PARK CITY, Utah -- Celebrity spotting takes precedence over powder skiing come mid-January when the tony mountain town of Park City morphs from a ski destination into a glitzy Hollywood backdrop, often with a snowstorm or two and the A-list from central casting.

		If you go ... festival.sundance.org/2007. This is festival central. Here you can find a guide to movies in the festival and learn how to buy tickets and reserve a room.

Here comes Sting and his entourage, complete with a mountain of luggage holding everything and anything he might need on the slopes. There goes Emilio Estevez ducking into a ski shop to get his board waxed. Val Kilmer was here just a minute ago, and Jennifer Aniston is looking as chic as ever despite the biting weather and relentless tabloid pursuit.

Heck, even Al Gore picked Sundance a year ago to debut his acclaimed film on climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Yes, Park City definitely will be the place to be from Jan. 18-28 when the Sundance Film Festival again transforms this nook of the Wasatch Range into a three-ring circus. You'll have your black-garbed industry types armed with millions of dollars in contracts looking for a sleeper project, the satchel-clutching, Starbucks-addled media and the celebrities who flit about town, usually in big, black and more-often-than-not, stretched rigs.

The stars are always easy to spot. Whenever they emerge from bistros or their limos onto the town's historic Main Street they're engulfed by paparazzi, reporters and camera-wielding fans angling to see whom all the fuss is over.

Like aspen leaves in a breeze, film-promoting fliers flutter from most any flat surface and utility pole still made of wood. Cavernous tents spring up throughout town to pamper the stars as manufacturers strive to pair their products with celebrity. This marketing mania hands out to the actors, actresses and directors "swag bags" stuffed with hundreds, some say thousands, of dollars of goodies. There are simple hats and T-shirts as well as expensive watches, digital cameras and, naturally in this wintry landscape, designer skiwear.

Films aren't the only feature. The Star Bar at 268 Main St. becomes the "Music Cafe," where those lucky enough to have snagged a festival credential are serenaded by such recording artists as Judy Collins, Bruce Hornsby and Rufus Wainwright.

"It's a very festive time," said Craig McCarthy, communications manager for the Park City Chamber of Commerce. "It's a very unusual 10-day period for a community like this. Not totally unlike the Olympics."

And Park City knows Olympics, having been a central cog for the 2002 Winter Games.

Of course, with any event of mass appeal held in a community of 6,000 there's a bit of inconvenience. What normally is a 10-minute drive across town can become an hour or more slog. Park City's already narrow streets become narrower courtesy of snowstorms that seem to arrive, almost on cue, with Sundance.

Trying to negotiate these streets are the stretch Hummers, the free city buses crammed to capacity with festival-goers and the locals who dare to venture out to the downtown Post Office. Parking spots that might have gone for $3 a day during the rest of the winter and free in summer, during Sundance might fetch $25 or more an hour. Even the Park City High School cashes in, renting out spots in its student parking lot.

Critics say this setting, the one that Robert Redford nurtured in the name of independent film, is ironically similar to the one he once disparaged.

"I had ... been to the Cannes Film Festival in France and felt like I had been on an acid trip in an amusement park," Redford told me just about a decade ago for a story about the Sundance empire he had created in the backwoods of northern Utah. "I said never again, never again will I do this. This is ridiculous. I had no interest in film festivals. It just seemed like a big waste of time and money for people to feel like they could talk about film."

At the time Redford was recounting how he felt when approached by organizers of Sundance's predecessor, the U.S. Film Festival, with a request that he lend his talents to their struggling production. It was the late '70s and Redford initially demurred, but in the early 1980s, he salvaged the festival from the garbage heap.

His vision? Create a festival that celebrated and rewarded independent filmmakers, not corporate production houses.

Fast-forward to the present and we find the iconic Hollywood leading man presiding over one of the top film festivals in the world.

Sundance has brought to public eye impeccable productions that old-schoolers might have deemed too risky to invest in. The list of Sundance award winners is sprinkled with the likes of "sex, lies and videotape," the "Blair Witch Project," "Reservoir Dogs" and "The Brothers McMullen." More recently it's given birth to "The Squid and the Whale," "Live-in Maid," "God Grew Tired of Us" (a documentary that followed the "lost boys of the Sudan" who fled war in their homeland to the United States), and even the whimsical "March of the Penguins."

Of the more than 3,000 films submitted for the 2007 festival, a mere 122 feature-length productions made the cut. And while Sundance was kindled by films with relatively little-known actors and actresses, the same can't be said these days. Among those who will appear on the screen are John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, child-star Dakota Fanning and Frank Langella.

Fanning, whose credits include "War of the Worlds" and the recently released "Charlotte's Web," stars in a film tentatively called "Hounddog" in which she plays a troubled Alabama girl in the 1950s who finds comfort in Elvis Presley. Langella, a Tony award winner on stage who also has a lengthy film resume, stars in "Starting Out in the Evening," a story about a writer searching for the fame of his past.

By choosing Park City, rather than New York, Los Angeles or even Salt Lake City, for his festival, Redford further sharpened the perceived grit and edginess of indie films. "I'm very happy that it's snowing and some people are miserable and can't get around," he said in that long-ago interview. "I feel that contributes to what it's about. It pulls people together."

And in the process it lends a winter carnival atmosphere to Park City. Where else can you get a sneak preview of next fall's smash hits one night and the next day find yourself sharing a chairlift with the leading man or woman?

True, there are inconveniences. Hotel rooms can be scarce and restaurant reservations even harder to land. But to most, those impediments are merely part of the Sundance experience. And really, if you spend a little time planning you can easily-- although not necessarily inexpensively -- have a great time.

"There are a lot of cancellations close to the event," Mr. McCarthy replied when asked about the difficulty of finding a room. "Films that people thought were going to get into the festival don't get in, so people cancel these rooms. People [also] leave the festival earlier than anticipated."

The Chamber actually acts as a clearinghouse of sorts during the festival, fielding calls from property managers and lodges that have vacancies and relaying that information to visitors searching for a bed or two. Of course, that bed likely will not come cheaply, with some suites and condos on the mountainsides that surround Park City going for several thousand dollars a night. Bargains, those below $200 a night, might require a daily 60-mile, roundtrip commute to Park City from Salt Lake City.

Understandably, discovering that the film you wanted to see has been sold out can be discouraging, as can be standing for hours in a "Wait List" line. Those are the days made for blindly taking whatever tickets are available or for skiing, which usually is impeccable in mid-January. Locals long ago realized that when Sundance comes to Park City the lift lines at the town's three ski resorts -- Deer Valley, Park City Mountain and The Canyons -- miraculously shrink.

"We have found that the majority of people who come to Sundance do not ski," said Mr. McCarthy. "You will find less-crowded slopes than at other times of the winter. And the snow-pack is good. It's a good time to go."