HUMAN GUINEA PIGS

     I remember when my old roommate Willie came down with a nasty cold and he'd been fighting it with decidedly mixed results.  During this epic struggle, he, like many sufferers of the overly simplistically-named "Common Cold" had been sucking down a popular brand of menthyl-lyptic throat lozenges.  Apparently this strategy had been having some effect since he commented that these lozenges seemed to be helping.  Then he wondered aloud just where exactly did "Menthyl lyptus" come from?

     Now, Willie's one of those people who retains a certain inquisitiveness, curiosity, and wariness about the world around him.  He takes nothing for granted.  I like to kid him that he could find a conspiracy in the fact that oatmeal's gray.

     Suffice it to say, he's a bit of an intense guy.

     I also once referred to him as the "Fountain of Useless Information" because nine times out of ten, he'll know the answer to questions like, "I wonder where Menthyl lyptus came from?"

     Still, too much information may sometimes be a bad thing.  We once set out to watch a four part PBS series on World War I.  The first night was fine.  The second night, however, we tuned in, only to find ourselves watching Episode 3.  By the next night, the series was already up to Episode 5, and so forth.

Damn those Republicans and their assaults on PBS, I thought.  The bastards must've slashed the funding so badly that our PBS affiliate could afford to air only every other episode.  What kind of revisionist history was this?  Even I smelled a conspiracy.

     Then I checked the newspaper listings.  Seems ol' Fountainhead had pegged the program's starting time right but somehow failed to notice that the station was airing two  consecutive episodes each night, not just the single every-other-chapter we thought we were stuck with.  Maybe his head gets so full that sometimes any new information just bounces off.

     Anyway, he's still a pretty smart guy, so when he asked where Menthyl came from, I was pleased to be able to inform him that it's extracted from mint leaves.  So then, he asked the exact same question that I ask about a lot of things:  "I wonder who first discovered that?"

     It's generally something we take for granted, but everything we consume; every food, every drink, every drug, every whatever had to be tried by somebody for the very first time.

     In the case of the modern day Menthyl liptus cough drop/throat lozenge, it's fairly easy to imagine a swampy, humid early spring day in some pre-historic forest eons ago.  The Mold and Pollen Counts are way up, (though, given the blessed absence of local TV weathermen, primitive man was spared the tedium of such tangentially weather-related filler as Mold Counts, Dew Points, Degree Days, and the exact value of pi.)

     Even though Grog may not know the difference between a Lightning Tracker and the First Look Doppler Radar, he knows that he feels like heck.  His nose is stuffed, his eyes are watering and itchy, and he's sneezing his fool Caveman head off.

     On this particular day, maybe he sneezes, trips on an exposed tree root, falls into a patch of mint plants, and knocks himself silly.  He lies there for a half an hour or so, breathing in the fresh minty air until he wakes up.

     Grog may now have a bump on the noggin but he realizes that, by golly, he can breathe again!  Perhaps being a bit of a klutz, Grog's conked himself on the head before while suffering from similar symptoms and never before noticed any such relief.  His primitive neurons sputtering and sparking like a loose light bulb, he's able to come to a realization:  Smelling those minty leaves cleared his sinuses and made his allergies feel better.  Grog has started mankind on the road to the modern day Menthyl lyptus cough and cold lozenge.  Too bad for him, the patent laws hadn't been invented yet.

     Plenty of discoveries and inventions have come about in a similarly scattershot fashion throughout man's history.  From Ben Franklin foolishly flying his kite on a stormy day to Isaac Newton's famously plummeting apple, the great discoveries of mankind have always required a guinea pig.

     Someone has to go first.

     For the big ticket items, the rewards for being first generally fit the risks.  If you're the first to do or discover something big, baby, history is likely to remember your name.  Grade school teaches us that Ferdinand Magellan was the first man to sail around the Earth.  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.  Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit the Earth.  Louis Pasteur advanced the cause of the dairy industry.  Even the Earl of Sandwich slapped some meat between two hunks of bread and invented the Big Mac.

     Or something like that.

     But what about the really brave souls?  There's a theory that the ancient Egyptians were the first civilization to make beer.  Supposedly, during the construction of the Great Pyramids, they soaked bread in water, then fermented this sludge with yeast and flavored it with dates, figs, honey, and flowers to make something resembling what we today call "beer."

     Yum, yum!  These must've been some pretty thirsty dudes!  Then again, I got this info from a coaster I swiped from a local brew pub, so I can't vouch for its scientific accuracy.

     Still, what if that's the way it really happened?  What if Anwar sucked down this concoction, hopped on his camel, and risked history's first DWI after a long hot day at the job site?  Whatever could have possessed him to quaff a skin of run-off swill from soggy, rotten bread, regardless of what else they added to hide the smell?  Whatever it was, he apparently didn't die or even get sick and he probably copped quite a buzz if he didn't know when to say when.

     We'll probably never know what possesses people like him to try out an exotic new taste sensation or untested miracle drug for the first time.  Maybe it's a sense of adventure; a willingness to risk living on the edge.  Maybe he did it on a double dare with a cherry on top.  Or maybe he had a cold and someone threw in a few of those mint leaves.

     Darn it, Willie should know these things!

DOIN' THE PARK CITY DANCE

It’s a big deal to go to the Sundance Film Festival.  Yeah, the cynic in me knows that Sundance is a far cry from what it used to be.  I realize that it’s strayed from its original mission to showcase independent films and has been largely hijacked by the studios that use it as just another marketing platform for their “art-house” fare.

Even so, it’s Sundance.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s the “Park City Experience” than just Sundance, however, because Robert Redford’s prodigy hasn’t been the only game in that wealthy Utah ski resort town for a long time.  Like the Lutherans splitting off from the Catholics, the Slamdance Film Festival was formed in 1995 when a group of filmmakers whose films Sundance had rejected banded together to hold a concurrent, renegade film festival in a hotel ballroom.  A myriad of offshoots quickly followed, including a couple, such as NoDance and Slamdunk, which achieved some level of respectability and acceptance within the indie film world.

All of this means that for a two week stretch in mid-January, the picturesque burg of Park City morphs into a mecca of desperate filmmakers plying their wares to a motley assortment of well-heeled Hollywood insiders racking up huge cell phone bills.

I’d been to film festivals before.  My adopted home town of Austin, Texas is a hotbed of indie film in its own right and hosts two of the most respected festivals in the business in SXSW and the Austin Film Festival.  It’s also the home of the genre-flavored Fantastic Fest, the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival (AGLIFF), the Austin Jewish Film Festival, and the Cine Las Americas International Film Festival featuring the best in Latin American and indigenous films.

As a longtime film journalist and filmmaker, I’ve been to all of them, but there’s nothing quite like the Park City Experience.  For one thing, you can really “attend” a festival in your own town.  You don’t really get to experience new surroundings, new restaurants, or new nightlife.  Plus, you still gotta get up and go to work the next morning.

Park City is a total immersion experience, especially if, as in my first visit there, you’re wearing more than one hat.  The first time I attended all the Park City “…dances,” I was writing extensively for one of the leading indie film publications and knew that my editor expected me to attend and write reviews for at least 5-6 films per day.  Meanwhile, I was also there to promote a film I had co-produced that was premiering at Slamdance.

Often, the two tasks went hand-in-hand:  Freezing in lines outside theaters while waiting for screenings offered numerous opportunities for shameless self-promotion, as did the seemingly endless shuttle bus rides from venue to venue.

Of course, the best-known venue, in fact what I would consider to be the epicenter of Sundance, is the Egyptian Theatre.  This marquee-festooned old-style movie theater serves as the backdrop for nearly every news report that comes out of the festival.  The Egyptian also occupies a prime perch at the top of Main Street, a steeply inclined 4-lane road that inexplicably remains open to motorized transportation during the festivals, even though the teeming mass of humanity jostling along its overcrowded sidewalks bustles along at a faster pace than the cars and trucks that stupidly attempt to navigate this grossly overburdened thoroughfare.

And then there are the Main Street Flyer Wars.  Filmmakers can get highly creative with their marketing swag, but the single most important piece of promotional propaganda will always be the simple postcard-sized flyer which features full color artwork from the film on the front and information about the film, including its screening times and locations on the back.

It’s literally impossible to print up too many of these, as it’s the primary mission of any film’s producer, director, cast and/or crew member in attendance in Park City to plaster these everywhere.  Bulletin boards set up for this purpose on Main Street are quickly layered four or five deep with these flyers, and the turnover is so fast that if shot in time-lapse, they’d resemble those electronic billboards that flip from ad to ad.

I simultaneously attended screenings at Sundance, Slamdance and at least four other offshoot festivals each and every year I made the Park City pilgrimage.  Our film played Slamdance to a packed house twice before screening at both SXSW and AFF here at home and ultimately going on to a domestic video release, so mission accomplished on that front, while I lost countless hours of sleep cranking out my film reviews.

It’s been a few years since I’ve made the trip, and I’d love to get back to Park City for Christmas someday.  The food’s not great, but remembering its quaint mountain beauty and the leftover Christmas lights twinkling in the January snow, I can just imagine that it would be a great place to spend the Holidays.

For one thing, all those annoying film people like me wouldn’t be there yet.  They’d still be at home packing their bags for yet another Park City Experience.