Winston Aldworth gets starstruck when visiting Utah's coolest film festival.
We've had one Rihanna sighting, someone from our group bagged entrance to Maggie Gyllenhaal's annual cocktail party, Taika Waititi is giving a talk across town and another of our group is pretty sure that Leonardo DiCaprio was in a darkened SUV that just sauntered down the main street of Park City. How sure? Really? "He always comes here. I read it somewhere."
This street in a small, but highly moneyed Utah ski resort is no stranger to celebrity sightings. From our barside perch on the main drag, Park City and Deer Valley ski resorts are a few minutes away — they're among the fanciest ski spots in North America. The dry powder snow is legendary, and dotted throughout the skifields are billionaires' holiday pads. The boutique shopfronts display fancy, expensive winter wear and the restaurants serve fancy food.
Of any time of the year, we visited during the busiest, when those billionaires' holiday pads are full and that food is at its fanciest. We've arrived during the Sundance Film Festival, a celebration — and starting point — for independent filmmaking and creativity over the past four decades.
My own brushes with celebrity were of the lesser-light variety: On a crowded footpath, I squeezed past John David Washington (son of Denzel), whom we'd just seen in the excellent Monsters and Men; and after a screening of the fox-clever American Animals I bagged a selfie with a couple of the actors. It's not cool to fawn over famous folk, but you can't help but be swept along in the festival's fun, buzzy atmosphere. You can probably still smell the fame on me.
