Strange musings from the bakery: Violent thoughts from Utah's Hollywood binge

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of musings by USU journalism student David Baker.

By David Baker

January 25, 2008 | The whole plan for the Sundance Film Festival was to get as drunk as humanly possible and roam the streets trying to pick fights with celebrities who had wronged me in the past.

I don't understand the nuances of independent film-making, so I figured I'd stick with what I knew - heavy drinking, intentions of violent behavior and a healthy hatred for consumers and producers of mind-numbingly stupid vomit under the guise of entertainment.

I had spent the previous day compiling a de facto hit list.

Public enemy No. 1: Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of such garbage as "National Treasure 2" and about a thousand other blockbusters that prey on the drooling masses using explosions and criminally awful premises - the assassination of Lincoln as the vehicle for a shoddy action-adventure flick only being the most recent of his egregious injustices.

I promised several people I would either sword fight the bastard in public, shank him with a razor-like, hand-sharpened toothbrush or puke on his $12,000 ski boots.

No. 2: Nick Cage. A sidekick of sorts, the Bush to Bruckheimer's evil masterminding Cheney-figure. Cage is the pretty face on the fecal matter Bruckheimer produces for mass consumption and even more massive profits. Nick is the trigger man in a heist scheme most of the American movie-watching public are either too stupid or too bored to be conscious of.

No. 3: Paris Hilton. Her very presence is offensive to common decency, tact and the moral fiber of America.

It would be dangerous to go at her head on. You need a hazmat suit to escape her vicinity without a mild case of venereal disease. If she was on the slopes, I couldn't be completely sure my position on Main Street would give me an adequate buffer zone to assure I wouldn't get chlamydia.

I told my mom as I crossed State Street on my way into Salt Lake City Friday night I planned on punching Ben Affleck in the head. She advised me to refrain, not cause a scene. I don't know if she just didn't want to see the headline "Student journalist jailed after assaulting Affleck," or if she was worried about my safety. Probably just being motherly.

"He's probably a pansy, mom," I said, thinking she was worried about me getting my ass kicked by the star of Gigli. "These people are much smaller in real life. I can take him. I bet he's like 5-foot-2." She still wasn't sold on the idea.

I was still hellbent on destruction that night at the Tavernacle, a clean, piano bar in downtown Salt Lake City, when I laid out my plan to a Bostonian who claimed to have been a stand-in for Matt Damon in The Departed.

After drinking whiskeys and marshaling my troops deep into Saturday morning, and getting flipped off by the entertainment at the Tavernacle, some longhair that I called a pussy because he wouldn't play the solo to "Sweet Home Alabama" -- but that's neither here nor there -- I woke up Saturday around 10, with my left and right brain playing a raucous game of tug-of-war in my head.

When it feels like your brain is splitting in half, with each side trying to escape out an opposite ear, it's damn hard to hold onto the illusion of drunken revelry and inappropriate behavior at Utah's one chance to appear on E News.

So while a man with my same name was busy shooting cattle and using his truck to drag them down the highway near Wellsville, I was busy pulling myself together in Salt Lake, trying to fix my mind on tackling and skewering Utah's 10-day celebrity and paparazzi binge.

A group of us headed out for an afternoon of potential assault and guaranteed star-filled mania - we had no idea what we were getting into.

If you think you are going to park at Sundance, you're higher than Paris Hilton after an opiate binge and half as smart the multi-talented hotel heiress/amateur smut peddler.

Thirty-seven minutes later.

After the utterance of well over 37 f-words.

The sighting of at least one irrelevant celebrity - it may have been mid-90's rapper Coolio, but it may have just been a tall black man with wild hair.

And thoughts of parking the car in the middle of the road and just laying down behind it - just like the random, frozen-to-the-bone transient in the puffy coat, pushing the heavy-laden shopping cart down 900 East in Salt Lake City Saturday morning that stopped his progress and laid down in the middle of the sidewalk like he had just given up on life.

After all the headaches and a brief discussion of foreshadowing, my friend Aaron and I coasted into a snowy parking lot in front of the Booster Smoothie in a strip mall a couple miles away from the bustling main hive of the independent film world. It wasn't close, but it wasn't full and it was free.

Before finding our spot, we'd been funneled, like thousands of clueless sheep to the slaughter, down a sick corridor lined with pretentious resort architecture - all stucco, wood beams and Austrian lodge motif - called Main Street, only to find all the $20 parking lots were full. We were angry and want nothing more than to find Mr. Redford and kick him in the balls.

This sort of rage was helpful to warm the body, protecting it against the punishingly cold air.

I think it also acted as sunglasses to shield the eye from the blinding glare of celebrity, allowing anyone willing to pay attention -- which I was doing now that my brain had settled -- to see the real heart of the bastard we were dealing with.

It focused me. Made me sharp.

For some masochistic reason, we decided to walk up to the heart of the monster.

In the cold and through the slush of the sidewalks, dodging movers and shakers with their fuzzy Russian-looking hats and furry Eskimo boots, we made our way through the crowds and into the nexus of the madness.

The whole time while passing by these dons of independent film I was couldn't help thinking that these were the kind of people who were directors of nature-documentary-social-commentary hybrids.

Someone whacked enough on their own pomp-laced, creative Kool -aid they think they can direct nature. I imagine them out on Mount St. Helen's asking the volcano for a little more emotion for it's next explosion, or telling the La Sal Mountains that their motivation is to be a majestic backdrop for Delicate Arch.

Walking up Main Street, it was too easy to pick out the redneck stargazers -- they were the ones driving Chevy S-10 pickups with custom camouflage paint jobs, sticking out like a sore thumb amid the chrome and turtle waxed luxury otherwise populating the Park City streets - so the hicks didn't even get a second look.

So to me, all the people we passed were either $10-coffee-swilling-pseudo-intellectual film pricks or celebrities.

And when you are fully aware there are celebrities around, you tend to project fame on every person you see.

"That guy in the hat ... yeah him ... Is he the dad on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?"

"Are you high? That's not Danny Devito. That guy is like 6-foot-6."

"Damn ... well what about the guy in the puffy coat with the chains and the entourage leaning against that Bentley, isn't that DMX?"

"No, for hell's sake. No."

"I think I just saw Jake Gyllenhaal."

"No. That looks more like Annie Hall than Jake Gyllenhaal."

"What about that guy with the glasses and plaid flannel? I think that's Joe Estevez."

"Like Martin Sheen's brother, Emilio's uncle?"

"Sure. No, wait. I don't think it is."

"Better question, how do either of us know or care about Joe Estevez?"

"Good point. But what if it is?"

"It's people like you that are coming up to us and taking pictures because they think you were an extra in Firehouse Dog."

Making up fake celebrities was essential -- especially since we weren't seeing any real ones. As a group, we only saw fake Coolio, r&b crooner John Legend and Jay Baruchel -- an actor many people wouldn't have recognized from his bit parts in Knocked Up and Almost Famous and his starring role on the one-season, TV wonder, Undeclared.

We knew Jay, so it was worth braving the treacherous cold and menacing high-roller vibrations to see at least one person we'd actually consider to be cool.

Taking into account other people's propensity for celebritizing everyone, I was considering telling anyone who wanted to know that I was an extra on a few German adult films and also a producer for MTV's Parental Control.

The worst thing is, it would have worked. Maybe not well enough to get us a table right off at the Wasatch Brewpub, where the wait was two hours - at least that's what Craig, some overstressed assistant manager, told us while he was ushering us up to the bar or out of the restaurant after Aaron and I had eaten and had a beer.

But even faux celeb status couldn't sustain me for more than a few hours at Sundance. The scene is steeped in pompous extravagance running the gamut - from fashion to luxury SUVs to incredible intellectual arrogance to social activism - eventually souring your mood.

An afternoon of eluding fur protesters and hipster ski and film freaks meant violence certainly would have been the end result of any confrontation between myself and the hit list.

A few things were apparent as Aaron and I climbed back in the car, teeth chattering:

1. A turd - in this case, a northern Utah ski town - dressed like a celebrity still stinks.

2. No matter how much your boots cost, ice and snow are still slippery. As an aside, stiletto heels aren't conducive to winter travel.

3. It would have been impossible to pull a drunken burn on this scene. The snow would further debilitate walking operations to the point of non-movement. Also, the crowd seems to be more into designer amphetamines, Prozac and Voss water than Evan Williams and 7UP, thus less likely to take kindly to my drunken offers to Indian leg wrestle in front of Harry O's.

MS
DM