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Show The Park Record Saturday, January 29, 2000 A-10 1 1 1 m 1 I I 1 1 1 1 Rugged yet graceful... bringing the outdoors inside Exotic Log Furniture 20 OFF SALE 9 Kinds of wood TO 'Hi Beds. Armores. Mantels, etc Bent Log Designs 1014 East 12300 South, Draper, Utah 800-236-8564 Visit our showroom or website at www.bentlog.com Announcing the Opening of our new Silver Creek Service Center We Specialize in-- Auto Marine Trucks Large Machinery S Welding & Fabrications State inspections V fi. oT.'V .Jw weatltin iim wi nmmWGmk ere s sometning new to about in Pinebrook... Drs. Michael & Venssa Knight, D.D.5. Are proud to announce the Grand Opening of Pinebrook Dental Group in the Pinebrook Prof essional rlaza I Plaza ' Dr. Milce & Dr. Venssa bring to Park Otq a combined years of family dentistry experience with an emphasis on Pediatric & Cosmetic Dentistry. Featuring Park City's only Laser whitening Service! Call now for convenient dau and evening appointments! 69-6638 Pi'nebroolc Dental Group Pinebrook Professional plaza 5050 W. Pinebrook Road Suite 2000 (Next to Prudential Coleman Real Estate and Garden Christian Academy) Your neighborhood dentists Honoring most insurance plans. Financing available. More Dogs on Main Street 1 By Tom Clyde Sundance flops when it comes to snow Sundance let us down this year. It was a flop. It's a well known secret that the only reason we put up with the whole affair is that Sundance can be counted on to bring the snow. Nobody knows if it is the hoards of people in black, the extra radiation from all those cell phones or the fallout from all those cigarettes, cig-arettes, but something about Sundance has always brought the snow. Last year's ski season was saved by the Sundance effect. This year, after a dismal start to the ski season, we were all banking on Sundance. "Well, it's OK to ski on hard, machine-made snow and thin cover, in the rain, but just wait until Sundance," we all told ourselves. Then Sundance comes and goes, and instead of two feet of new snow, the only thing we have to show for it is about two feet of cigarette butts on the sidewalks. The skiing has been pretty good, if you go up high and select the days carefully to avoid skiing in the rain. And there is absolutely nobody on the hill. I skied both Park City and Deer Valley during Film Festival, and sometimes was the only person on the entire lift. I never encountered a line anywhere. There were movies, and the usual Halloween atmosphere on Main Street. There were close encounters with celebrities. I was using the restroom at the Yarrow and Roger Ebert was at the next urinal. Parking w as at a premium, and there was so much cell phone traffic that microwave popcorn was popping right there on the grocery store shelves. The usual proliferation of posters, stickers and other junk was plastered all over the town. Friends in the restaurant business have the same stories about "important" people showing up at 10 o'clock with a party of 20 for an 8 p.m. reservation for a party of six. and getting belligerent about waiting. These coastal types have been damaged by too much oxygen on the brain. It was Sundance as usual, except no snow. If they canl do better than this. I think we ought to think twice about inviting them back. Redford himself ought to be hauled before the city council for an explanation. They got two feet of snow in Virginia this week, and we got nada. Somebody has to be held accountable and, if not Redford, who else? The hot action this year was in the documentary category. I was working on a little documentary of my own this last week. My brother, sisters and I are in the process of cleaning out Mom's house in Salt Lake so we can get it ready to sell. Sorting through the family home of 50 years has been an interesting experience. It's a combination of archeology, anthropology, and some kind of puzzling psychology. As each of us reached adulthood (or at least that age) and moved on. our former bedrooms got filled with stuff. It had reached a point that Mom was living in about three rooms in a pretty large house, with the rest of it filled with stuff. In the basement, more or less where I had last left them, were my Tonka trucks and Lego bricks. It was like unearthing an old friend. My sisters stumbled across old prom dresses. The drain snake that Dad had employed with such colorful language was still there in the furnace room. Christmas decorations from the last 50 years, including a working set of bubble lights, all there in boxes stacked in the basement. The items of real interest and emotional appeal areni the pieces of fine art. We all kind of came apart when the steam boat fingernail brush bathtub toy turned up in the back of a drawer in the bathroom. It's a little brush attached to the bottom of a yellow rubber steamship. At some time or another, every one of us had played with in the bathtub. It probably didnt cost a buck new, but is priceless. It got moved to the ranch house where another generation of kids will play with it. My mother grew up on a tiny poultry farm in Idaho. I don"! know how many hens Grandpa had when he was in full operation, but even if they produced a 100 dozen eggs a day, given the w holesale price of eggs, life had to be pretty lean. Mom came of age at the start of the Great Depression. She left home after high school, and was expected to earn her own way, and send what she could back home to help support the rest of the family. Mom and Dad were married before the War, and scrimped by during the war years on ration coupons. Finally, at the end of the war, for the first time in her life, there w as some economic stability sta-bility and a sense of security. She would have been about 30. No wonder she saved things. Every wire hanger that ever came into the house is still there. The plastic bags from the dry cleaner were neatly folded and tucked into drawers. There were about 50 empty Log Cabin syrup bottles washed out and stored on shelves. In the context of her early life. I understand not throwing things out. One of the unusual items was a brochure from the Department of Defense called "Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack." It full of useful disinformation straight from the Pentagon. Apparently a nuclear attack was nothing to get upset about. At 50 miles from the bomb blast, most buildings would remain standing, though the window s would be blow n out. It would take about five minutes for the explosion to spread to 50 mile6 from ground zero. The booklet goes on to explain w hy your chances were better in a community fallout shelter than in your own. and also how to build and equip your own fallout shelter in the basement of your home. "Some people may panic," the booklet warns. Itls full of drawings of happy, smiling families, safe and secure in their shelters. After two weeks, everything every-thing was supposed to be OK. I remember the silly "duck and cover" drills in school, but for me. the Cold War was mostly played out on "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and posed no real threat. For my parents, who had struggled through the depression, then WW II, only to emerge into a world where the government was advising them on which corner of the basement w as the best place to huddle with the kids in anticipation of being incinerated, it must have been a different story. Whatever their fears, they hid them well. I never remember being afraid, or my parents expressing fears. The house was loaded with preparations for both the best and the worst in a world where either was possible. They enjoyed prosperity, but never seemed to trust it. My generation has come to think of prosperity as the norm. For my parents' generation, it was an aberration aber-ration to be enjoyed w hile it lasted. And just in case, dont throw anything away. Tom Clyde is a former city attorney and author of "Mart Dogs on Main Street. T He has been a columnist for The Park Record for more than a decade. Don't get me started By Gary Weiss My friend, the tycoon Editors note: The following appeared in its orignial form during Sundance Film Festival last year. Since it's film festival time again, it somehow felt appropriate to exercise both my admittedly huge capacity for being pretentious, pedantic, pontif-icatory pontif-icatory and all of those other obnoxious "P" things, and, at the same time, do some honor to an old and valued friend. I'm always happy doing the first and, in this case, it a genuine pleasure to think, write and reminisce about a guy whose friendship I enjoyed long before he became a real-deal tycoon in the movie business Harvey Weinstein. When I was much younger, F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of my favorite writers. In retrospect, I've come to view my admiration for him as indicative of a flaw in my own character. While undoubtedly a unique and extraordinary craftsman in the use of language, my regard for the values about which he wrote, and which he dearly felt, has become a minor source of personal embarrassment He was wrong about so many things but, like the myriad attributes of his artistic gift and character, he was, at least, grandly so. Shortly before bis death, among his notes for "Ihe Last Tycoon," Fitzgerald wrote "There are no second acts in American lives. " There is, perhaps, no assertion by an American writer that was further from the mark. At least in my view, among the greatest manifestations of the American persona is the constant opportunity to re-invent oneself. Which brings me, finally, to the subject of this column a friend of nearly 25 years who, while perhaps not the last movie tycoon, is certainly cer-tainly one about whom that appellation is, in this era of corporate art, valid and true. A man whose tycoon-hood tycoon-hood can be traced directly to the Sundance Festival, but whose talent and vision came as part of his original origi-nal equipment. Again, Harvey Weinstein. As mentioned above, I've known Harvey for nearly near-ly 25 years. We met as business associates back then, several incarnations ago, and now we remain merely friends. Those decades past, Harvey was an increasingly increas-ingly successful concert promoter in Buffalo, N.Y. While still in bis 20s, he was a pretty big fish in a medium-sized pond Though very different people, we liked each other right away. In fairly short order, as he became more successful, our business relationship became less relevant, and our personal friendship more so. Unquestionably, he could have continued on that rock n roil path, piled up a bunch of money and had, by any definition, a prosperous and productive career. But, even then, he wanted something different; differ-ent; something geared more to his personal aspirations aspira-tions than his prevailing success. Harvey wanted to be involved in the movies. That yearning was, and is, by no means uncommon. In the entertainment business, motion pictures were the class of the field. The repository of the highest status. sta-tus. What was uncommon, however, was that Harvey wasnt interested in being a movie mogul deal-maker the path that for someone like him was the easiest; all it took was money. Instead, Harvey wanted to be a movie maker, and was willing to sacrifice much of what he'd already achieved to make that happen. Though the exact time line it somewhat fuzzy in memory, sometime during that period, he began to Y ... V leave more and more of the concert business to his partner, and actually apprenticed himself to a New York movie executive in the real sense, right at the bottom. While he may not have quite made millions at that point, he was doing damned well, which made that move kind of stunning. What made it all the more impressive to me, was that when we'd get together, we'd talk mostly about storytelling, which, to this day remains one of the most important interests in my own life. I dont recall us ever talking about "deals," which seems to be the primary currency of Hollywood. We'd run into each other in New York, or Toronto, or Buffalo, or LA., and over extravagant room service ser-vice orders, talk about Stories. Stories he or I thought would make terrific movies, and why. For me it was just pretty much a fun intellectual exercise, but with Harvey, I could see it as a process of the hot.ing of his craft. Before he'd actually made any movies, be started start-ed going to the Cannes Film Festival networking, learning and positioning himself to exploit the opportunities oppor-tunities that seemed, more and more inevitably, would be coming his way. And come they did. For those interested in such things, what followed has become the stuff of legend. It became Miramax pictures, a wildiy successful company that became so in that rarest of ways, by putting out films mostly distinguished distin-guished by marrying commercial success with quality. From my vantage point, remote in time and space, but with all that old history, it was easy to imagine him betting bet-ting big on judgement in which I'd always known him to believe. And winning far more often than losing. Anyway, over the last bunch of years, the only time I'd see or speak with Harvey was here, at the festival, where he'd really kick-started his rise with "sex, lies and videotape. " I was standing behind the counter one night, at the bookstore my family owned at the time, when I looked up and there he was with a pile of truly fine books: Edward Abbey, not Tom Clancy; Terry Tempest Williams, not Danielle Steele. From that moment, it was like all those yean and his incredible success hadnt even happened. It was just the timeless kind of comfort that can be shared only by those with genuine and long-term history. Though we were still very different people, the bond that was forged those 25 yean ago was still there. We could still laugh and talk about things that neither of us could tell our wives. I was genuinely glad to see him, and genuinely proud of his success. From what I knew, he'd both earned and deserved it I admit to knowing virtually nothing about the substance sub-stance of the film festival. But my sense is that it still draws lots of folks who, along with the considerable accoutrements of the-whole movie mogul fun-pak, genuinely want to fuO the ancient and timeless function func-tion of art to enrich and elevate the everyday lives of the rest of us. For them, there no better model than Harvey Weinstein. In him, legend is real. He didnt did-nt somehow wander into great success. Very deliberately, deliber-ately, he worked and achieved. And, still, he is a good enough man to have remained my friend. And for that, I'm glad. Gary Weus o aHf former owner of DoBys Bookstore and has served 'am aV Smm Ca PUimung Commission. |
