No Movie for Us on Saturday

Just to wrap things up, we were unable to get tickets for "Toy's House" on Saturday. Many people show up in Park City without any tickets in hand and then try to wait list into the movies they want to see. This is what we attempted to do Saturday morning. We showed-up at the theater more than two hours before the scheduled movie time. There was already a short line, but it looked promising. Exactly two hours before the movie starts, they hand out wait list numbers. Jois and I were numbers 29 and 30. A sign in the lobby said that the average number of wait list tickets sold at each movie at this particular theater was 33. Again, it looked promising.

With our numbers in hand, we were then free to leave the queue, so we headed to a little restaurant down the road for breakfast. We returned to the theater an hour later, lined back up by number and crossed our fingers. I think fewer than 20 people in the wait list line got in to the movie, so we were sent away movie-less. Darn!

In retrospect, many things worked against us. First, it's a fairly small theater (it's actually a hotel conference room converted to a theater.) Second, there was a lot of talk about "Toy's House" after it premiered earlier in the week. The story of three young men who decide to run away from civilization and "live off the land," it seemed to be the surprise hit of the Festival -- at least with audiences. Third, it is one of the few comedies showing in what proved to be a pretty heavy line-up of films -- a very desirable trait that late in the Festival. And finally, it was Saturday. It definitely felt like there were more movie goers on the weekends then during the week.

Hopefully "Toy's House" will make it to Portland and we can see it then. We have a few movies that we were unable to see this year that fall into that category, so we'll see. We are already working on housing for Sundance 2014, so it looks like the Sundance Outsider Blog will be resurrected once again. In the meantime, I'm going to make the most of Portland's rainy season and try to catch up on the Academy Award nominees that I haven't seen.