Flyover Online

Blockbuster Girls 1 Steve Buscemi 0

Press check-in on the first day of the Sundance Film Festival means long lines for unlucky journalists whose credential photos were lost by the festival computer server and quick sign ups for those whose photos remained intact. (I am happy to report that I avoided the long photo line, although I am sympathetic about computer malfunctions after recently replacing a frazzled laptop).
Inside the second-floor press lounge at the Park City Marriott, where everyone huddles over a computer, actor-turned filmmaker Steve Buscemi sits alone at a table, adjusts his wire-frame glasses and studies his screening list.
A few colleagues stop and say hello, offering their pledge to catch his adaptation of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s “Interview” on Saturday. But for the most part, people walk by Buscemi without notice or choose to leave him alone. Instead, the spotlight belongs to the Blockbuster Total Access Girls – a squad of pretty corporate cheerleaders straight out of the Detroit Auto Show. Yet, these smiling women are at Sundance, proof of what Robert Redford said later at the opening press conference (pictured above), that like it or not, fashion and promotion of new goods has become part of the Sundance experience.
Buscemi doesn’t stand a chance against the Blockbuster posse with their beige thigh-high boots, white parkas with the Blockbuster Total Access logo, white tights and plenty of sass. His lonely guy experience is a page from Buscemi’s nerd performance in “Ghost World.” Nobody wants to pay attention to an unassuming middle-aged filmmaker and actor no matter how acclaimed he might be. There are babes to meet and photograph, for some people, a key part of the Sundance experience.