One of my all-time favorites is the one Saundra Saperstein, the retired doyenne of the Sundance press office, once told me about opening night at the 1987 festival.
The opening-night film was Louis Malle's "Au Revoir, Les Enfants," and when Saperstein went to Malle's hotel to pick him up, she was pulled aside by Malle's wife, actress Candice Bergen.
"She said, 'Would you loan me a pair of your slacks?'," Saperstein told me in a 1994 interview. Bergen had forgotten her carry-on bag and didn't have a suitable outfit for the premiere. Nevermind, Saperstein said, that the actress was 2 inches taller and a size smaller than she.
Saperstein, ever resourceful, found a couple of stores open. She sent a driver to pick up six pairs of slacks. Bergen tried them on, picked a pair, and the evening was saved.
Roger Ebert, the esteemed critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, offered me this one: "Last year I took the wrong shuttle bus by mistake and found myself at the Yarrow instead of the Library, and walked in to see what was screening, and was told by a kid from San Diego State to check out 'Me and You and Everyone We Know,' which was starting in five minutes. I walked in knowing nothing about the movie. When it was over and the lights went up, I saw that Lisa Schwartzman of Entertainment Weekly was across the aisle. 'What did you think?' she asked. 'I think it is the best movie I've seen at the festival,' I said. 'Me too,' she said."
An old friend, R.J. Millard - formerly the festival's head of media relations - recalled a run-in with talk-show host Montel Williams.
Williams, Millard said, "shows up for Opening Night, uninvited, and walks the press line at the 2002 festival. After asking him to leave the press line and enter the theater so we could start the screening, he proceeded to grab me by the collar and say, 'If you put your hand on me one more time or ask me to move . . . I'll go when I'm done.' With that, every photographer in the room got that shot."
But that's not Millard's favorite story. "The only really good/bad story I have through all those years is the one about the piece of [air conditioning] that fell on the head of a journalist's pregnant wife. But you know that one already."
Yes, that would be my lovely wife, Leslie, who got bonked on the head by a ventilation conduit that fell from the ceiling of the pre-renovation Holiday Village just before a screening of "American Movie" in 1999. And, yes, we learned that few words get a paramedic's attention faster than "pregnant."
My other favorite story happened a few years ago. I was with my family in an elevator, and a guy walked in. He saw the flat-brimmed hat my then-2-year-old son had on, and said, "Nice hat, kid."
Today, when my son sees ads for "King Kong" on TV, my wife and I point to Adrien Brody and say, "That's the guy who liked your hat."
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Contact Sean P. Means at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602.
