Did 'Anvil!' filmmakers call on Dr. Frank for emergency acupressure?

LONG BEACH — My frosty 4 a.m. shuttle van and twice de-iced 6 a.m. JetBlue flight out of Salt Lake were filled with Sundance attendees headed home after a long weekend of swilling and swagging.

Never have I seen a plane's overhead compartments so stuffed with Fred Segal bags and Timberland boot boxes.

Having spent my last hours of the festival at Hyde, in the good company of Chris Lee and our video intern, Daniel Minguez, I was half-asleep by the time our hour-late flight touched down in balmy Long Beach.

This is one of many reasons I did not realize the smiling man in black-frame Nixon glasses and an enormous red-and-black flannel shirt at the Long Beach baggage claim was talking to me when he said: "Hey! Aren't you Dana?"

I replied with the mumbler's variation of "Huh? Hmm? Wha?"

"Dana Sano?" he asked again. "The music supervisor on 'Anvil?' "

Ahhh. He was referring to the Sundance music documentary "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," about the three-decade-old "demi-gods of Canadian metal" led by two lifelong friends in their 50s. Tenacious D with more highly amplified distortion, you might say.

Apparently this guy was confusing me with Dana Sano, who he says music supervised "Anvil," although the film does not appear in her extensive and mightily impressive ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch") IMBD credits.

He looks at me hard, again, and says, "Didn't I work on you?"

Feeling something akin to a rusted-out Country Squire at this point, I said: "I'm sorry, I know (of) 'Anvil!' but I'm not Dana." I tell him where I work, what I do, and what I saw at the festival (his request).

"Okay..." he said. "Yeah, I worked on the 'Anvil' crew while they were in post-production for about four months. I'm Dr. Frank. I'm an acupressure doctor."

Dr. Frank visits his clients, not only on movie sets and in post-production suites, but at film festivals. This leads me to believe that if the "Anvil!" team required services in post-production, they must have been near-basket cases in Park City to require acupressure specialist Dr. Frank to fly up to the mountains to apply pressure to their "acus."

Openly prying into the fate of someone else's deal, I ask Dr. Frank if "Anvil!" looked like it would end up with a good buyer by the time he left Monday morning, often the witching hour for acquisition negotiations.

This is the root of the problem.

"Everyone told them they would sell 'Anvil!' on the festival's opening weekend," Dr. Frank said. "Now it's Monday. I just keep telling (director Sascha Gervasi) to relaaax. Just take it eaaasy. It will happen. The movie has gotten so much great press -- even in your paper. But (Gervasi's) very stressed. He put close to $500,000 of his own money into it."

I tell Dr. Frank what reporters, producers and executives have been saying all weekend. Buyers are being very cautious. They're lying in wait and weighing their options until they see all the cards on the table. I also tell him what I have heard from a handful of other journalists, that "Anvil!" has played extremely well at the festival and is on more than a few festival pundits' sales watch-lists.

Dr. Frank says: "Good, I'll tell him you said so. He really needs to relaaax."

— Sheigh Crabtree