Joel Stein Goes Campaigning in Sundance

I am an artist. This is something I've known my entire life, but it was nice to have it officially recognized by the Sundance Film Festival. This year the festival accepted Joel Stein's Completely Unfabricated Adventures into its short-film competition--one of only 96 entries chosen out of 5,632 submissions. Getting a short into Sundance is more difficult than getting into Harvard and an even greater indication that you have rich parents.

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As with many works of great art, JSCUA was conceived when a website owned by the director of Airplane! gave me $2,000 for the right to computer-animate an old column of mine about going to a water-treatment facility in Orange County, California, to drink tap water filtered from sewage. NationalBanana.com intended to sell this to a cable channel, but it turns out that cable channels aren't in the business of supporting a series of avant-garde poop jokes. (See the top 10 Sundance hits of all time.)

My acceptance material from Sundance kept stressing how the festival was about having your work seen by an audience and not about the awards, which made it clear that it was all about winning an award. It also kept addressing everything to the director, in this case a team of respected visual artists called Walter Robot, instead of to me, the star and writer. Sundance seems to think directors matter. As if people fly to Utah for a film festival because it was started by the director of The Legend of Bagger Vance.

To launch my Sundance campaign, I decided to enlist the most influential people in the world: celebrities with things to promote. With its free food, velvet-rope access and photographers waiting outside, the MySpace Café became the obvious campaign headquarters, and within two days Billy Bob Thornton, Téa Leoni, Woody Harrelson, Kyle MacLachlan, Benjamin Bratt and NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman were all saying they wanted to see JSCUA more than any other short. Though, admittedly, they didn't seem to know about any other shorts, and I might have told MacLachlan I'd buy the $65 bottle of cabernet sauvignon he makes. You have to be a little phony if you want to succeed in the shorts world.

Still, I wasn't hearing people at parties or on Main Street talking about my film. The major fault in my plan was that actors and directors with movies at Sundance don't see other movies, since that would restrict the time they could spend talking about their own movies. Desperate for a new strategy, I thought about what had worked before in Utah. I gently asked festival programmer Trevor Groth what the punishment was for bribing judges. "Bribery doesn't happen enough in the film-festival circuit. I've been waiting for it for years," he said. So I asked talented, handsome actor Lou Taylor Pucci--one of three shorts judges--whether he'd throw his vote my way if I mentioned his name in TIME and called him talented and handsome. "Oh, dude, I would totally not do that. Ever. Ever," he said. I really wish Thornton had been on the jury. I think I could have swung him for three Pabst Blue Ribbons.

I'm not sure where the award ceremony for the feature films was held, but the shorts awards were given out a mile from town at a weird '80s dance party with a really bad buffet in a room without seats. I did not see Robert Redford. Standing near the stage, rehearsing my speech, I was relieved not to get any of the eight "honorable mentions," which is some kind of Sundancespeak for "loser." But when the actual award was given, they called up a young hipster named Destin Cretton, who not only did not have a speech prepared but also was holding a half-eaten lollipop. Trying to be a gracious runner-up, I walked over to congratulate Cretton.

"I assume yours is about either the Holocaust or a mentally disabled guy," I said.

"You're right," Cretton replied. "I worked for two years at a residential facility for at-risk teenagers." I felt an interesting mix of discomfort and validation. Then Cretton put his arm around me and said, "It's not about winning and losing. We're all at Sundance together." When he offered me his half-eaten lollipop, the discomfort quickly melted away.

I sat in the corner, downing an impotent Utah beer and staring at a roomful of younger, hipper, less competitive people. They really were just happy to have their work shown to an eager audience. And for at least that moment, I was happy to have talked about myself to celebrities, eaten free food and drunk an enormous quantity of free absinthe. In fact, Defamer.com called me "the most coddled noncelebrity at Sundance." Which could form the basis of a pretty good short for this June's CineVegas festival.

See pictures of movie costumes.

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