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PARK CITY, UTAH -- I'd already left O'Shucks bar on Thursday by the time Colin Farrell and his posse got around to crashing it. And Morgan Spurlock did not stop on Main Street to show me his owwie from falling off a snowboard.

But, hey, I collared Dan Rather for 15 minutes on Saturday. One may ask what the 70-something newsman was doing at the Sundance Film Festival (though in fairness, one may ask the same thing of Tom Hanks, who's about the last person you'd expect to see in a Sundance film, though there he is in "The Great Buck Howard," starring his kid).


Turns out Dan was in Park City for the same reason I was, to work and shoot video. He'd seen three films, including Spurlock's latest misadventure, "Where In the World Is Osama bin Laden?", and interviewed various heavies about what he called "the nexus of politics and film."

And while my work will be proudly featured on KansasCity.com, the retired CBS newsman's got a little higher profile, namely his Tuesday-night series "Dan Rather Reports" for HDNet.

"We have invested quite a bit of airtime and more of Mark Cuban's money than he probably cares to spend on this political campaign," said Rather, whose billionaire boss also has a film at Sundance, a biopic of the late gonzo journo Hunter S. Thompson.

"Is someone trying to propagandize the American people? Is it true that the people who make these Sundance films are 'left-wing' or liberal?" Rather said he'll tackle that with help from observers of various political stripes on tonight's show, airing WHAT p.m. on HDNet.

If you haven't already "Dan Rather Reports," it's nothing like the 60-something news anchor reading ever-shorter prompter lines to an ever-decreasing audience. No, it's more like the 40-something "Gunga Dan" seen on tape in the opening scene of "Charlie Wilson's War," a reporter out on the frontier, traveling light and talking as long as he wants.

Though, as I say, he was on a bit of a schedule Saturday.

"This is the first time since 1928 that we've had neither a sitting president nor former vice president vying on either side, Democrat or Republican -- though some would say in 1952 there was Alben Barkley -- point is, it's never been this wide-open," said Rather. "Every presidential election is historic to some degree, but I think this will be a signature election, much like 1968 and 1960, Kennedy versus Nixon.

"Our whole thing is to add value, to be different, and the way we do that is to follow the money, what it's used for. And we've been investigating for well over a year what's wrong with our voting machines -- and there's a lot more wrong with them."

When I mentioned I'd seen his amazing one-hour expose of touch-screen voting machines and the sweatshop conditions under which their built -- it's still playing on YouTube -- it was like I'd complimented him on a new sweater.

"Thank you very much for noticing, Aaron," he said.

**

Critics at Sundance operate in a parallel universe alongside the rest of the festival. There are three screening rooms set up just for the press, operating continuously from early morning to midnight. It's more efficient to jump in and out of screening rooms than spend time waiting on line that could be better spent reading through the hundreds of Sundance-related press releases emailed to us.

However, a nice perk of the press pass is that I can request tickets to public screenings. So on Saturday, I took in the documentary "The Order of Myths" at my favorite venue, Prospector Square, an intimate 332-seat theater that seems to attract especially lively and engaged audiences.

"The Order of Myths" is a chronicle of the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Ala., in 2007. Mobile claims to have the country's oldest Mardi Gras, and it certainly has the most segregated one. The all-white and all-black parades and dances are so walled off from each other that until recently, not even the two sets of kings and queens had diplomatic relations.

Director Margaret Brown is from Mobile, and thanks to her sensitive eye and access to the movers and shakers on both sides, she's created an account of time-honored rituals and their power over people. The crowd laughed at all the right points, gasped appropriately (as when Brown revisited Mobile's ignominious recent past, when one of the country's last documented lynchings was carried out in 1981), and were full of questions when Brown took the stage afterward, along with five of the people featured in the film.

I overheard a guy a couple of rows behind me telling his seatmate that he was a director at the Weather Channel in Atlanta. His name is Josh Locklair, and like a lot of folks attending Sundance, he's an aspiring screenwriter looking for an agent and a home for his next script.

So, I asked him, does working in TV give you a leg up on everyone else here, or is it something you have to unlearn?

"Well, being in the news-oriented side of the business, you know that the most important part of writing is telling human truth, and I think we saw that today with this film," said Locklair. "Also television has taught me a great deal about the filmmaking process in terms of being economical with your resources." Because nothing says indie film like a seven-figure budget.

***

The point of pouring a football stadium full of people into a small ski resort town is to create happy accidents, like the one I got into on Saturday. Invited to dinner by a friend who works at PBS, I found half a dozen opinionated documentary buffs around the table, and we spent a long evening swapping Sundance gossip and arguing about the films we'd seen.

Gossip: The elder Hanks spent more time talking to audience members before the premiere of "The Great Buck Howard" than he actually appears in the movie. Argument: "Secrecy," a slick, heavily promoted docu about the U.S. government's infatuation with privacy, would've been a lot timelier had it been made two years ago.

I was also reintroduced to a strange local custom I'd forgotten about, when my thumbnail idly found its way to what looked like a price tag on a nearby bottle of pinot noir.

"Don't do that," somebody warned, and pointed to the tiny print on the side of the tag: "Unlawful To Remove." Yes, it's OK to tear off the tag off that mattress you bought in 1986, but you can't scrape off a half-inch label on a bottle of wine in Utah.