and enjoyed by the hip elite; now it's a mob scene everywhere you go. If you've got a press badge and you know people, you can finagle your way around and see what you need to see and have some fun between screenings. I don't know what I'm complaining about, really. I guess I'm just saying it would be cooler if the festival could revert back to where it was -- size-wise, hype-wise -- in '93.

I hit town around 1:30 pm and went straight to the festival headquarters at the Park City Marriott. I ran into Magic Lantern's Reid Rosefelt, who informed me that Katie Holmes does not have a nude scene in PIECES OF APRIL, which Reid's company is repping.

Apparently PIECES was set up at a big studio last year and ready to shoot when the plug was pulled because some executives felt that costars Patricia Clarkson and Derek Luke weren't bankable enough and that the whole package seemed like a weak commercial bet. Along came producers Gary Winick and John Sloss (the team behind last year's Sundance hit TADPOLE), who got it rolling again.

I talked to some others - publicists Mickey Cottrell and Jeremy Walker, among them. Fifteen minutes into my chit-chats I was getting the distinct impression that Wayne Kramer's THE COOLER, which shows twice on Friday (at 5:30 and 11:30 pm), is more of a hot-ticket thing than I'd previously discerned. Aaah, don't listen to me. This is all hot festival air.

Festival staffers are handing out these humungous press badges measuring 7 by 4 inches. They're actually a large white-and-gold badge inside a see-through plastic envelope that includes a transit map. You can put tickets and other stuff into it, so that's fine. A journalist pal has a friend who's a paid festival staffer, and this guy says the extra-large badges came about because the festival honchos noticed that press people covering the '02 Winter Olympics here were wearing similar-sized passes, and they wanted to copy them because "they thought they were cool."

Phantoms

Residues of the September 11th tragedy are clear elements in a couple of Sundance films -- Dan Algrant's PEOPLE I KNOW, which screens tonight (Friday, 1.17) at the Eccles Theatre, and Richard Linklater's short film LIVE FROM SHIVA'S DANCE FLOOR, which stars Timothy Speed Levitch (THE CRUISE). I've seen Algrant's but not Linklater's, so knowledgable things first.

As regular readers may recall, PEOPLE I KNOW was shot in the spring of '01 and then shelved by its distributor, Miramax, out of concern that its dark portrait of avaricious New York power-mongers was out of synch with the post-9.11 climate.

One brief bit that Algrant decided to cut out of the film featured the World Trade Center towers. It shows star Al Pacino getting out of a cab in downtown Manhattan, with the camera then panning up and catching sight of the towers 10 or 15 blocks south, and then the camera tilting further and further left until its rests horizontally, giving the vague impression that the build ings themselves have fallen over.

It's a hell of a shot, given the obvious fact that Algrant didn't have a clue about what would happen three or four months later. If I were running Miramax I would have insisted that it stay in the film. It's uncanny that Algrant captured it. I ran a brief bit about this three or four months ago after Algrant sent me a VHS of the footage.

"There was no way to leave [the shot] in the film," Algrant told me earlier this week. "People would assume it was a manipulated effects shot" -- although it was obvious to me that it hadn't been tweaked at all. "It makes people remember the tragedy...there are three thousand reasons not to keep it in...I don't want people to be hit over the head with it...seeing those buildings spin to the side is a visceral reminder of that attack. Maybe in five years or so [this shot] can be put into a DVD."

And yet the version of the film that will hit theatres on April 25th contains two shots of the towers, and one of these is almost a shocker. It's a shot aiming out from the 40th floor of an office building. At first fog clouds are obscuring the view, but then the clouds break and wham...the two towers, massive and ominous, are maybe 1000 feet away. It's more than a little spooky. How is it that Algrant happened to shoot this, or the other shot for that matter?

"Speed" Levitch believes that part of what artists do is channel unconscious currents and premonitions. Julian Schnabel seemed to do the same thing when he painted his "Big Girl" series several months before the September 11th tragedy, showing a blonde girl with some kind of bullet or missile plowing into her head.

Levitch, a New York tour guide when he isn't making movies, talks about the 9.11 tragedy in Linklater's short, LIVE FROM SHIVA'S DANCE FLOOR, which is being shown in Park City as a companion piece to Deborah Dickson's THE EDUCATION OF GORE VIDAL. Particularly, Levitch offers an idea about what to do with the vacant 16 acres of space where the World Trade Center once stood. And before you laugh, think about it.

"Bring in a herd of American Bison," suggests Levitch, "and turn Ground Zero into a joy park and domestic grazing land. The Bison will take over Wall Street eventually. And remember, there's a precedent for this -- the original Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, was actually a grazing meadow for sheep. Just think...some day a Wall Street executive will be promoted and get a corner office and he'll be hugely excited because the corner office will give him a great view of the Bison.

"You're not going to heal the hurt by building another skyscraper ," Levitch says. "This short film is a geometric proof of my axiom about the Buffalo." DANCE FLOOR was shot by Linklater on 16mm color film in a single day, he says. The title comes from the Vedas and refers to the eternal dance of creation and destruction.

Levitch is representing the short during the festival. Linklater is shooting a film right now for producer Scott Rudin called HOUSE OF ROCK, starring Jack Black and written by Mike White (CHUCK AND BUCK). Levitch has written a book that's kind of an armchair version of his New York walking tours, called "Speedology -- Speed on New York on Speed" (Context Books, New York). He says it's been out a couple of months.

As long as we're on the subject, I should mention there's one other 9.11 echo in GANGS OF NEW YORK. Just as Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day Lewis's gangs are about to fight their final rumble, shots are fired from U.S. warships in New York harbor. The shells come whistling in and explode against buildings nearby. I had a chance to listen to their sound on a GANGS DVD screener recently, and to me they sound like one thing only -- jet engines.

I called GANGS editor Thelma Schoonmaker and asked about this. She said that the sound editor who worked on this scene, Eugene Gearty, used "real" mortar effects taken from the sound tracks of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE THIN RED LINE. "The only other thing he did was weave in the scream of a capuchin monkey...so he used that scream, but otherwise it's all real mortar sounds."

Okay, but to me it's jet engines. Surely Gearty and Schoonmaker and director Martin Scorsese must have considered that people would have this impression. How could they not?

Trapped

I'm sharing the Sundance condo with two journalists, and one of them -- the one sharing the loft space where I'm sleeping, or trying to sleep, I should say -- snores like a buzzsaw. Like an adenoidal wart hog. Like a monster in a Hammer horror film from the late 1950s. This is intolerable. He's paid his share and is here for the whole festival, and I'm not going to sleep a wink.

Aren't there things a chronic snorer can do to fix his or her problem? I seem to remember remedies being advertised on TV or online. How do married couples cope with this? I'm amazed that a person with a snoring problem would even consider sharing a loft space with someone else, knowing he/she has an ailment that may keep the other person up all night. William Bendix would call this a revoltin' development. There is no sound more disgusting that a loud guttural snore.

Does anyone know of any solutions that can be bought at a drug store...anything? Please advise immediately. Either the snoring stops or the guy leaves, or he sleeps curled up in the downstairs bathroom and shuts the door. This is awful...a nightmare.

Plus the upstairs bathroom has a leaky faucet that doesn't leak - it sounds like a small kitten starting to throw up or choke up a hairball. Plus the bathrooms have no towel racks to hang stuff on, or hooks of any kind - nothing. I wonder how the contractor who built this place rationalizes his input. He probably looks in the mirror and says to himself, "Well, I built a shit-level, bottom-of-the-line condo - but the doors lock and the floors are definitely level!"

Direct What You Know

Oliver Stone is part of this festival in more ways than one. Not only is COMANDANTE, his documentary portrait of Cuban honcho Fidel Castro, showing this weekend, but a drama called CONTROLLED CHAOS, which is at least partly inspired by the experience of Stone's former right-hand assistant, Azita Zendel, in working for the Oscar-winning filmmaker in the early to mid '90s, will be screening at the Treasure Mountain Inn's Fireside Salon on Saturday at 5 pm and Monday at 12 noon.

I haven't seen CONTROLLED CHAOS but I admire the moxie of a budding filmmaker reaching into her own background, however risky or controversial that reaching may ultimately turn out to be, for material. And you have to chuckle at the irony of a movie seemingly portraying certain aspects of Stone's personal life and working habits in roughly the same spirit that Stone's JFK or NIXON told their stories -- as mixtures of truth, myth and impressionism.

Zendel says it's about "how far an employee can or should go to protect her boss." It's about a kind of triangular relationship between a flamboyant film director named Rick Jones (Don Hughes), his assistant, Elsie (Amy Blomquist), and an entertainment reporter referred to in the film as Slick (Eric Engstrom) who's trying to dig up dirt about Jones' possible ties to the death of his investigative reporter brother.

Anyone who's read James Riordan's exhaustively researched 1995 biography will recall that Zendel was not only regularly quoted, but was right in the middle of nearly every detail of Stone's life for roughly four years, from '91 to '95, which was Stone's most prolific period. He directed JFK, HEAVEN AND EARTH, NATURAL BORN KILLERS and NIXON during this time, and was involved in developing Stone's NORIEGA movie with Al Pacino, which never happened, and Stone's might-have-been EVITA with Michelle Pfeiffer.

Anyway, Stone fans and the general curious might want to check out CONTROLLED CHAOS. It'll at least be a hoot, and it could be something more.

One thing I really love about this festival is that it inspires in me an interest in looking at "maybe" movies that might be great or good or not-so-hot, but were made by hard-charging, impassioned souls who cared enough about what they tried to say to go through all kinds of sweat and grief and financial anxiety to get them seen. I can't do this again during the festival, but I should do this more often in general. You never know when you'll run across a filmmaker worth paying attention to.

Nothing Yet...

...on the Sundance movies, but I'll have some reactions, stories, quotes and photos on Monday. Tomorrow is Ed Solomon's LEVITY, followed by RAISING VICTOR VARGAS. Dylan the budding journalist arrives at 3 pm, then it's on to the Eccles for Keith Gordon's THE SINGING DETECTIVE and then, depending on the breaks, a press screening of Richard Lagravanese's A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Plus about three parties and maybe a fourth.

Chicago Blues

"I think you're suffering from a very familiar form of Oscar-season denial. I remember my own bout of it during the year of FORREST GUMP. I didn't like the film, and refused to believe that it could even be nominated, let alone win Best Picture -- although the evidence was all around me, in the reactions of both critics and audiences.

"Well, the same thing is going on with CHICAGO this year. Despite your antipathy to the film, people are going insane for the movie. Insane. Have you seen it in a theater full of paying civilians? I can honestly say that I haven't seen a movie play like this since STAR WARS, and that includes TITANIC and whatever other more recent juggernauts you want to mention. It's going to be nominated for a ton of Oscars, in every major category, and may well win a bunch. Picture. Director. Screenplay. Cinematography. Editing. Production design. Costumes. Zellwegger. Zeta-Jones. Maybe Gere. Maybe Latifah. Maybe Reilly.

"If you want to leave CHICAGO off your list of movies that you would nominate, feel free. But to leave it out of your prognostications at this point is simply wishful thinking." -- Jack Lechner, Radical Media.

Wells to Lechner: You've convinced me, Jack -- thanks. Now I want CHICAGO to win. I mean, it truly is the best picture of the year. Gee, it sure feels good to just go with the flow and not fight City Hall. Thanks for straightening me out.

Errata