Local Columnist Mocks Sundance for Imposing a Code of Conduct to Combat Harassment, Discrimination

In a nod to common decency and last several months of sexual misconduct scandals, the Sundance Film Festival has introduced a Code of Conduct for attendees and staff. But some people in Park City think that’s stuuuuuupid.

It probably is pretty obnoxious to have your hometown overrun with Hollywood fancy-farts swinging around their swag bags while you’re just trying to order a cappuccino in full ski gear, but local columnist Tom Clyde is taking absurd issue with this straightforward, humane statement on Sundance’s website:

Sundance Film Festival is an environment where bold, creative, and distinctive voices are celebrated.

Sundance Institute is committed to allowing attendees to experience the Sundance Film Festival free of harassment, discrimination, sexism, and threatening or disrespectful behavior. We reserve the right to revoke, without notice or refund, credentials or access to Festival events and venues for those who engage in such conduct.

We have partnered with the Utah Attorney General’s office to provide a 24-hour live hotline for those who are involved in or witness something that violates this Code of Conduct at 801-834-1944.

In an op-ed for the Park Record, Clyde deliberately mischaracterizes the hotline as a number to directly call Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.

“No kidding. That’s really happening with our tax dollars. The AG is standing by to take your call,” writes Clyde. Is he? I’m pretty sure he pays someone else to answer the phones, but okay.

Clyde makes the not unreasonable point that the AG can’t revoke credentials and the potential outcome of calling a hotline on someone is unclear, but it is a false gesture towards taking a serious situation seriously—which he absolutely does not do. Though he mentions Harvey Weinstein and the slew of “gross, boorish” stories that have come out since his downfall, Clyde doesn’t follow through with his thought and acknowledge the Code is implicitly about sexual harassment, he mischaracterizes it as “a system to criminalize rudeness”:

If I watch a movie and walk out half way through, and say that it was a terrible movie and the people who wasted their money making it must be idiots, should I be expecting a call from the AG’s office?

Yes, “rudeness” is the biggest problem in Hollywood right now. This dude obviously thinks this is a practical piece about all the ways you can be harassed by studio executives at Sundance (hilarious!), but it reads like someone who has been living up on the ranch a bit too long.

“The whole affair would be easier to deal with if the ski conditions were better,” he writes. Dude wants to ski.