Here

....and here we are. I'm sitting in a cabin in Halladay, UT, recovering from a long night. A lot to cover:

Yesterday I left LA at 7:00 am after three hours of rocky sleep (up until the wee hours burning DVDs and doing laundry) and arrived in breathtaking Salt Lake City around 10. What an ungodly looking place in the winter.

Met up with Daniel Koobir (editor) Christine No (producer) and Todd banhazl (cinematographer) after using the airport wifi to fire off some emails for a few hours. We threw our bags and boxes of promotional items together and realized (uh oh), how will these things possible fit in one car? I ran off to retrieve the rental and we hot-boxed our modest little Chevy Malibu until elbows and legs were spilling out of windows and drove off to our cabin....

....which, we discovered, was pretty close. It's a one bedroom which will play host to six - seven smelly filmmakers over the course of the next ten days. Intimate may be the right word.

We threw down our bags and drove the 30 mins to Park City --- and what a madhouse. It feels a little like Woodstock but with rich people.

We found headquarters and meandered around aimlessly until we found the filmmakers sign-in, where we were bombarded with attention and received those prized laminated passes which they placed around our necks like leighs in Hawaii. Mine says John Patton Ford - Sundance director. A surreal moment.

After meeting a zillion people in a zeitgeist of hospitality (did I mention these people are really, really friendly?) we covered headquarters in PATROL promotional fliers and marched off to meet some friends for a drink. Apparently a combination of shuttle buses and trolleys run the gamut in Park City, and we found ourselves navigating a web of bus roots until we arrived at Main St. --- the main drag. By this time snow was showering down and I was beginning to be grateful for those thermals I had on. We stopped in at a pub and --- aha --- found our AFI people, Martin Stitt and his crew. Martin was a classmate of mine who also got into the festival.

A few drinks later the Irishman in me began to get a little frustrated. Drinking alcohol in Utah is like drinking Kool-Aid. It makes you pee, that's about it.

An hour later Todd and myself were off to see RESTREPO, an opening night documentary about a group of soldiers defending an isolated base in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan. We piled into the theater and sat with the largest crowd on record to see a doc at Sundance...head programmer John Cooper introduced the film, and then bam, it starts....and thus begins the most unapologetic and ruthless two hours in recent memory. An amazing and really, really scary movie, mostly shot on handheld video cameras and showing what the American media never shows....I shouldn't spoil it anymore. All six hundred people left the theater in complete silence after the credits.

The exciting part is, none of these movies have sold to distributors. So we're literally watching something that just rolled off an editor's computer and onto a big screen for the first time. You can feel a real air of anticipation in the audience --- it's just unreal.

After that, we hit up the opening night party (by this time I was sleep-walking, which turned into sleep-dancing) and back to our cabin around 2:00 am. I had been up for twenty-two hours. This is real.