I Almost Sh*t My Pants at Sundance

And more incredibly professional reporting from the famed film festival.

If you’re hoping to hear my thoughts on Twinless, or Together, or maybe Rebuilding, Seeds, or Sorry, Baby, you won’t find them here. Sorry, baby—I didn’t watch them. You might be thinking, “but…didn’t you pay thousands of dollars to travel to the mountains of Utah specifically to watch those movies and tell us about them?”

Yes, yes I did.

Every journey from my home has its challenges for a guy like me. I’m a man of strict, simple routine. I’m certainly not agoraphobic but I’m a bit reclusive, very gregarious in small bursts. I love people but mostly in the way that you love your politically controversial grandfather, from afar; let’s hang out at Thanksgiving dinner and hospice, other than that we’ll text.

It’s not you, it’s me. I suffer from migraines, eczema, and a severe anxiety disorder that is all the more debilitating because I talk when I’m nervous. I’ll blurt out the most personal grave-taker to fill a silence, evinced by the title of this article. If you’ve ever been stuck at party, head pounding, scratching ferociously at your thighs, convinced you’re having a heart attack while some dude is droning on about the future of cryptocurrency, you know my pain. These three things can converge into an embarrassing cocktail if I’m not careful. It’s best to be highly prepared for social situations.

I’ve written before about how much I love film festivals. They’re typically a blissful exception to my experience of going outside (probably because most of my time at them is spent watching movies). This particular Sundance Film Festival, though, I had some sort of stomach bug in addition to everything else. It could have been the stress of some personal things, or the travel itself, maybe a virus, something I ate, I don’t know.

I felt queasy the entire time. The first three or four days I’m not sure I spoke to anyone at all. I was walking everywhere, mostly the press theater, trudging through the snow with the blistering Mormon wind beating my cheeks like they stole its Nintendo. For every film you have to wait in a line for about an hour or so, depending on the movie and, because I was by myself and didn’t feel well, this was brutal. There were no major red flags, just some general malaise I chalked up to jet lag, or loneliness.

By the fifth day I was ready to leave but I had three days left to go and I had only seen five movies, most of which I didn’t like. I was miserably depressed, angry at myself for squandering this opportunity. So many people would kill to be at the Sundance Film Festival and there I was, curled up in bed in the Airbnb, pining for home.

Get up. Go talk to people, make connections, watch the movies, you fool! That’s what I told myself. I struggled out of bed and trudged over to the Eccles theater, which is where all the big premieres open to the public go down. I had wonderful times at that theater last year.

I stood in line for a while and all seemed well. I even spoke to the people around me in line and they were lovely. I bumped into John Magaro and told him how wonderful he was in Omaha. Ah, this is nice. “Now, this, is podracing,” I thought. I eventually made it from the cold into the theater itself, which is very old. It doesn’t even have stadium seating, just a slight slope to the floor. The Eccles Theater seats around 1200 people, using those old school little chairs where your knees are touching the chair in front of you and you’re intimately sharing armrests with your neighbors. The rows are long, too, hundreds of seats together and the only way in or out of each row is on either side of the big auditorium—there is no aisle in the middle to break it up.

Very much overconfident, I sat in the middle. My stomach was already gurgling as I waited for the room to fill and the show to start but I figured it would pass. After all, there was no way God would smite me with a bout of diarrhea at the world premiere of this movie surrounded by a thousand strangers.

I was wrong. It turns out God would totally do that. The moment the lights dimmed and the pre-roll with all of the Sundance sponsors filled the screen my stomach started doing an impression of a Simone Biles routine. It felt like I had eaten kettle bells. I was squirming in that tiny seat for the first forty minutes of that movie. I stole panicked glances to my left and to my right periodically, surveying my exits like James Bond, but if James Bond desperately had to shit.

Now, I typically don’t leave a movie, ever, not even to pee. I’ll walk out of a movie at a film festival, but only to go see a different movie. Remember, in this moment there are over a hundred people on either side of me and we’re cramped in like cinephile sardines. The thought of having to stumble over all of them in the dark is only slightly more appealing than shitting my pants somewhere near John Magaro.

And remember I didn’t know I had to poop. It could just be gas, but even if you could trust a fart with stakes this high, and you definitely couldn’t, that’s hardly more socially acceptable. Like some sort of IBS Sherlock Holmes, I judged from the intensity and frequency of the cramps that any fart, if fart it be, had a 97% chance of being both loud and stinky. The smell and timbre of that flatulence would forever ostracize me from the film community. I would be persona non grata, excommunicado like a gassy John Wick.

No, no, that’s it, I must go, thought. I stood up and went for it, choosing to go to the right. Those poor bastards. I’m 6’2” and 220 pounds and in that small space in the dark there was no avoiding it; I tapped every other person on the back of their head with my left elbow, and stepped on every third foot with my right boot. Like Cersei Lannister, naked and shaven, trudging from the Great Sept of Baelor I made my walk of shame to the bathroom, but instead of a tolling bell and shouts of “SHAME!” to mark my steps it was a raucous round of walking farts, which in the sudden commotion had now demanded to squeak forth.

Safe in the bathroom, on that nasty public toilet, I booked an early flight home, perhaps never to return. Oh, and the name of that movie? You’ll never believe it.

It’s called Bubble and Squeak. Yeah. Tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.