Rookie junketeer

Walter Chaw lives in Littleton, Colorado, likes movies and reviews a ton of them for Film Freak Central.net and Rotten Tomatoes. To his surprise, Chaw found himself invited to the junket at the Four Seasons here for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His piece might be summed up this way: liked the movie, didn't really fit in on the coast.

Sporting a battered green Jansport backpack only slightly worse for wear than I was after seven years of crippling-debt encumbering, otherwise worthless and slightly embarrassing higher education, I was looked over more than once by six-foot blondes in mini-skirts walking tiny dogs (at 11:00pm...in a hotel lobby) doing the silent calculus of whether I was so rich that I didn't care what I looked like or was just a scumball trying to get a room for one night that would cost me, generously speaking, about a month's salary. A man with an evil Slavic accent berated the night manager to my right, and Stefano nervously scanned his screen, doing his own silent calculations of whether I was rich enough to cause a scene when he told me that I wasn't in the system. Calls were made, platitudes offered, and the solution was for me to pay for my room and maybe Focus would reimburse me maybe in the morning but more likely someday if anything came up, they'd let me know. Not fond of my options (pay for a room at The Four Seasons so I could sit in a press conference and a few roundtables in the morning and then fly back to Denver, pr sleep in the street), I called an old friend now in L.A., arranged a couch, and regretted the fact that I really liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and so would probably appear to have been bought by a coach ticket and a great big privileged hassle.

Thanks to Steve for the pointer.