Doing the Sundance shuffle

Slamdance was where you could find intensely personal and risk-taking films such as "My Father, the Genius" by Lucia Small. The project began with the weird request of the filmmaker's father, Glen, who had been an extraordinarily promising and visionary architect in the 1960s and early '70s before his colossal arrogance derailed his career. During a period of especially harsh defeat, when he thought the world would never appreciate his genius, he put in his will that his daughter Lucia should write his biography after he died. Instead she made a gutsy documentary about him without waiting for his demise.

It was her way of finally getting to know her father, who she had seen only once a week as a child -- her parents divorced when she was 5 --and had rarely communicated with as an adult. The film shows Glen Small's brilliant and radical ideas about architecture and urban design that would harmonize with nature. But it also portrays how he pissed off the rest of the architectural establishment and caused his self-destruction. He could have been a giant like Frank Gehry, but he ruined his chances by making harshly critical statements about the real Gehry and their colleagues.

The film also shows Glen Small as a fiercely self-absorbed narcissist who largely abandoned his three wives and six children in his pursuits of his own talents and hedonistic pleasures. Glen was in financial ruin while Lucia Small shot the film, which forced her to max out her own credit cards and brought on the resentment of one of her sisters, who felt that she was using the project as a way of stealing away her father's attention and favor. The festival's premiere audience thrilled to the risky filmmaking and then gasped when Glenn Small appeared afterward for the Q & A even though the movie often portrayed him so negatively. It was an awkward but charming moment. When asked what he thought of the film Glen was as egomaniacal and impolitic in person as on-screen: He said that he wished it had focused more on his work than his messy life.

Slamdance also had this year's best hope for emulating the cultish following of "The Blair Witch Project." It was "Nothing So Strange," a fictional film about the internal politics in an activist group investigating the conspiratorial coverup of the assassination of Microsoft's Bill Gates. The film, which pretends to be a documentary, is an homage to classics of the documentary genre, such as Erroll Morris' legendary "The Thin Blue Line." It picks up brilliantly on the strange culture of conspiracy theorists, drawing inspiration from the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King cases and from LAPD scandals such as Ramparts. The film's crew epitomized the no-budget couch-surfing spirit of truly independent film. The director, Brian Flemming, and one of its stars, Laurie Pike, were former lovers -- they actually met years earlier at Sundance, when he was promoting his alternative Slumdance festival and she was a journalist covering the scene. This time around, with 12 members of the film crew sharing a three-room hotel suite, they slept in the same bed once again but claim that it was motivated by necessity and that they didn't have sex. Pike said that she arrived at Park City with a single dollar in her pocket and got through the 11 days on all the free food at parties and events. When I bought them pints of beer after their screening, they seemed elated that someone was essentially paying to see their film, even if the financial contribution was indirect.

They came to the festival along with the Bill Gates imitator Steve Sires, who has a small but crucial role in "Nothing So Strange," appearing in their own equivalent of the Zapruder film. Sires looks remarkably like the real Bill Gates. The only tipoff is that Sires is 5-foot-8 and the real thing is around 6 foot. Strangely enough, Sires lives on Gates' home turf of Seattle and works as an engineering consultant on Linux, the free software alternative to Microsoft's Windows. Even better, he claims that a production company once hired him to fill in for Gates in a video shown at the 2000 Comdex convention when the real Bill couldn't make the shoot, and no one ever seemed to realize the difference. As he walked through Park City, though, the star-struck festies tended to ignore him because even though he looked like the richest and one of the best-known men in the world, he certainly didn't look like a film star.

There were a few mock celebrities who made a big hit at Sundance, though. Fans flocked to a party for the surviving members an early-70s San Francisco performance troupe of acid-tripping bearded hippie drag queens who helped inspire glitter rock. They were the stars of "The Cockettes," an exuberant and fascinating documentary that delighted audiences through the week. When one of the aging performers showed up in the kind of way-over-the-top makeup and elaborate costumes portrayed in the film, even the most jaded partygoers interrupted their schmoozing to gape for a prolonged moment.

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