If CineVegas stays about Vegas, star will rise

As you know, Britney Spears is a washed-up singer and still not a "woman" by some standards of responsibility. But she is the most famous woman in the world, so when the sloppystar showed up Friday at a CineVegas party, the mass witnessing of Britney was a marketing miracle for the film fest.

Because it was Father's Day weekend, she took her dad to a poolside cabana at Palms Place. It was not a private Hallmark moment. Her open cabana was prominent for CineVegas partyers to peer into. And behold, the gawkers shuffled in a logjam to eyeball the freak show.

See Britney's blank expression!

See Britney's black dress!

See Britney's black eyeliner!

Afterward, everyone mingled in little black dresses and tight shirts to recount their brush with fame:

"She didn't even smile once." She looked "vacant" in "fake hair." "It's not like she can do anything but sit there in a private booth." "It looks like the spirit was ripped out of her." "So sad."

A woman who visited the restroom at the same time as Britney exited excitedly: "I just peed with Britney!"

The Britney freak show was, as always, sad but a triumph of publicity. Previous CineVegas fests have brought Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron. This year's opening weekend was taken in by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and ex-porn star Traci Lords. Respected actors come at the end of this week: Don Cheadle, Angelica Huston, Sam Rockwell and Rosario Dawson.

But no one's presence could have proved more appropriate than Britney's to the otherworldliness of CineVegas' parties of painted-naked models, fire-breathing sideshows and a Vegas performer dressed as Charlie Chaplin wearing a live cat on his shoulder.

Even to Hollywood people, CineVegas seemed trippy. Director Peter ("The Full Monty") Cattaneo walked the red carpet for his comedy "The Rocker" and compared the presence of scantily clad femme fatales with more stately film fests.

"It should be like this in Venice," Cattaneo said and grinned. "In fact, every time the movie is shown anytime in the world, there should be showgirls out front."

Everywhere you turned, it was L.A.-meets-Vegas. At Saturday's red carpet for "Dark Streets," Bijou Phillips posed for photos by looking over her shoulder as photographers snapped her backside.

At times, Phillips has been called the original Paris Hilton, a party girl and a friend of Paris, though she's attempting to be a serious actress without leaving behind her Paris circle.

"I still know all those girls, and they're nice girls, and we've known each other since we were really, really little kids," Phillips said. "So it's not really that: 'leaving things behind.' We all work a lot. They're all pretty hard workers."

With that, Phillips and her mom entered the Palms movie theater for a screening of "Dark Streets," a gorgeously shot movie, filmed entirely through a "swing & shift" camera, which left a face or two in focus while everything else on the screen stayed blurred.

As the opening credits rolled, the packed crowd applauded the names of the film's stars, who sat in attendance with B-movie hero Roger Corman. On screen, Phillips sang jazz standard-styled songs in 1930s-styled gowns. Her character struggled with unrequited love for a man and a vial of drugs.

"This is the movie every little girl wants to grow up to make," Phillips said after the movie.

Phillips then filed to the after-party at the Palms pool to sing songs from the film. Among those listening was gray-haired and gracious Adam Yauch of New York's The Beastie Boys. He is here as head of his new distributor, Oscilloscope, looking for movies to buy. It's a lot of work.

"But I like looking at films. I go to film festivals," he said. "Most of the filmmakers we're dealing with are indie filmmakers. And they really just care about filmmaking. They're more artistic people. So far, I think we've circumnavigated most of the Hollywood (B.S.)."

I pointed out all the scantily clad women at this particular festival.

"That's the downside, right?" he joked.

To some out-of-town women at CineVegas, it was a slight downside. A Hollywood female told me she thought Vegas is getting closer to achieving the status of the Sundance film festival, especially because it's run by people such as artistic director Trevor Groth, who is Sundance's senior programmer.

She didn't mind the Vegas skin at parties so much. But she wondered whether one of the CineVegas parties, at Sapphire strip club, could be a turnoff to some women in Hollywood.

Men were less judgmental. Gabriel Mann, the lead in "Dark Streets," said becoming as big as Sundance is possible.

"You guys just keep doing exactly what you're doing now, and it's inevitable," Mann said. "It's a beautifully run festival. The people have been really, really nice. The venue couldn't be more perfect. There's not an actor I could name who wouldn't be thrilled to come here for a movie."

As evidence of that, Groth said it's become much easier to get filmmakers to show their creations at CineVegas. It used to be more difficult to persuade filmmakers to come. "Now, people are contacting me" to screen their movies, he said.

That has happened as CineVegas has gone more Vegas, he vowed when I asked about Sapphire.

"The one thing I've always thought was important for the festival was to embrace all things that are Vegas," Groth said. "For me, Sapphire is a part of Las Vegas, and they've been very supportive to us, and we know that some of the guests who come to the festival embrace that too."

More simply, Groth said, "We've amped the crazy to celebrate our 10th anniversary."

To a longtime chronicler of Vegas, CineVegas actually does feel even more eclectic than most events here.

At one point this weekend, I chatted with a Hollywood insider who whimsically complained that making movies is a lot like "baby-sitting drug addicts" with enormous egos. At another party, a dapper young man of wealth told me about the first movie he produced, and how he fretted the anxiety of both its potential failure and potential success.

As it turned out, the location of Friday's Britney spectacle was a fate of CineVegas symbolism. The party she attended celebrated the feature "Your Name Here," a thinly veiled biopic of the late novelist Philip K. Dick, a paranoid-druggie weirdo whose sci-fi writings suggest a dopey philosophy: We don't live in a real world. We live in a simulated dreamscape.

CineVegas' official poster image played into such a dreamscape with its homage to "Blowup," the classic film that questions the reality of perception.

And what is Las Vegas, and what is Hollywood, if not a surreal supplier of an alternative universe?

Doug Elfman's column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.