PARK CITY — Hang out at the Sundance Film Festival and you can get into the spirit of things by role-playing.
Me. I want to grow up to be Kate Montgomery.
Not in the physical sense, naturally. I'm only willing to go so far with the wonderful world of Hollywood make-believe.
But ethically and creatively speaking, Montgomery, writer/director/co-producer of "Christmas in the Clouds," became one of my heroes this week because she defied every convention imaginable to make a movie and earn a spot on the Sundance card.
Montgomery never went to film school, never seemed to read that handbook, "How to Suck Up to the System While Posing as a Profoundly Deep, Dark, Independent Thinker," and never tinkered with screenwriting till after she'd had a couple careers and kids.
"I don't come from the studio system. I come from the mom system and the system of being a human being interested in people around me," said Montgomery, who lives with her husband, daughter and son in the Bay area.
Montgomery worked eight years in marketing and advertising with the Wall Street Journal. After moving to San Francisco, she produced TV commercials out of her home to provide more family time.
Then the earthquake of '89 shook the Bay area and her equilibrium.
"It made me rethink mortality and the fact I'd been getting up every day with this white noise in my head that I should be doing something I was passionate about," Montgomery said.
The noise translated to "Write." Her involvement with the Native American Film Festival in San Francisco, and American Indian friends led her to pen a screenplay full of Indians.
The first thing she was told, shopping the script to Hollywood, was to lose the Indians.
"They said no one could connect with my characters," Montgomery said.
That fried Montgomery, because Hollywood's stereotypical American Indian characterizations were 6 million degrees of separation from her friends' reality.
"They always have them speaking purple prose in period pieces or objects of guilt and pity on the res. Well, the people I know have college degrees and everyday humor and the same problems I do," she said.
So, Montgomery wrote a multilayered love story, purposely avoiding the noir genre so mesmerizing to Hollywood.
"I get so tired of serious filmmakers who believe the only path to critical acclaim is something edgy and depressing where they appear profound and worthy of awe," Montgomery said.
Rejected by one studio exec, Montgomery told the woman, "You know, you come to work in your fancy-pants Pradas, driving your Jag-u-awwr, and you're so used to people kissing your butt, you think the only way you can achieve balance in your life is to find something to be miserable about. And you think everyone wants misery like you do."
Invigorated by reciting that Michael Jordan-worthy in-your-face, Montgomery added, "Most of us want comfort food and to draw from that well of love and redemption and hope. Whatever state of denial we're in, love is what we all want."
Montgomery set her love story at a ski resort run by American Indians and earned widespread Indian support. Singer Rita Coolidge and veteran actors Graham Greene and Wes Studi wanted in.
Robert Redford, Montgomery said, "was sophisticated enough" to appreciate the film's nuances. She got to film at Sundance Resort and also shot at Deer Valley, Heber City, Midway, the Cottonwood Canyons and Salt Lake International Airport. Her set decorator was Salt Laker Ken Kirchner and her "key hair" lady Charlene Johnson of Midway.
"I could not have asked for more wonderful people or a better location than Utah, right down to the end, a very romantic shot at sunset from the top of Timpanogos," she said.
Every day seems Christmas and every cloud nine when you hear Kate Montgomery and watch her movie.
E-mail: gtwyman@desnews.com