When the lights came up after the premiere of Paramount Vantage's Black Snake Moan, an energetic Justin Timberlake sprinted on stage and made cute for the audience. Meanwhile, at Celsius, a dimly lit dive at the bottom of Main Street, a very different kind of musician sat quietly on the edge of a barely raised platform. Wearing a simple black sweatshirt, ball cap, and white Air Jordans, Bobby Rush, the septuagenarian Mississippi blues musician, appeared nearly as inert as the piano crammed into the corner behind him. ''I've been doing this a long time,'' he said to a reporter while doing nothing at all.
You'd never guess from his calm, quiet demeanor that he was surrounded by marathon bidding wars and multimillion-dollar film deals. Following huge deals from Weinstein and Paramount earlier in the week, big money continued to roll on Thursday when First Look laid down $3 million for King of California, which stars Michael Douglas, and Park City was anticipating a forthcoming bidding war after Thursday night's premiere of Jake Paltrow's A Good Night. In total, the star-studded spectacle saw studios lay down more than $40 million this week, according to Variety.
None of it was of major import to Rush, however. He barely stirred as Black Snake Moan stars Timberlake and Christina Ricci were led past him through a flurry of flashbulbs to their secluded booth in the back. The rumor had been circulating that Timberlake might perform at the premiere's after-party, so the room was already packed wall-to-bartop with Sundancers hungering for slick, calculated gyrations and falsetto come-ons. But within a couple of hours, the promise of pop had faded and been replaced by true grit. Assisted by a harmonica, a tireless, sweat-drenched drummer, and a grizzled gee-tah virtuoso in genuine cowboy attire, Rush conquered the stage with as much gusto as Timberlake could have mustered and brought sexy back — waaay back. As Rush wailed about his cheating wife's dalliance with the garbage man, copies of the soundtrack on which he is featured appeared as if by magic in the hands of partygoers.
''I'm a real blues fanatic," says Memphis-bred Moan director Craig Brewer. ''I study the mythology of it. I've been collecting albums since I was 12 and I really think it's a special musical form that I don't want to say is dying, but I'm worried that people's interest is dying because they haven't been exposed to it.''
At Sundance, where presumably every movie is born of some dedicated filmmaker's powerful conviction, it only makes sense that many of the films' soundtracks reflect equally strong individual, and occasionally idiosyncratic tastes. Actor-director Justin Theroux's decision to score his dark romantic comedy Dedication with music from his favorite band, the very experimental Deerhoof, may surprise fans of the Nora Ephron-pioneered genre. But as Dedication star Billy Crudup observes, the sometimes-raucous tunes are intended as more than just incidental cues. ''The music is such an instrumental part — no pun intended — of this film,'' says Crudup, who plays a sour writer possessing deep-rooted neuroses and prone to morbid hallucinations. ''I had no idea that it could be so vital to the storytelling in terms of the character's psychology. That was a big revelation.''
Not only does a signature soundtrack aid the narrative inside the theater, it can also take on a life of its own outside. At press time, The Go-Getter, Martin Hynes' coming-of-age, road-trippy ode to grand theft auto, still had not been acquired by a distributor. But the film's handlers had already received so many requests for the soundtrack, written and performed by critically acclaimed indie folk musician M.Ward, that they had burned a few CDs for those in the know. Hey, whatever works.
