Crashing Sundance: The Time I Made Bruce Willis Mad

“I’m super excited. I mean it’s Catherine Zeta Jones!” Jayson cooed. “Looove her!”

“Totally,” I nodded. Part sarcastic. Mostly trying to blend in.

Jayson loooves Catherine Zeta Jones. Jayson is gay. And Jayson is a venerable reporter with an equally venerable Hollywood magazine.

Jayson represents, as he tells it, the last remaining vanguard of traditional media. A throwback to a kinder, gentler era when “off the record” actually meant “off the record.” He hailed from a time before the sleaze of Perez Hilton and the “gotchas” of TMZ.

“Those were the days,” a pudgy man with E! credentials reminisced with Jayson. “Those were the days.”

They prattled on about the latest Sundance buzz. Doughy 40-somethings turned locker-gossiping high schoolers all over again. Except they now gabbed about better bankrolled and better looking jocks. Half an hour of giddy Did you hear?’s and hushed You didn’t hear this from me’s led to the following conclusions:

– Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana—the girl from Colombiana—were “definitely an item.”

– Spike Lee “has totes lost it.” His Red Hook movie was not a sequel to Do The Right Thing but rather a preening lecture on race that tried too hard. Lee also torched whatever remaining bridges he had with the studios after ranting they knew “nothing about black people.”

– And no one could get enough of Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky comedy based on a real Craigslist ad seeking a companion for time travel. “It’s, like, this year’s Napoleon Dynamite,” Jayson mused.

I was lucky, Jayson beamed. To be in the know, you know.

“Totally,” I nodded again.

In truth, I pitied them. I was there on a lie. For the free champagne and unpronounceable hors d’oeuvres. A mischievous Saturday night at Sundance. But this… this was their lives.

And they were not alone: legions of bespectacled paparazzi shuffled their feet along the Red Carpet, forever confined to the other side of the velvet rope. Their faces were numb from an afternoon waiting on dilettante A-listers. Their fingers perpetually curled around tape-recorders. Forever hoping that they would, for once, out-scoop TMZ. Their careers were built on living vicariously through the lives of the rich and the famous: a celebrity’s off-hand comment about their lives defined their own.

Jayson was mopey. The snow fell harder. The stars were an hour late.

“So…” I tried to force conversation. “How many times have you been to Sundance?”

“You go first.”

“It’s my first time.”

“First time, wow. How much do you know about it?”

“Umm,” I fumbled, “I saw the Entourage episode.”

“Really? What was the plot?”

“Oh, you know… it’s Entourage. There’s no plot. They’re rich. That’s the plot.”

“Well, I’ve been coming here since waaaay before Entourage. This is my, let’s see, 19th, I think.”