At last, a feature

This year Ari Gold is collecting on his hard work, patience and perseverance at the Sundance Film Festival.

Gold, the writer, director and star of the feature “Adventures of Power,” rose through the Sundance Film Festival ranks gradually, at first, attending first as a couch poacher and party crasher, climbing through windows to get into the scene in the mid-1990s, and later as a film short director for 1999’s 60-second film, “Culture.”

“I’ve had good success at Sundance for someone whose never had a feature and I met actresses and directors I would never have met in Los Angeles and New York,” he says. “At Sundance, everyone goes to the same places.”

In 2007, he returned to entertain on banjo, guitar, ukulele as one-fifth of the garage-pop indie folk band, “The Honey Brothers,” an ensemble he started with HBO’s Entourage star, Adrien Grenier and his twin brother Ethan, for a gig at the Slamdance Film Festival’s opening gala.

This year, Gold returns with his first feature-length film, three years in the making, happy to be back in the filmmaker crowd. “Last year, I felt kind of like I was at a party in the back of someone else’s party,” he says. “It was sort of strange and a bit disorienting how disconnected I felt to my old experience.”

“Adventures of Power” is a comedy that unites a copper mining labor dispute with the unlikely and seldom-if-ever-seen art of air drumming, a passion of the film’s off-beat hero, Power. It’s an unusual concoction, but one that finally gelled as Gold visited his aunt in Silver City, New Mexico.

“I loved the way people knew each other and somehow, when the air drummer character started to develop in my head, I already knew his name was Power and I started thinking where he was from, and I just kept thinking about my aunt and about this town,” he says.

It all seemed a little far-fetched until Gold returned to Silver City to do research: copper mines were on strike and laborers were in the streets with picket signs. “The concept of the film all seemed like some unrealistic 1982 rock movie, but then when I saw the strike happening, I was like, ‘My God, this stuff’s still going on down there,'” he remembers.

The film is set in New Mexico, but scenes that reference Silver City were actually shot in Utah — in Price, Helper and Salt Lake City. Gold says he chose the state as his backdrop because of its varied landscape, and because New Mexican copper mines were concerned about the film’s subject matter. “I eventually realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere in New Mexico, because the copper mines there didn’t want any disruptions, or in some cases, because they didn’t want to show a film about a labor dispute,” he says. “I had one plant manager say to me exclusively they didn’t want their people to be walking past strikers, even if they were just actors.”

According to Gold, the power plant manager in Helper, Utah seemed to have a better relationship with their labor. “The guys working were always happy and saying hello when we were shooting,” he says. “They basically gave us an all-access pass to shoot in and around the plant and didn’t care what the politics were.”

To get into character, Gold attended an air guitar competition as Power, drumming in a field of guitarists.

“It was really one of the things that solidified the character in my mind,” he says. “The audience really liked it The judges were instructed not to let me win, but some people were coming up to me saying things like, ‘You were robbed, man.'”

In the film, “The Honey Brothers” members contribute in various ways. Grenier is cast as the villain — a role that contrasts with the romantic, doe-eyed he typically plays – and Ethan Gold helped to score the soundtrack.

“Adventures of Power,” on its surface, seems to tread in the footsteps of genre-comedies such as “Dodge Ball,” and “Blades of Glory,” but Gold says he hopes it leaves a slightly different impression.

“I want people to be moved by the spiritual message – it’s about someone who is missing drums and finds out he doesn’t need them, that the drums are inside him already,” he says. “I’m not proselytizing anything, but I want people to walk away from a movie they might expect to be purely comedy and instead, have it really touch them. The spiritual side is part of the story, and I want the audience to feel that.”

Screenings:

Thursday, Jan. 24, 9 p.m., Tower Theatre, SLC Saturday, Jan. 26, 11:45 p.m., Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City

Tickets: Purchase tickets at the Gateway Center at the corner of Heber Ave. and Swede Alley in Old Town from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily through Jan. 26. The tickets must be paid for in cash only. For information, call (435) 776-7878.

Andrea Sperling (213) 434-2045 [email protected]