Sundance: Hey, was that Mandy Moore?

Friday was a good day. Even though Sundance is harder than ever to navigate, particularly if all you really want to do is see films, we managed to see three pretty good ones. Plus, I met an old high-school buddy, we snared our third party invitation and the evening ended with our catching up with an old boyfriend of my daughter’s who is a recording artist.

Oh, and we saw Mandy Moore walk into the Celsius Lounge. But more about that later.

Why is Sundance harder for critics to navigate? Two reasons. First, for my previous eight festivals, I was always guaranteed a seat at the 1,300-seat Eccles Theater . I would just show up, flash my press credentials and some volunteer in charge of such things would hand me a special ticket. Now, even at the Eccles I have to request tickets 24 hours in advance – with no guarantee that I’ll score any.

Second, we always used to fill both our days and nights watching movies. We could do that easily enough because the press room had copies, mostly VHS but more and more DVD, of films that we could check out and watch whenever we wanted. So a typical day would be our showing up at the press office before 9 a.m., checking out two or three movies on tape, going to see three or four movies theatrically, then watching two or three more in our condo.

For 2007, they are still letting you check out DVDs. But … you can’t take them out of the building. They have three screening booths – booths, not rooms – where you have to watch them on the premises. With one set of headphones, so that even if you wanted to you couldn’t watch the movie with a friend. Or spouse.

The reason for the change? The fear of piracy, we’re told . Sitting in the press lounge Friday morning, posting a couple of feeble messages (feeble because I hadn’t yet experienced anything), I heard a guy laughing that excuse away.

“Last time I was in New York, I bought one of those pirated movies,” he said. “It was shot from the second balcony, and the main thing you could see was the bald head of the guy down in front.” He smiled and swigged from his freebie bottle of Aquafina. “Next year they’ll be charging for the water because of piracy,” he said.