Park City Blockbuster Goes X-Treme

mike lewis

• November 19 2008
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According to an article by Andrew Kirk in the Park Record, Park City’s Blockbuster has created a section that features movies from the town’s “Extreme” film festival, the X-DANCE, which coincides with the Sundance Film Festival.

Photo by David Ryder/Park Record

Here are the highlights:

Blockbuster Video is now a little more extreme.

Winners of the X-DANCE Film Festival are now available at the Iron Horse Drive Blockbuster and will soon be available at the Quarry Village location.

Paul Nichols, manager of the Ironhorse Dr. store, said he was always frustrated with his offerings of ski, snowboarding and extreme-sport films.

“It was one of those little niches we had a hard time fulfilling until the X-DANCE section came about,” he said.

Nichols is friends with Brian Wimmer, the festival’s co-creator, and the two agreed the arrangement would be mutually beneficial.

Wimmer and his festival partner Eric Barrett are both professional filmmakers who started X-DANCE about nine years ago to promote better sport filmmaking.

The “X” in the name comes from X-treme sports and the “dance” part is because the film runs alongside Sundance and has been inspired by it.

Wimmer has been in the film business for 25 years and said his true love is action sports.

“As a filmmaker and an athlete, I wasn’t happy with anything I was seeing,” he said.

Most X-treme sport films are a lot of jumps and landings on skateboards, snowboards, bikes, snowmobiles etc. set to music.

“We call it ‘action porn.’ Takeoff, landing, takeoff landing, put it to music and call it a film. They’re really about selling T-shirts,” he said.

Growing up in the area, and having known Robert Redford since childhood, Wimmer decided he wanted to do for sport films what Redford did for independent films.

The X-DANCE film festival does not recognize the most “extreme” or entertaining films, Wimmer finds that far too subjective. Like Sundance, the festival uses experienced judges to critique filmmaking skills like cinematography, editing and the musical score. Most important to Wimmer and co-creator Eric Barrett is story.

“You don’t have to have a scripted story, but we’re wanting to get into the soul of athlete and the sport and bring that out. If I see a guy jumping off the cliff 10 times, I don’t care, I don’t know who he is,” he explained.

Wimmer is tired of seeing films with great athleticism but no story.

“Open the mic up!” he joked.

Barrett compares the films they award to documentaries. He cites Sundance premiers “Lords of Dogtown” and “Riding Giants” as examples of exemplary sport films.