Alan Deutschman

Lewis’ narrative was wonderfully entertaining, but according to Lowenstein’s first-rate book, it turns out that another contingent on the Salomon trading floor was making a helluva lot more money than Lewis’ Neanderthals. Salomon recruited a bunch of quiet, aloof, socially awkward supernerds — mostly economics professors from top universities — to sit among the frat boys. While the others traded based on gut instincts, these geeky geniuses were the ultimate rationalists, relying on complex mathematical models and harnessing staggering amounts of computer power to discern extremely subtle trends in the markets.

Their leader, John Meriwether, the head of trading at Salomon, wasn’t at all like Lewis’ bad boys. He had a strict Roman Catholic upbringing and kept rosary beads and prayer cards in his briefcase. Even as a teenager he was so cautious and methodical that he wouldn’t bet on his hometown team, the Chicago Cubs, until he got a weather report about the winds at Wrigley Field.

The nerds were Meriwether’s real stars. Lewis thought he was a big shot when he got a $225,000 year-end bonus, but that was nothing compared with the $23 million that one of Salomon’s professors pulled down in 1989.

In “When Genius Failed” (published by Random House, the same parent company that published my new book, “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs”) Lowenstein picks up the story in the early ’90s, as Meriwether takes the fall for an underling’s lawbreaking and leaves the firm. He brings the professors with him to the preppy haven of Greenwich, Conn., where they create a new firm called Long-Term Capital Management, raising buckets of cash from famous rich guys like Hollywood agent Mike Ovitz and Nike CEO Phil Knight. Long-Term Capital was a hedge fund, meaning it was a private partnership open only to a small number of high-net-worth individuals who could afford to take big risks with their money.

Long-Term Capital was instantly and fabulously successful. In 1996, the firm made an astonishing $2.1 billion, eclipsing the profits of huge, established companies such as McDonald’s, Disney or Xerox. The trick wasn’t that its investments shot up in value. It was that it was playing with staggering amounts of other people’s money that it had borrowed. The firm squeaked out only a measly 1 to 2 percent return on its bets, but because of its massive borrowing, the crumbs of profit were billion-dollar crumbs. It wound up controlling assets worth a shocking $140 billion. That made Long-Term Capital two and a half times the size of one of the largest mutual funds, Fidelity Magellan, and even bigger than investment banks like Morgan Stanley.

Meriwether was able to borrow great sums mainly because of the aura surrounding his team of academic geniuses, which included two Nobel Prize winners. Long-Term Capital was cast as the math whiz with the mental ability and emotional discipline to count cards at blackjack. It was as if everyone pooled their hard-earned savings and sent him to Las Vegas, where he would watch patiently for hours until he knew that the deck would be stacked in his favor.

It was a good system, but it was too good to last.

In 1998, the firm’s portfolio crashed disastrously, after adverse world market movements triggered massive selling. Long-Term Capital’s collapse threatened to create a panic on Wall Street, since many major banks had lent it such huge sums. Despite the public backlash that would result from rescuing a bunch of rich speculators, the Federal Reserve orchestrated a multibillion-dollar bailout.

What went so spectacularly wrong? Lowenstein explains that the professors’ core belief was that financial markets behaved in a supremely rational and coolheaded manner, much like they did. That was the basis for their elaborate models and computer analyses. Indeed, it was a basic tenet of modern financial theory that went virtually unchallenged in academia. Unfortunately, that tenet is incorrect. Financial markets are no more rational than the humans who buy and sell securities, and humans are maddeningly unpredictable. They’re often driven by wild emotion rather than cold reason, especially during periods of crisis. So when the Asian economic crisis exploded and Russia defaulted on its debt in the late ’90s, the financial markets lost their mind and went totally berserk, and Long-Term Capital’s computer models couldn’t help.

The other problem was that when Long-Term was still flying high, the professors — intoxicated by their success — diverged from their smoothly scientific methods. They began making huge and surprisingly risky investments based more on faith than reason. It was as if the geeky card counter got caught up in the excitement and distractions of Las Vegas — the emotional thrills and the chips piling up in front of him — and started betting on sheer impulse, rather than waiting countless hours for the perfect hand.

“When Genius Failed” isn’t as flashy as “Liar’s Poker,” but it is a commendable book — well reasoned and revealing. Lowenstein, a financial journalist and the author of an earlier study of investing legend Warren Buffett, excels at explaining financial matters in a concise way that illuminates without oversimplifying. It’s rare enough for someone to be able to explain business so smoothly and cogently, but Lowenstein also has a deftness with descriptions. (He says that Meriwether was so unpretentious that “he could have been the State Farm agent down the street.”) He also has a reporter’s eye for telling detail, showing how one Long-Term Capital partner, once worth zillions on paper, ultimately was forced to use his wife’s checkbook.

Could a Wall Street debacle such as Long-Term happen again? For the moment, it looks like we’re safe. The prestige and mystique that hedge funds enjoyed in the ’90s have been diminished by the failure of Long-Term Capital and several other high-profile players. The next big blowout was Julian Robertson’s famous Tiger Management, which for years had enriched investors, including writer Tom Wolfe. (That’s why he could afford to spend 11 years writing a novel.) Then Tiger lost billions in assets and ultimately closed down. And the loudest-mouthed hedge fund honcho, James Cramer, now of TheStreet.com, capped a decade-long winning streak with an embarrassingly lousy year when many of his backers rushed to pull their money out of his partnership. Suddenly it seemed as if even the biggest geniuses were as prone to screwing up as the day trader next door, and Wall Street wasn’t nearly as eager to entrust the gurus with huge bankrolls.

But memories are fleeting in the financial markets, and when the next wave of speculative fervor arrives, it’s likely that a fresh bunch of hotshots will emerge, with a new buzzword or twist on the same old game. Lowenstein shows that Washington hasn’t done anything to preempt another Long-Term-like crisis. He faults Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who, in the name of free-market ideology, has stubbornly resisted calls for more regulation of derivatives, the financial instruments that helped Long-Term Capital control such vast assets.

While there are margin requirements that limit the amount of stocks investors can buy with borrowed funds, those rules don’t apply to the newer, fancier derivatives, which are like side bets on securities prices without governmental oversight. There’s nothing to stop the big investment banks from lending billions to another firm playing dangerous games. And if it can count on the feds to arrange a bailout, then why not roll the dice again?

Astonishingly, Meriwether and his crew are already back in action. Last November, they launched a new hedge fund, JWM Partners, which raised $250 million from many of the same investors who backed Long-Term Capital. As for me, I’d feel a lot safer entrusting my savings to the day trader next door.

At Sundance’s 18th annual festival, which ended Sunday, the first-time auteur to emerge as the potential savior of indie film was a superb new talent named Karen Moncrieff. Her film, “Blue Car,” was the festival’s first entry to be bought by distributors for release in movie theaters. It’s a dark, sensitive, lyrical drama of a beautiful and precocious teenage girl with a troubled family life who seeks self-expression as a poet — and finds a father figure (and sexual predator) in her high school English teacher. Miramax bought the rights soon after the movie’s debut on the first weekend of the festival, paying between $1 million and $2 million for a film made on the cheap for only $400,000. Moncrieff was instantly anointed as the new genius.

From her bio in the festival’s program, I expected to meet a grubby 24-year-old overwhelmed by the spotlight. Her experience seemed limited to studying acting as an undergraduate at Northwestern, getting a “certificate” in film from a community college in L.A. and making a few shorts. So at our interview over coffee on Park City’s tony Main Street, which is like three blocks of San Francisco or Manhattan transplanted into a canyon of the Rocky Mountains, I was surprised to find a poised and urbane 38-year-old. While many Sundance filmmakers don’t own a comb and have trouble finding one set of clothing that isn’t badly stained or torn or overly faded, even to wear to the final awards ceremony, Moncrieff’s shiny, straight black hair was tied back neatly and she wore the kind of stylishly retro horizontal-framed eyeglasses that must have cost several hundred dollars.

It turned out that she had a dirty little secret. She wasn’t an unwashed kid right out of film school. She was a seasoned star of television soap operas. For a decade she had profited from parts in B-movies and recurring roles on “Days of Our Lives,” where she played a glamorous international spy, and on “Santa Barbara.”

“I was really afraid that if people knew of my sordid acting background, they wouldn’t take my movie seriously,” Moncrieff confessed. Even though she worked on daytime TV, the dramas that she loved the most were French art-house films like “Blue” and “La Promesse.” She said that her decade doing schlock helped give her the determination to make the kind of films that she really admired: “Because I saw that side of the business for so long, I know how rare good roles are, especially for women, and I wanted to put into the world good work that I’m passionate about. I love complex, flawed characters on the screen. I really want to find my audience, and I don’t care if it’s a huge audience, but I want to make films that I’d want to see. My agent in L.A. said the calls are pouring in, which is great, but I’m committed to doing work that means something to me. I’m not supposed to say this, but honestly I don’t care about the money. I want someone to come out of my movies and feel like I did coming out of ‘Blue.’ ”

Moncrieff’s idealistic attitude and her legitimately big talent helped sustain the original guiding spirit at a festival endangered by the masses of celebrities, scenesters and hangers-on, who saturate Park City hoping to co-opt some of the groovy indie cachet. Like Burning Man, Sundance is a countercultural arts festival that became so successful and popular the elitists now go there simply for the parties and the chance to say they were part of the scene. They find that nearly all of the hundreds of screenings are sold out by the time they arrive. But who really needs to see a film? You can ski during the day and crash parties all night, getting bonus points for proximity to the big Hollywood stars. You can gape at the gorgeous aspiring actresses from L.A. and New York who walk around the hotels with bare arms and bare midriffs and tight leather pants, hoping to attract the attention of directors. They go around shockingly underdressed only for the first few days until the cold air chills their almost anorexic figures and grudgingly they have to put on sexlessly thick woolen turtlenecks that cover them from the neck down.

“It’s sort of ‘Animal House’ in the snow, isn’t it?” asked Ben Chaplin, a British actor who starred opposite Nicole Kidman in “Birthday Girl,” a comedy about a shy bank teller who imports a sexy concubine from Russia who turns out to speak no English. Kidman surprised the festival with a bravura performance almost entirely in Russian.

This year, on Sundance’s first weekend, one of the hottest parties was the fete for “Wise Girls,” a comedy starring Mariah Carey, Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters as street-smart waitresses at an Italian restaurant that turns out to be a front for the mafia. Carey and Sorvino appeared in the VIP room in the back of a Main Street dance club. Their heels were so ridiculously high that they stood out like larger-than-life devotional statues encircled by human-size admirers. Sorvino wore a long-sleeved white dress covered with white sequins that made her look like a glitzy but, oddly, still-demure bride from Las Vegas. Carey’s skin-tight black gown was cut so low in the back that it threatened to show off the crack of her butt. As their heads and shoulders rose about the crowd, they looked like the white and black queens in an enormous chess set, facing off from across the board.

Everyone at Sundance was gossiping about how much weight Carey had gained, and although she did look sort of zaftig when she was photographed on TV, in person the curviness seemed sexy rather than fat. One of the festival’s surprises was that Carey could act. After her big flop in “Glitter,” where she played a diva like her real-life self, “Wise Girls” let her prove a more modest but real talent in a comical character role and as part of an ensemble cast with more accomplished and experienced actresses around her.

Even more surprising, Carey spent the weekend saying “please” and “thank you” to everyone and acting like a normal mortal while so many other big-name stars had the haughty presumptuousness and entitlement of the stereotypical divas and spoiled celebrities. When the “Wise Girls” party was breaking up, I followed Don Johnson and his entourage down Main Street to a party for “Cherish,” a drama about a San Francisco woman who is unjustly convicted of a hit-and-run killing and imprisoned at home with an ankle bracelet. There were already hundreds of people crowding the restaurant, so Don Johnson’s posse squeezed its way through the bowels of the kitchen and emerged right in front of the stage and the bar, imitating one of the most famous scenes from Martin Scorsese’s mob opus “Goodfellas.” It was a case of life imitating art imitating life.

For some of the marginal has-been celebrities, it wasn’t enough just to be seen at Sundance parties: They felt a need to perform there. Rosanna Arquette served as the disc jockey at a bash thrown by Independent Film Producers West. She looked slender and chic in a tight, black T-shirt with the inscription “J’aime le Cinema,” but she didn’t seem to love her many real-life fans. When they approached the stage to chat with her, she waved them off dismissively, shouting, “I can’t talk now!” as if picking another CD every few minutes required all of her formidable concentration. Hardly anyone danced to her grooves, probably because they wanted newer, cutting-edge music, but Arquette wouldn’t take their requests. Instead she was spinning outmoded rock tunes from the mid-’80s, when her own stardom peaked with “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

“Just because she was a movie star doesn’t mean she knows how to D.J.,” said a hip young Angeleno who stood on the sidelines waiting for something better to dance to.

The stars displayed even more of their diva attitudes at the press conferences. At a Q & A session for “Personal Velocity,” which ultimately won the jury prize for best dramatic feature film, Kyra Sedgwick scolded the photographers for daring to shoot her while she was talking, as if she wouldn’t look attractive enough with her mouth open. And her co-star Parker Posey upbraided the reporters for all talking at once. Afterward, one of the dissed hacks sniffed that she wanted to ask Posey what it was like attending Sundance now that Christina Ricci has usurped her long-standing role as the festival’s “it girl” and unofficial queen. The reporter was too timid for a confrontation. But at other press conferences, the press came out with venomous attacks. At the Q & A for “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a drama about teenage Asian-American honor students who turn to crime, a journalist brazenly asked the director, Justin Lin, how he felt about making such a bad movie. Fortunately the famous critic Roger Ebert was in the audience and swiftly scolded the colleague for his disrespectful treatment of an earnest young filmmaker.

Apart from the parties and press conferences, the best places for spotting celebrities were the premieres and the promotional events. It wasn’t enough for Robin Williams to attend the debut of “One Hour Photo,” in which he portrays a lonely lab clerk who lives vicariously through the snapshots he develops for happy customers. Williams was so charged up that he did 20 minutes of stand-up comedy after the screening. Brad Pitt showed up for the first screening of his wife Jennifer Aniston’s movie “The Good Girl,” about a disaffected woman working in a Texas discount store. Even though he looked more like a grungy teenager than a glamorous celebrity, the crowd in the theater spotted the actor and surged toward him like a rugby team going for a loose ball.

So many big-name stars come to Sundance that major corporations spend lavishly to rent luxurious ski houses in the hills and concoct clever ways to draw the celebrities to hang out there and bring the companies media attention. Alanis Morrisette sang and John Leguizamo performed comedy shtick at the “Chrysler Lodge,” though it’s doubtful whether any of the Hollywood industry types would ever drive a Chrysler. Reebok got Matt Damon to come up to its “Reebok Retreat” and take a strenuous exercise class that combined elements of step aerobics, yoga and weight training. Damon tried it out for only a few minutes before he managed to escape. He promised to come back but never did, so a CBS TV crew had to film myself and my Salon.com colleague Jean Tang for a Salt Lake City evening news segment on “where the stars work out at Sundance.”

The celebrity frenzy began to subside after the first weekend of Sundance, and by midweek the festival was reclaimed by the critics and film buffs who watch as many as four or five films a day. At that point Sundance turns from a Burning Man-like party into a weird reincarnation of “Survivor,” when the hardcore cinephiles compete to see who has the stamina to see the most films –25, 30, 40! — and who can spot the great unsung talents. The irony was that while the powerful studios and distributors were swarming over Sundance, many of the best discoveries were two miles up the mountainside in the relative obscurity of the alternative Slamdance festival, which has recaptured much of the youthful, scrappy spirit that Sundance had before it became so absurdly famous.

Slamdance was where you could find intensely personal and risk-taking films such as “My Father, the Genius” by Lucia Small. The project began with the weird request of the filmmaker’s father, Glen, who had been an extraordinarily promising and visionary architect in the 1960s and early ’70s before his colossal arrogance derailed his career. During a period of especially harsh defeat, when he thought the world would never appreciate his genius, he put in his will that his daughter Lucia should write his biography after he died. Instead she made a gutsy documentary about him without waiting for his demise.

It was her way of finally getting to know her father, who she had seen only once a week as a child — her parents divorced when she was 5 –and had rarely communicated with as an adult. The film shows Glen Small’s brilliant and radical ideas about architecture and urban design that would harmonize with nature. But it also portrays how he pissed off the rest of the architectural establishment and caused his self-destruction. He could have been a giant like Frank Gehry, but he ruined his chances by making harshly critical statements about the real Gehry and their colleagues.

The film also shows Glen Small as a fiercely self-absorbed narcissist who largely abandoned his three wives and six children in his pursuits of his own talents and hedonistic pleasures. Glen was in financial ruin while Lucia Small shot the film, which forced her to max out her own credit cards and brought on the resentment of one of her sisters, who felt that she was using the project as a way of stealing away her father’s attention and favor. The festival’s premiere audience thrilled to the risky filmmaking and then gasped when Glenn Small appeared afterward for the Q & A even though the movie often portrayed him so negatively. It was an awkward but charming moment. When asked what he thought of the film Glen was as egomaniacal and impolitic in person as on-screen: He said that he wished it had focused more on his work than his messy life.

Slamdance also had this year’s best hope for emulating the cultish following of “The Blair Witch Project.” It was “Nothing So Strange,” a fictional film about the internal politics in an activist group investigating the conspiratorial coverup of the assassination of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The film, which pretends to be a documentary, is an homage to classics of the documentary genre, such as Erroll Morris’ legendary “The Thin Blue Line.” It picks up brilliantly on the strange culture of conspiracy theorists, drawing inspiration from the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King cases and from LAPD scandals such as Ramparts. The film’s crew epitomized the no-budget couch-surfing spirit of truly independent film. The director, Brian Flemming, and one of its stars, Laurie Pike, were former lovers — they actually met years earlier at Sundance, when he was promoting his alternative Slumdance festival and she was a journalist covering the scene. This time around, with 12 members of the film crew sharing a three-room hotel suite, they slept in the same bed once again but claim that it was motivated by necessity and that they didn’t have sex. Pike said that she arrived at Park City with a single dollar in her pocket and got through the 11 days on all the free food at parties and events. When I bought them pints of beer after their screening, they seemed elated that someone was essentially paying to see their film, even if the financial contribution was indirect.

They came to the festival along with the Bill Gates imitator Steve Sires, who has a small but crucial role in “Nothing So Strange,” appearing in their own equivalent of the Zapruder film. Sires looks remarkably like the real Bill Gates. The only tipoff is that Sires is 5-foot-8 and the real thing is around 6 foot. Strangely enough, Sires lives on Gates’ home turf of Seattle and works as an engineering consultant on Linux, the free software alternative to Microsoft’s Windows. Even better, he claims that a production company once hired him to fill in for Gates in a video shown at the 2000 Comdex convention when the real Bill couldn’t make the shoot, and no one ever seemed to realize the difference. As he walked through Park City, though, the star-struck festies tended to ignore him because even though he looked like the richest and one of the best-known men in the world, he certainly didn’t look like a film star.

There were a few mock celebrities who made a big hit at Sundance, though. Fans flocked to a party for the surviving members an early-70s San Francisco performance troupe of acid-tripping bearded hippie drag queens who helped inspire glitter rock. They were the stars of “The Cockettes,” an exuberant and fascinating documentary that delighted audiences through the week. When one of the aging performers showed up in the kind of way-over-the-top makeup and elaborate costumes portrayed in the film, even the most jaded partygoers interrupted their schmoozing to gape for a prolonged moment.

It undermined my pretensions of culinary mavenhood to have such an unremitting lust for food that would be considered bad, if not awful, by the gourmand crowd. It was as if the chef at Lutece were caught pounding Ring-Dings. How could I overcome my humble roots in the Ashkenazi shtetlach and assimilate into America’s ruling class of elite WASPs if, on the way to hearing a string quartet at Carnegie Hall, I swooned outside Carnegie Deli? What good were my Princeton degree and my rumpled khakis and button-down oxford broadcloths and Top-Siders if I still craved matzo balls and stuffed cabbage?

My ancestors in Poland and Russia didn’t have the benefit of fresh, certified-organic produce grown by obsessive overachievers who had shed their professional careers to go back to the land. I’m not convinced that my forebears even had vegetables. They didn’t have fruity, cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oils, so they had to settle for the less mellifluous “schmaltz,” aka congealed chicken fat, surely nature’s purest form of cholesterol. They didn’t prepare carpaccio or cook meat juicy rare or even a tolerable medium, partly because the kosher dietary laws forbid eating the blood of animals (which, after all, is what makes them taste so good), but also because their meat was so tough that you had to cook the hell out of it for countless hours to break down the sinew.

The inscrutable laws of kashrut also forbid mixing dairy and meat, which is Yahweh’s way of keeping the Jews from ever eating as well as the Italians (who, I’m convinced, are the real chosen people, at least from a gastronomic perspective). And in the Ukrainian outback the Yids certainly didn’t have their own deep-sea divers to catch day-boat scallops especially for their kitchens (as I recall was specified on the menu at Bouley).

They didn’t know from ahi tuna. For fish, they had to make do with the lowly carp and pike, which don’t have the delicacy of flavor that makes a good carpaccio or the sturdier character demanded by the grill. Instead, Jewish cooks mush up the bland piscine flesh into weird otherworldly, elliptically shaped lumpen balls of cold whitish mystery meat known as gefilte fish. (“Gefilte” is from the Yiddish and German for “stuffed,” since sometimes the concoction is inserted back into the fish’s skin.) To my mind it’s the signature dish of scrappy Ashkenazi cuisine or, better yet, our tribe’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine: If as a worldly adult you still love gefilte fish, that’s probably because it evokes the warm nostalgia of childhood.

For me it brings back memories of Passover in the promised land — the leafy outlying areas of the borough of Queens, N.Y. — at the home of Grandpa Julie, the Plumber to the Stars. Julie was famous in the family for his emergency calls to the leading hotels and apartment houses of Manhattan, especially the time he gallantly rode in on his Cadillac Coupe de Ville and fixed Elizabeth Taylor’s toilet. Once, in a less urgent situation, he installed a washer-dryer set for Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But his greatest claim to fame was the time Marlene Dietrich made homemade chicken soup for him because he had a bit of a cold when he showed up for a service call.

My Grandma Pearl made a therapeutic chicken soup, too, with matzo balls that had an admirable balance between fluffy softness and structural integrity. Her Passover seders always began with an irresistible appetizer trio of the soup, gefilte fish (I liked it so much that I always insisted on a double serving) and her homemade specialty, chicken liver combined with congealed chicken fat and onions and chopped finely by hand (this was in the B.C. era, before Cuisinart) and served in mushy globular lumps that didn’t resemble anything found in nature but looked much like a brownish sibling of the strange fish balls. (The dish was spectacularly inexpensive: Even today, raw chicken livers sell for only a buck a pound at upscale markets in the beaux quartiers, so imagine how cheap they were eons ago in Queens.)

Then there was roast chicken with side dishes that were generous meals in themselves. She served stuffed cabbage, which only sounds like a vegetable course but is really a carnivore’s debauchery. The “stuffing” is a gargantuan meatball of ground beef and the omnipresent onions, wrapped in a thin layer of green cabbage and drenched in a spicy tomato sauce. Grandpa Julie never tired of calling it “stuffed garbage.” Another favorite was kasha varnishkas: bow-tie-shaped egg noodles with buckwheat groats, also popular partly because it was cheap. (This was before Jews became hippies and discovered that whole grains had healthy fiber.)

But Grandma Pearl wasn’t the real legend among the female chefs in the clan. That honor — and my favorite piece of family culinary lore — belongs to her mother, my Great-Grandma Minnie, and the story of the fish swimming in her bathtub before it was slaughtered to become gefilte fish.

Minnie’s four children had it hard growing up in the Brooklyn public schools with the surname Putzer, which in Yiddish-savvy New York would have been like being known as “Dickhead” in Nebraska. But as a compensation they had a mother who brought over culinary techniques from the Old World. These traditions still thrived in the Brooklyn of the late 1940s. At the marketplace she would pick out a live chicken to be decapitated on the spot. Then she would pluck its feathers herself, which she called “flicking” the bird.

My mother, Elaine, who was a small child at the time, often accompanied Minnie and still recalls the “terrible smell” of the poultry market, but she loved it when the butchers would let her eat the raw egg yolks of the unlaid eggs taken from inside the hens, which decades later she remembers longingly as a wonderful delicacy. The chicken would still be warm when Minnie got it back to their apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, near the ramps to the Manhattan Bridge. (This was long before Williamsburg was colonized by artists and youthful hipsters.)

Unlike roast chicken, gefilte fish had the advantage of being a dish that you could prepare well in advance, since it was served chilled and kept well in the refrigerator. But the special and undeniably strange rules about Passover made it impossible for Minnie to prepare the appetizer course ahead, which is where the live fish in the bathtub comes in. But first a bit of background about a bygone tradition so all this will begin to make sense.

Everyone, even the most goyish, knows that for the weeklong celebration of Passover — the springtime festival of the Hebrews’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt — Jews aren’t allowed to eat bread that has risen with yeast. For that matter, they can’t consume any grain that isn’t completely cooked within 18 minutes of contact with water. This is a way of remembering that the Jews had to flee Egypt in great haste and didn’t have time to order any Chinese takeout — not even a quick stir-fry — let alone wait for their dough to rise.

Not eating real bread for a few days — such a nice symbolic gesture, no? But being Jews, we can’t leave it at that. We have to overachieve in the most sensational way. So for Passover it’s not enough to abstain from leavened bread or long-cooked grains, which are called “chametz.” You have to systematically purge your kitchen of any of these offending foodstuffs. But that’s the easy part. Next, you have to thoroughly clean any surface that has had contact with chametz; to the truly observant Jew this means taking a Q-tip or a toothpick to the tiny crevices and hidden recesses of the stove and fridge. As for the utensils that cooked chametz throughout the year — that long wooden stirring spoon, for instance — well, you have to either burn them (that’s right) or sell them to someone who isn’t Jewish and then buy them back after the holiday. (Today there are Web sites that facilitate this transaction.)

Needless to say, cleaning the kitchen for Passover is a real pain in the tuchis; it takes several days, and you can’t get started preparing any part of the Passover feast until it’s done. So Great-Grandma Minnie would have to wait until her house was completely kosher for Passover to kill the fish and chop it up. She would buy a live carp at the Williamsburg fish market and let it swim in the bathtub for several days while she purged the chametz.

That’s when little Elaine, around age 4 or 5, had her fun. She would spend hours at her grandmother’s apartment playing with the fish, treating it like a species of urban pet. She watched it swim and fed it lettuce. She couldn’t bear it when her grandfather would swiftly chop off its head. (Decades later, she realized that her experience of love and loss was fairly common among Jewish girls of the period when she found it retold in a children’s book called “The Carp in the Bathtub” by Barbara Cohen.)

But the story didn’t end there. Elaine had something of a mischievous streak, and one year she fed the fish a potent Ajax-like household cleanser that she found near the bathtub, a detergent with the brand name Babbo.

As the family began consuming the first course of the seder, the gefilte fish, her Uncle Larry said to Elaine: “Look what happened to your friend.”

“I fed it Babbo,” she blurted out in retaliation for his cruel jibe.

“You poisoned it?!” he exclaimed, genuinely shocked.

Fortunately, the dosage wasn’t deadly. Minnie lived to age 89, and her funeral was a series of tributes to the joys of her from-scratch cooking. But it would have been harder for me if I hadn’t stopped for a gluttonous lunch beforehand at Pastrami King a few blocks from the mortuary in Queens.

The strange power of gefilte fish for the Jewish people has far deeper roots than my own family’s escapades in New York’s Outer Boroughs. Historian Claudia Rosen, author of “A Book of Jewish Food,” writes that fish has symbolized fertility ever since Jacob told his children that they should multiply like fish in the sea. As for carp in particular, the river fish was introduced to Europe in the 17th century by Jewish traders who brought it from China on the silk route. While preserved salt herring was the staple protein source of their weekday diet, carp — a fresh fish and thus more costly — became the big splurge that they saved for the special Sabbath dinner.

With the Diaspora and the newfound prosperity of Ashkenazi Jews in the West, it’s hard to believe that the humble gefilte fish was once a delicacy. Today we still have a fish fetish, but it’s more likely to be for smoked salmon, which is much more expensive, and highly esteemed by gentile foodies, too.

I’ve heard of attempts to modernize gefilte fish for gourmands adhering to the new religion of Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters as well as the more ancient covenant of Abraham. On the Internet you can find recipes for ahi tuna gefilte fish. I’ve heard of Mexican Jews who make gefilte veracruzana, smothering the carp cake with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce. I’ve resisted these nouvelle concoctions, though. If I’m enjoying a Cal-Ital sauce, then I’m happy to have it with a Mediterranean or Pacific fish. If I’m eating white-fleshed fish mixed with matzo meal and eggs, then make it carp. Without the bland taste and the weird jelly on the side, it’s not the same.

When I was a burgeoning foodie in New York, gefilte fish and chopped chicken liver were high on my shortlist of guilty gastronomy. But then, at 24, on my first culinary pilgrimage to Paris, I had an unexpected experience that changed my entire opinion of Jewish cuisine. For my very first meal in Paris I found the perfect old-school bistro on the Ile St. Louis and ordered two dishes with utterly musical-sounding names: “pâté de foie de volaille” and “quenelles de maison.” In English, that’s an appetizer of chopped chicken liver, much like my grandmothers made, and a weird elliptically shaped ball of bland chopped white-fleshed fish, much like gefilte.

It just sounds so much more like gourmandise in French.

2 pounds winter carp
2 pounds pike
2 pounds whitefish
5 onions
2 quarts water
4 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons pepper
3 eggs
3/4 cup ice water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3 tablespoons matzo meal
3 carrots, sliced

To make the jelly broth: Have the fish filleted but reserve the head, skin and bones. Combine the head, skin and bones with four sliced onions, one quart of water, two teaspoons of salt and three teaspoons of pepper. Cook over high heat while preparing the fish.

To make the fish balls: Grind or chop the fish and the remaining onion. Place in a chopping bowl. Add egg, water, sugar, matzo meal and the remaining salt and pepper. Chop until very fine. Moisten your hands and shape the mixture into balls. Carefully drop the fish into boiling stock. Add the carrots. Cover and cook over low heat for one-and-a-half hours. Remove cover for the last half-hour and cool the fish before placing it on a platter. Strain the stock over it. Chill and serve with horseradish.

Like John D. Rockefeller in a previous generation, Soros found making his billions to be very stressful, and he took much more pleasure in giving them away. Even though he has already given $2.8 billion to his foundation, Soros is still worth around $5 billion. He has promised to give away the rest of his wealth before he turns 80, meaning that his legacy as a philanthropist and reformer could be even greater than it already is.

Soros achieved his lasting fame early on: Back in 1981 he was hailed as “the world’s greatest money manager” by the bible of the trade, Institutional Investor, which wrote: “As Borg is to tennis, Jack Nicholas is to golf and Fred Astaire is to tap dancing, so is George Soros to money management.”

Only one other individual — the famed Warren Buffett — rivaled Soros as an investing wizard for the long stretch from the ’60s through the ’90s. Buffett’s approach was dreadfully prosaic — he lived in Omaha, Neb., of all places, bought stocks in a few supersolid companies (among them Coca-Cola, Disney, ABC and the Washington Post) and held onto them forever. Soros, in contrast, was the epitome of guts and glory. He was a short-term speculator who made terrifyingly huge bets on the directions of financial markets.

No wager was bigger than the time in September 1992 when he risked $10 billion — billion with a B — that the British pound would fall. His instinct was right: That night, while Soros slept in his apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he made $1 billion from the trade. Ultimately his profit reached almost $2 billion — and earned him international notoriety.

From that point on, Soros had guru status among traders, who believed that he could move markets single-handedly. Presidents and prime ministers constantly feared that Soros would bet against their currencies, and the sheeplike denizens of Wall Street and London’s City would follow him, resulting in sharp devaluations and economic crises. Malaysia’s chief of state demonized him for allegedly ruining that country’s economy during the Asian financial panic. Soros gained a reputation as one of the few names — along with Buffett and Alan Greenspan — that had oracular status in the global economy.

And then it all went to hell. Soros lost $2 billion in Russia’s default in 1998. The following year he made a big bet that Internet stocks would fall. The basic idea was right, but he was about a year too early, and he quickly lost $700 million. Then he rushed to buy up a bunch of tech stocks, which sank. His embarrassing losses mounted to almost $3 billion when the NASDAQ ultimately did crash in the spring of 2000. That’s when Soros announced that he was withdrawing from an active role at Quantum, which he would transform from a high-risk speculative fund into a conservative institution — a move like Babe Ruth pledging that he would only try to hit singles from now on.

Soros wasn’t the only legend who suffered an embarrassing fall. Another famous speculator, Julian Robertson — who managed money for New York glitterati such as writer Tom Wolfe — lost billions and had to close down his Tiger Fund last year. Even Buffett had a bad slump. For the small-time day trader at home, moaning as he watched CNBC and logged on to E-Trade and figured that he had just blown the kids’ college tuition fund, it was oddly comforting. It was like watching Tiger Woods triple-bogey every hole on the back nine. If even he could be such a duffer, then you had an excuse.

But even as Soros retired from Wall Street, his influence in the world had never been greater. For two decades his true passions had been philanthropy and political influence, not investing, and by 2001 he had put a stunning $2.8 billion into his foundation, which promotes liberal democracy throughout the globe. Since 1980, when he began giving financial support to dissidents and human-rights movements such as Poland’s Solidarity, no private citizen has done more to promote reform in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Newsweek called him “a one-man Marshall Plan.”

In the ’90s Soros expanded his efforts to Africa, Latin America and even the United States, where the paragon of capitalism became a cult hero to the bohemian counterculture for his outspoken criticism of the drug war and his financial largess for groups advocating drug legalization and medical marijuana ballot initiatives. Although the $30 million he has given toward changing drug policy is a mere crumb of his overall philanthropy, it has helped to remake his image in this country from capitalist kingpin to progressive savior. While Buffett is famous for sipping Cherry Coke, Soros — who doesn’t smoke tobacco, let alone pot — is most celebrated for fostering cannabis clubs.

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Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 as Dzjcgdzhe Shorash and grew up in a family of haute bourgeoisie Hungarian Jews. His father, Tivadar, was an attorney who worked very little, preferring the pursuits of a bon vivant. He owned real estate and published an Esperanto journal. Tivadar’s life of comfort and leisure, made possible in part by a good marriage, came after a perilous youth. He was a lieutenant in World War I when he was taken as prisoner of war on the Russian front and exiled to Siberia. He escaped and lived as a fugitive through the tumult of the Russian Revolution.

Those survival skills were crucial to the family when the fascists invaded in World War II. Tivadar bribed government officials for false identity papers so his son could pretend to be the godson of a gentile bureaucrat. For a period, the family hid from the Nazis in nearly a dozen different attics and concealed stone cellars.

After the war the teenage Soros moved to England (he was inspired by BBC broadcasts) and scrounged odd jobs. As a waiter at Quaglino’s, a posh restaurant in London, he wasn’t too ashamed to scavenge the leftover profiteroles. In 1948, at age 18, he supported himself by harvesting apples and painting houses before enrolling at the London School of Economics.

Soros was strongly influenced by one of his professors there, Karl Popper, author of “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” At a time when leftist intellectuals still had faith in the Marxist religion, Popper argued that Communism was as condemnable as fascism, since both were repressive and intolerant. Popper’s ideas resonated with the young Soros, who had lived under the Nazi and Soviet occupations and had seen both regimes firsthand. Decades later, Popper’s conception of the “open society” would be the basis for Soros’ philanthropic efforts — he would even borrow the term for the title of one of his own books.

Soros aspired to be an intellectual luminary like Popper, but his grades weren’t top-notch and he had to struggle for his subsistence. During one break from school he did a stint as a night-shift railway porter. In 1952, after receiving his degree, he worked as a handbag salesman before finally getting in the door at a London investment bank. Four years later he moved to New York with only $5,000.

Soros began to establish himself as a junior trader on Wall Street, but his real ambition remained to become an intellectual in the grand European tradition. Through the early ’60s he tried to rewrite his philosophy dissertation so he could publish it as a book, but his efforts frustrated him.

“There came a day when I was rereading what I had written the day before, and I couldn’t make sense of it,” he later reminisced in his 1995 book, “Soros on Soros.” “That was when I decided to get back into business … I thought that I had some major new philosophical ideas, which I wanted to express. I now realize that I was mainly regurgitating Karl Popper’s ideas.”

While Soros was what he liked to call a “failed philosopher,” he excelled as a money manager. In 1969 he went out on his own and established a private investment partnership, or “hedge fund,” that would evolve into what is now the Quantum Fund. His success was quick and conspicuous: Throughout the awful bear markets of the 1970s, when most investors lost money, Soros’ fund was profitable every year, and sometimes he even scored double-digit returns. Quantum had only one losing year in its first two decades — ironically, it was 1981, when Institutional Investor jinxed Soros by putting him on its cover as “the world’s greatest money manager.”

But Soros’ biggest embarrassment came in October 1987: For a Fortune cover story titled “Are Stocks Too High?” Soros predicted that the U.S. market wouldn’t fall. Only days later Wall Street suffered the crash of ’87. Soros took a $300 million hit, making him one of the biggest losers in the debacle. But even with that big blow, Quantum was actually up 14 percent for the calendar year — a year when Soros’ personal compensation of $75 million made him the second-highest-paid man on Wall Street. He could pull triumph out of disaster.

Soros settled into his reign as the King of the Street. In 1992, the year that he made his gutsy $10 billion bet on the British pound, Soros’ compensation was $650 million. It was the most lucrative year for any individual in Wall Street’s recent history. (Even Michael Milken reported an annual income of only $550 million at his peak.) In 1993, Soros topped the rest of his peers by making $1.1 billion, which was more than the annual profit of the McDonald’s Corp. Financial World calculated that Soros’ pay was greater than the gross national product of 42 nations. In retrospect, a billion bucks a year seems relatively modest compared with the Internet fortunes of the late ’90s, but back then it was real money.

Soros’ success sprang partly from his extraordinary energy and relentless drive. He often tested the stamina of his butler and cook by sleeping for only two hours a night before returning to work. But Wall Street is full of supercharged workaholics, which begs the question: What was Soros’ secret? His basic theory of investing was that financial markets are chaotic. The prices of stocks, bonds and currencies depend on the human beings who buy and sell them, and those traders often act out of highly emotional reactions rather than coolly logical calculations.

Soros didn’t accept the prevailing theory among economics professors, who held that markets are rational, that prices reflect every nuance of hard data and relevant information. He believed that investors influenced one another and moved in herds. Soros’ trick was to try to understand that herd instinct. Most of the time he went along with the mob, but his real killings came from sensing when the trend would turn and getting out in front of the pack.

And how could he tell the timing of the crucial turning points? Like other investors, Soros had colleagues gather information and perform analyses. But he also had an extraordinary gut. He said that he would have an instinctive physical reaction about when to buy or sell. Normally his composure was cool and emotionless, but when he suffered from a bad backache, he took it as an ominous warning about problems in the market. “I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio,” he once explained. “I rely a great deal on animal instincts.”

The Soros Foundations’ push for liberalization in Eastern Europe began with a focus on his native Hungary in the early ’80s as a showcase. One of his first coups was surprisingly simple: His foundation discovered that photocopiers were rare in the country, so it gave 400 machines to libraries and universities as a way of fostering free expression and dissemination of ideas.

Although he started pouring cash into Eastern Europe in the ’80s, it was Soros’ media stardom as an investor that really gave him an unprecedented visibility. “Until 1992, I had difficulty getting an Op-Ed piece on Eastern Europe published in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times,” he said. From that point forward, Soros’ cash and clout enabled him to hobnob with chiefs of state as if he were one of them. In 1993, after dining with the heads of Moldova and Bulgaria in the same day, he told journalist Michael Lewis: “You see, I have one president for breakfast and another for dinner.”

Soros’ greatest influence, however, came not from his shuttle diplomacy but, rather, from his donations to dissidents and grass-roots political movements, such as the Otpor student group and other organizations that agitated for the overthrow of Yugoslav tyrant Slobodan Milosevic. Soros shrewdly gave money and equipment to scores of tiny independent TV stations, which used the newer generations of scaled-down apparatus to elude the control of repressive regimes as they broadcast uncensored news. Evelyn Messinger, who worked as director of electronic media for Soros’ foundation, recalls flying to Belgrade with a TV transmitter in her baggage to deliver to an operator.

Starting in the mid-’90s, Soros pushed his reform efforts into the United States, most conspicuously with his criticisms of the nation’s war on drugs. He argues that the emphasis should be on treating addicts, not on criminalizing them. Soros supports the Lindesmith Center, a leading advocate of drug legalization. The center is run by Ethan Nadelmann, a rabbi’s son and former Princeton professor, who is one of the most outspoken and charismatic crusaders in the cause. Soros has also funded needle exchange and methadone treatment programs and supported medical marijuana ballot initiatives in seven states, including California and Arizona. Joseph Califano Jr., director of Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, calls Soros “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d do if it were up to me,” Soros says in “Soros on Soros.” “I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available. Initially I would keep the prices low enough to destroy the drug trade. Once that objective was attained I would keep raising the prices, very much like the excise duty on cigarettes, but I would make an exception for registered addicts in order to discourage crime. I would use a portion of the income for prevention and treatment. And I would foster social opprobrium of drug use.”

That kind of approach is still a long shot in today’s political climate. But when it’s voiced by someone with the Establishment credentials of George Soros — and billions to spend — it’s an idea that can no longer be dismissed by the pooh-bahs of the political world.

“Go Tigers” was financed entirely on spec, and Sherman’s ideal scenario is to sell it to a theatrical distributor for $1 million, which would lock in a nice profit. The problem is that there are 105 other full-length movies at Sundance, and only a few will sell at all, let alone for decent money. Sherman needs to attract attention for the film; he needs to catalyze the buzz. Luckily, Sherman has a taste for do-it-yourself marketing. So, armed with a staple gun and a roll of cinema-size wall posters (known in the biz as “one sheets”) he walks up and down Main Street, posting “Go Tigers” posters along the way. When you’re the producer of a scrappy indie film, you do all the shoe-leather jobs that might be beneath the unionized flunkies on a studio project.

Sherman navigates the icy sidewalk past Zoom, the upscale-yet-casual restaurant owned by Robert Redford, patron saint of Park City and founder of the festival. This year Redford couldn’t be bothered to show up for his own shindig. He’s supposedly on location in Morocco, acting beside Brad Pitt in a big-budget studio flick, but conspiracy theorists among the PIB insist “Bob” is using this as a cover so he can move around town nearly incognito.

Redford’s restaurant is at the busiest intersection in Park City’s historic Old Town, but the village is normally so placid that even this corner doesn’t have a traffic light. It doesn’t need one except for these 10 days in January, when road-raging L.A. refugees maneuver their rented SUVs as though they were merging on the 405 freeway during rush hour.

Up ahead, Sherman finds a tall kiosk that Sundance has put up for movie advertising. He plasters it with “Go Tigers!” posters, covering over the fliers for a half-dozen other films. Then he’s accosted by an interviewer for the Salt Lake City TV news. As Sherman stops to provide three minutes of sound clips to the camera, he has his back turned to the kiosk, so he doesn’t see that the filmmakers for a rival Sundance entry are stapling their posters over his. And once they’ve left, other cineastes — hoping to be discovered at Sundance, just like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez were in years past — will come by within five or 10 minutes and bury them with a new layer of doomed publicity posters.

I’m watching this exercise in frustration because Sherman has bravely invited me to follow him around and get a behind-the-scenes view of the festival from the perspective of an indie producer. What I’ll see in the following week should serve as both a source of inspiration and a cautionary tale to would-be filmmakers, whether they’re looking to make a cheapo flick with a digital video camera and a loaded Macintosh — all bought for 10 grand on credit cards — or if they’re lucky enough to have a no-strings million bucks from rich friends to turn out a 35mm print with slick production values.

Thursday, Jan. 18
Sidney Sherman is trolling the hallways of Shadow Ridge, the Holiday Inn-style hotel that serves as festival headquarters. He’s carrying a tangle of passes to Tuesday night’s “Go Tigers!” party: laminated party invites strung on shoestring-like necklaces. The Sundance tradition is to wear a bunch of passes around your neck as if they were ski lift tags. This is a way of showing off that you’re a real insider, not a wannabe. Sherman’s mission is to make the rounds of the public-relations firms in their hotel suites and swap invites to his own party for passes to a dozen other hot-ticket fetes. “These are the currency of the festival,” he says. The parties are where most of the vital schmoozing takes place, where the buzz is spread and where budget-strapped filmmakers get free hors d’ouevres to relieve them of another night subsisting on donuts and microwaved hot dogs. The parties are also where you get the free stuff — logo-adorned tote bags, T-shirts, scarves and jackets from the sponsoring companies. If you’re ambitious about it, you can leave Sundance with a whole new wardrobe — another conspicuous testament to insiderdom.

Seemingly everyone at Sundance hosts a party, and so Sherman and director Kenneth A. Carlson had wanted to try a more creative approach to marketing. But many of their ideas for what they call “guerrilla P.R.” were rejected outright by the festival or the town. They hoped to bring the Massillon High School football team’s mascot — a real live tiger — but the Sundance honchos were understandably wary of getting involved with animal rights issues. They wanted to bus in the school’s gung-ho marching band, but Park City’s noise ordinance outlaws sound that can carry more than 25 feet. They thought of importing the huge tiger balloon that resides on the rooftop of the Wendy’s hamburger franchise in Massillon, but Park City already has a regulation against inflatables in anticipation of the 2002 Winter Olympics, when this resolutely quaint alpine hamlet will be besieged by shameless advertisers.

“There are laws against everything in Park City,” Sherman tells me, “but in a way it’s good because it prevents overload. It’s better to get ‘discovered’ than to overhype the film.”

After stalking the hallways and swapping party passes, we get into Sherman’s rented Jeep Grand Cherokee and drive back to our own hotel suite. This is where a total of six guys — two producers, the film editor, the director of photography, the production assistant and I — are sharing a two-bedroom suite, sleeping on the beds, the couches, a rollaway, even the floor.

Sherman’s partner and executive producer, Todd Robinson, is sitting at the kitchen table hacking out a TV script on his Sony Vaio subnotebook. Robinson, with his long brown hair and beard, looks more like a blue-collar guy than the stereotypical slick Hollywood player. At the moment he’s busily writing an episode for “Special Victims Unit,” NBC’s spinoff of its popular detective drama “Law and Order.” For several years, Robinson and Sherman have kept up their more lucrative careers in the worlds of studio movies and TV while pursuing the financial crapshoot of making documentaries together.

Robinson is an Emmy-winning TV writer who has penned screenplays for famous big-budget movie directors such as Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen; Sherman was one of the development executives behind “The Fugitive” and “Falling Down.” But artfully crafted documentaries are what they make for love, not money. The genre gives them the chance to create films their own way, without the long, frustrating process of dealing with studios. Instead of waiting an exhausting two years for a series of 10 people at a studio to say OK to a fictional feature film, they like to simply go out unsponsored and shoot a low-budget documentary that tells a compelling and poetic story.

The catch is that eventually they need to make back their six-figure investment, which is difficult, since so few documentaries are plucked for theatrical release. Their previous film, “Amargosa,” was a portrait of an eccentric septuagenarian who performs solo dance-and-mime shows in a small theater she renovated in a remote ghost town in California’s Death Valley. “Amargosa” received critical acclaim and even made it onto the 10-film “short list” for the Academy Award for best documentary, but it still didn’t sell for cinematic distribution. (To be considered for the Oscar, Sherman and Robinson had to “four wall” the film — that is, pay the owners of an art house in L.A. for a week-long theater run) Now they have an offer on the table from the Sundance Channel for $15,000 for the TV rights, a fraction of the film’s costs. This time around, with “Go Tigers!” they need a much bigger sale to validate their indie dreams.

Robinson picks up a little orange plastic football with the “Go Tigers!” logo, one of 500 they’ve produced as promotional giveaways. He throws it across the room, disappointed that it’s so cheap-looking. “I can’t believe they charged us $2 a ball,” he says. “These probably cost 2 cents to make.”

Friday, Jan. 19
Sidney Sherman walks into the Morning Ray cafe bakery on Main Street, hoping the manager will let him put up a “Go Tigers!” poster in the entrance vestibule. The Morning Ray’s menu is based on the many varieties of authentic boiled-and-baked bagels it imports from Manhattan’s famous H&H, so its 63 place settings are filled with Gotham filmsters and it’s a particularly good place to get their attention. But as Sherman looks at the wall, he sees it has already been plastered with a lengthy message to customers from the cafe’s owners, who have survived 13 previous Sundance festivals. Like most of the merchants and townspeople in Park City, they despise the attitude they get from the arrogant Hollywood types who are invading the place. So they’ve posted some explicit rules of proper conduct.

Rule No. 5 says: “Cell phones are annoying. Do not expect your server to stand by before you hang up.” Cellphones are Public Enemy No.1 to the mellowed-out residents of the mountain village. As the local alternative newspaper, Wild Utah, writes in its “Sundance Survival Guide”: “Restaurant folks: if you can’t get customers’ attention to take their order, give them your cell phone number and tell them to call you when they’re ready.” The paper also advises the locals: “Go skiing. No one from out of town will. It’s much too hard to talk on your cell phone when carving turns.”

But cellphones are only one of the Morning Ray’s prohibitions. Its nine-point rule list continues in its etiquette instructions for Hollywooders:

“Try to limit special orders … Keep it simple. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get the double decaf soy latte with no foam, a twist of lemon, and whipped cream on the side that you ordered — get a grip!”

“Because everyone in Hollywood knows everyone else in Hollywood (or wishes they did) and hey, we simply must dine together, there will be a $20 per person ‘joiner fee’ not including food. This is partially due to the fact that we do not know everyone in Hollywood; all we know is that joiners back up the kitchen and make everyone wait longer.”

“Finally, if you are pushy, rude, abusive, or otherwise unpleasant, you will be asked to leave immediately. Don’t believe us??? Try it — we could use the space.”

Friday night
“Go Tigers!” is scheduled for its world premiere at 7:30 p.m. I expected the screening to be at the lovely Egyptian Theater on Main Street, an archetype of the old-time movie palace. The Egyptian’s marquee is the standard visual image — the “establishing shot” — in almost all the media coverage of Sundance. But that’s where the “dramatic” or fictional films get their debuts. The documentaries have their first screenings at the Holiday Village, a suburban-style three-screen complex in front of a big parking lot in a strip mall. It’s hard to think of a less glamorous setting. Inside, the cinema has a tacky, ’70s, stripped-down style of exposed cinderblock and cheap orange curtains. It’s a throwback to the kind of dives indie films were relegated to before Sundance helped to make them into a bigger business, before they made their way into new theaters with cup holders and stadium seating.

Sherman and Robinson sit in the back of the cinema through the showing. Robinson is clearly uncomfortable, and both are annoyed that cellphones keep going off throughout the screening, even though before each show a Sundance official admonishes the crowd to turn off their ringers. Still, the audience reacts at the right places. They laugh hysterically when a teenager at a keg party vomits three times in quick succession. They hoot when two bulldogs — the mascots for a rival football team — are filmed copulating in the background while their master talks to the camera, oblivious to the scene of primal animal instincts.

In addition to the laughter, the audience is immersed emotionally in the film. The Sundance liberal types chafe at the moral compromises that Massillon makes to have a top-caliber team that can fill its extraordinarily large 25,000-seat stadium: It “red shirts” or holds back the best eighth-grade athletes for a year so they can enter high school when they’re bigger, stronger and more mature. It was accused of illegally recruiting a star player from a rival town. Its co-captain, a defensive star, was imprisoned for rape. Its top players repeatedly take the college boards and get scores that are too low for them to qualify to play on college teams. Its academic facilities are literally crumbling while its football players have a weightlifting coach and enjoy spacious locker rooms fit for the NFL. Nonetheless, the team creates a sense of real community in the town that’s otherwise beaten down by steel mill closings and economic depressions, and it’s hard not to root heartily for the Tigers to give Massillon a little hope.

The producers know that representatives from some of the top indie distributors are here: Goldwyn, Miramax, Lion’s Gate. So are a few dozen film enthusiasts who stood in line for more than an hour to get in. Sherman thinks those hardcore cinema fans are one reason why it’s better to shop a film around at Sundance than in Hollywood. He could have invited the distributors only to see a special showing at a private L.A. screening room, but it’s weird when you’re projecting a film to a dozen hardened industry people. Better to have real fans in the audience. Better to give them a chance to talk it up at parties and on Main Street when they’re eating bagels at the Morning Ray.

After “Go Tigers!” ends, the producers hang out in the lobby, trying to gauge the audience’s reaction as it filters out. The famous critic Roger Ebert enters the building — he’s here to see the next documentary, “Scratch,” a history of hip-hop DJs. Sherman and Robinson approach Ebert and give him a handout with the times for the “Tigers” showings for the rest of the festival, then they respectfully leave him alone. Minutes later, back in the Jeep, Robinson muses: “Poor guy. He must get hit up every seven minutes.”

Sherman turns to Robinson and says: “Some acquisition executives left after 30 minutes.” He then turns to me and explains, “Tonight was low-level distribution people bird-dogging for their higher-ups. It wasn’t people who can pull the trigger” and make an offer.

“I can’t tell you how painful it is to see your film for the first time with an audience,” says Robinson.

Saturday, Jan. 20
At 9:45 a.m. in the bedroom of the hotel suite, Sherman takes a cellphone call from Shaun Redick of the William Morris Agency, which is representing “Go Tigers!” He’s gotten the reactions from last night. Miramax, Lion’s Gate and USA Films have all said that they won’t make an offer. Paramount Classics is a question mark. There’s possible interest from Goldwyn and from Sony Classics, which sent a hired scout and now needs to have one of its own people view the film before making a decision.

“Cool,” says Robinson enthusiastically when he hears about the possible bidders. Then quickly his attention seems to turn to the spate of turndowns. “Fuckers,” he says.

Sunday, Jan. 21
There’s a press screening of “Go Tigers!” at 9:15 in the morning. Sundance’s organizers want the critics to make their own independent judgments without any unwanted interference, so it doesn’t allow the filmmakers to attend and schmooze; Sherman and Robinson have to rely on their public relations representative, Ali Forman, for a report.

The big coup, Forman recounts, is that Elvis Mitchell, a top critic from the New York Times, has showed up to see the film. Afterward, he won’t tell Forman whether he liked it but says he’ll write about it in his coverage of the festival. This is good but not great: If Mitchell loves things, usually he tells her.

That night the “Tigers” crew heads up to Deer Valley — an ultra-swank resort where the biggest stars like to stay during Sundance — for a party in honor of a (fictional) movie about whores and junkies. The setting is a house with large, rough stonework on the ground floor and unfinished logs as the posts and beams above them. The style is Log Cabin Hunting Lodge meets Nouvelle Riche Chateau. The huge 7,600-square-foot structure (five bedrooms, eight baths, four-car garage) is currently on the market for $2.95 million — not cheap for a weekend skiing retreat. Its value might be boosted by the fact that tonight Mick Jagger, Stephen Baldwin and Julie Delpy are in the house.

Monday, Jan. 22
Sundance has grown so much that there aren’t enough real movie theaters in Park City to handle all the screenings. Tonight’s showing of “Go Tigers!” is in the large conference room of a hotel, with a makeshift projection system. You don’t get Dolby or THX in a conference room. But this is really the make-or-break night for the film: Sherman and Robinson are expecting the audience to include reps from a slew of potential buyers, including Sony Classics, the Independent Film Channel, Blockbuster, Goldwyn, Artisan — and even Miramax, which is giving “Go Tigers!” a second chance.

In the lobby I’m talking with Jeff Werner, the film’s editor, who took more than 300 hours of raw footage, found a compelling narrative line and cut it down to an hour and three-quarters. Werner is a Hollywood veteran who edited big-budget studio films such as “The Mirror Has Two Faces” for Barbra Streisand. As we wait for the screening, the “Tigers” crew looks tense, standing in the wings so there’ll be more seats for the film fans who’ve waited in line for more than an hour to get in.

“This is the first time I’ve realized that the film might not sell,” Werner tells me. “It’s a real drama.”

Twenty minutes into the screening, the projector malfunctions and the film rolls without sound for most of a minute. It feels like eternity to the filmmakers. Sherman races out of the room to see what’s wrong. The sound returns, but the “Tigers” crew is visibly upset for the rest of the show.

“The audience never came back after the sound glitch,” Sherman says gloomily after the credits roll, adding that the missing dialogue contained vital information for the story. Werner isn’t so downbeat, but he does think that the audience took half an hour to re-engage with the narrative.

Robinson disagrees. “They still dug it,” he says. “They laughed at the right places.”

Later, at a Thai restaurant on Main Street, Sherman has a hard time eating the pad thai and curry chicken because his nervousness has given him stomach pains. “It’s so nerve-racking to have a screwed-up screening,” he says.

Tuesday, Jan. 23
Before this morning’s “Go Tigers!” screening at Holiday Village, I see a middle-aged woman standing outside the theater entrance wearing a sandwich board. The sign on the front says “SUPPORT GROUP: Mothers of Indie Filmmakers.” She’s Lindsey Miller Lerman, a Nebraska Supreme Court judge, and her son has a 75-minute film at No Dance, one of the several Sundance alternative festivals that have sprouted up in Park City at the same time as the mother fest. There’s also Slamdance and Slamdunk and Lapdance and TromaDance. (Troma is the studio behind tasteless comic horror masterpieces such as “The Toxic Avenger.”) Last year Redford denounced them all as “parasites,” and surely they are, but the newer festivals have captured some of the edginess and guerrilla ethos that Sundance lost when it became more assimilated into the Hollywood mainstream.

Lerman’s son’s No Dance film is called “Nebraska Supersonic.” She’s handing out fliers. “It’s done in the mockumentary style. He made it with one-third the budget of ‘Blair Witch,’” she says, proving that she’s as well-versed in cinema as in law. “It has the sensibility of ‘Spinal Tap’ or ‘Best in Show.’” Her son shot it at age 21; now he’s 25. “He’s been camped out in the dining room for the last few years.”

After the “Tigers” screening, Bob Berney from the Independent Film Channel emerges from the darkened cinema. IFC’s lower-level people saw “Tigers” at its earlier screenings and recommended it to Berney, the senior executive or “trigger guy,” the one who has the power to make an offer. In the lobby, he tells Shaun Redick of William Morris that he loved the film. Redick tells the producers, and hope is restored after the gloom of last night.

Wednesday, Jan. 24
After six nights of staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. at parties or poker games or watching “Apocalypse Now” on cable TV, and six mornings of getting up at 7 or 8 for breakfast meetings or screenings, Sherman and Robinson are exhausted. They’re both lying in bed at the hotel at 3:30 p.m. when the phone call comes from their agents. Sherman and Robinson are instructed to drive over to the William Morris condos at once. A deal’s underway.

Cassian Elwes, the head of Morris’ indie film practice, has sequestered the IFC executives in one of the agency’s ski condos. He escorts the producers and ‘Tigers’ director Ken Carlson into a second condo next door. The idea is that Elwes will shuttle back and forth between the two parties, hammering out the terms of the deal. Cassian’s bother Cary (who starred opposite Alicia Silverstone in “The Crush”) is hanging out in the second condo, where Sherman and Robinson are brought to wait. He hands them a bottle of mineral water.

“You’re going to sell your movie,” he says. “Cool.”

Thursday, Jan. 25
The news makes the Hollywood Reporter and then the other trade publications. The North American rights to “Go Tigers!” sold to IFC for a reported low-to-mid six-figure upfront payment. The price was less than the movie’s production cost, but the deal gives the producers something rare for a documentary film: a theatrical run (as well as a later showing on cable TV, of course, plus home video). And if it does well in the cinemas, the filmmakers could earn back the full cost and even make a profit.

With three days left in the Sundance festival, Sidney Sherman is happy that he can finally try to catch one of the remaining screenings of someone else’s film.