Many of these people are friends, or at least they have worked together before. The event, the cast-and-crew screening of the drama "American Pastime," was something of a reunion for people who spent part of last summer filming in the Utah sun.
It was also a celebration of the fact that this group of people accomplished a truly difficult thing: getting a movie from script to screen.
"I think you'll see the spirit and dedication you all brought to it," the movie's director, Desmond Nakano, told the audience. "I hope we did it justice."
The movie depicts life for thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II, unjustly forced to abandon their homes and lives on the West Coast to live in government internment camps - including the camp at Topaz, Utah, where part of the movie was shot. The story is told through the experiences of Lyle Nomura (Aaron Yoo), a sax-playing L.A. teen who was set to take a baseball scholarship at a college in San Francisco.
"This movie may enlighten some people, and that's why we made it," said producer Barry Rosenbush, a Hollywood veteran who is also executive producer of the wildly successful (and also Utah-filmed) "High School Musical."
It wasn't a gala premiere, and none of "American Pastime's" big-name Hollywood actors - like Gary Cole (Ricky Bobby's daddy in "Talladega Nights") or Jon Gries ("Napoleon Dynamite's" Uncle Rico) - were in attendance. There were some homegrown celebs, like Fox13's morning guy Leroy "Big Budah" Teo (who plays a Hawaiian internee) and Olesya Rulin, the Salt Lake actress now known as the piano-playing composer Kelsi in "High School Musical." (Rulin, who has a small part in "American Pastime," celebrated her 19th birthday by attending the screening.)
The audience also included members of Utah's Japanese-American community, who seemed particularly appreciative of the movie's history lesson.
The audience gave a big cheer when the closing credits rolled. Small cheers erupted from different parts of the theater when someone saw a loved one's name on screen. Another big cheer went up when this line scrolled: "This picture was shot entirely in the state of Utah."
"It's good to have this kind of movie come to Utah," Les Boothe, one of the film's set decorators, told me afterward.
The state of Utah thinks it's good, too - so much so that it spends taxpayers' money to lure filmmakers to shoot here. The Motion Picture Incentive Fund, in its fourth year, gives a 10 percent refund (up to $250,000, though that may soon go up) on what production companies spend in the state.
In the last fiscal year, the fund had $1 million to give out, and the just-completed Utah Legislature upped that to $3.5 million for the upcoming fiscal year. That's not chicken feed, though it's rather behind the incentives some states, like New Mexico and Louisiana, give filmmakers.
State officials estimate that for every dollar given out in the incentive fund, a production spends nearly $15 in Utah. According to the Utah Film Commission, "American Pastime" received $152,000 in refunds and spent more than $2 million in the state.
That incentive money isn't just lining producers' pockets. It's being churned back into the Utah economy, either through equipment purchases or hiring local crews: gaffers and make-up artists, camera operators and set decorators.
Those were the people who got the most out of seeing "American Pastime" Wednesday night. They didn't just see a movie they enjoyed - they saw their own handiwork, and an advertisement for other filmmakers to see what Utah movie crews can do.
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* SEAN P. MEANS writes a daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at blogs.sltrib.com/movies. Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail movies@sltrib.com.
