Method Man, Reggie Bush, Kim Kardashian and the Q factor

What do Wu-Tang Clan, rapper Method Man, actor Esai Morales, photographer-documentary filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, sex tape/reality TV star Kim Kardashian and all-star running back Reggie Bush have in common?

To be sure, all of them have made contributions -- both sublime and ridiculous, great and small -- to popular culture and sports. And all have some measure of Q recognition factor on the boldfaced, name-clogged streets of Park City during the festival.

But on a recent afternoon, a visiting reporter had an unusually personal encounter with each of them, as one by one, all were given their credentials to enter The Lift Center -- a complex that encompasses the Fred Segal swag suite, the MySpace Cafe (staging ground for so many of my colleague Richard Rushfield's daytime operations), a Heineken-sponsored bar/restaurant and a two-story nightclub venue -- while your correspondent sat and quietly waited for his press pass to issue forth from the check-in's laser printer.

The thing took about 25 minutes to come out, while the famous people just breezed in, grabbed theirs and left.

Gaining entree to TLC, as the Lift Center is called, is something of a golden ticket around here -- at least as evidenced by the semi-constant throng of people who cluster around a barricade in front of the venue (also home to a chair lift that conveniently picks up and deposits winter sports enthusiasts right in the middle of town), in the hopes of encountering a celebrity, any celebrity, maybe even Kevin Sorbo!

Inside the Fred Segal Fun and Style suite, marketers from Los Angeles and New York were doing a brisk business of giving away high-end merchandise to rich, pampered famous people (and their various hangers on).

Most swag enablers, like Eric Burka, co-founder of Yudu, an environmentally-friendly sportswear line, were happy to contribute to Sundance's unique "fund the already-privileged" program. "John Paul from John Paul Mitchell came in and took off his shirt in here," Burka breathlessly recalled. "He just loved our T-shirts. He couldn't get enough!"

Hallie Shano, director of sales and design for the Necessitees T-shirt and intimate apparel line, meanwhile, recounted being taken aback by the unabashed greed of several celebrity suite habitues, whom she declined to identify.

"They're like, 'You know what? I came back because I decided I needed more of those,'" Shano said. "One came back four times."

"They're chozzers," she added, using the Yiddish word for wild pig. "They're schnorring. They just want to take and take."

--Chris Lee

(Photo: Method Man, posing at Sundance, courtesy Getty Images)

Comments

[Natalie Longurl]

The only contribution Kim Kardashian makes is filling the entire wide-angle lens with her big fat useless flabby ass. What a disgusting piglet she really is. A warthog has moer cahse than her.