The Yarrow Hotel is a rustic Park City ski lodge that becomes, for 10 days every January, a major Sundance venue. Two of the three press-screening venues are here in converted conference rooms, and the third is just across the parking lot in an actual movie theater. Since we spend so much time here anyway, many Sundance journalists are achieving maximum efficiency (read: laziness) by booking rooms here. They are expensive this time of year, as you might imagine, but if you make the arrangements sufficiently in advance and have a sufficiently liberal travel budget, you can both live and work in the Yarrow. There's almost no need to go outside at all!What's more, the Yarrow finally seems to be accepting its role as part of the many-tentacled Sundance beast. Screenings have been held here for years, but there was always a certain disconnect between the hotel staff and the festival-goers. (This is in contrast to the Park City Marriott, which has enthusiastically embraced its status as Sundance's official festival headquarters.)
This year, the Yarrow is even offering that most-prized amenity for a Sundance journalist: free wifi! They had it last year, but only for actual guests of the hotel, and it was password-protected. Not anymore. I think the hotel realized that the guests were freely giving out the password anyway, so they did away with it. A password that everyone knows is no password at all.
And so, as you walk around the Yarrow lobby and pass between screening rooms, you'll hear journalists discovering the wifi with all the wonderment of a child on Christmas morning. "There's wifi?" they say as they notice someone else's laptop connected to the Internet. "Free? Really?" It is simple pleasures like this that keep movie-wearied writers from becoming despondent and casting themselves into snow banks to perish.
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1. Yeah, too bad the wi-fi only applies to people in the lobby and not the actual guest rooms!! Argh. Ether-wire my ass.
Posted at 5:42AM on Jan 25th 2008 by Scott Weinberg