SUNDANCE, ‘98. DAY I. 1/15...

"At Large" winged into Utah on a packed "Greyhound of the Skies" (Southwest Airlines) flight filled with flacks, hacks, and film-types. There was a conspicuous absence of goatees aboard. A good sign.

Ebner sat across from roly-poly writer-director, Dan Rosen, who’s premiering his film, Dead Man’s Curve in the American Spectrum section of Sundance. His movie, a rough-cut of which Ebner viewed back in LA, is a dark comedy comparable to Scream. In fact, it stars Matthew Lillard -- the immensely talented actor who played the killer opposite Skeet Ulrich in Wes Craven’s spoof. Lillard played the hysterical murderer in Scream, and he’s currently doing Neve Campbell. No joke. Who wouldn’t kill for that role?

Born out of a comedy bit Rosen did on MTV a few years back, the premise of Dead Man’s Curve is from a collegiate legend involving a university student awarded with a 4.0 grade point average for the semester after his roommate committed suicide. Of course Rosen takes that a few deadly steps further by having two roommates plotting the murder of a third, then making it look like a suicide to get dual 4.0s.

Dead Man’s Curve also stars Michael Vartan (Myth Of Fingerprints), Johnson Batinkoff (Walking And Talking), and Dana Delaney (China Beach). Full of heinous plot twists and turns, and frat house jokes galore, in the words of Sundance Programming Director, Geoffrey Gilmore, it’s "easily the most commercial movie at the festival this year."

Ebner: Being from Baltimore, how do you get around the constant comparisons to John Waters?

Rosen: I’m overweight and straight. How’s that?

Ebner: Who are your other heroes out of Baltimore?

Rosen: A young man named Barry Levinson. Heard of him? Cal Ripken...

Ebner: That reminds me -- do you have any inside info on what happened with Ripken and Kevin Costner? Did Ripken really beat the hell out of Costner after catching him screwing around with his wife?

Rosen: Nothing happened. It did not happen, but may I make a statement for the record? That homicide in LA that the kid is trying to blame on the Scream movies? Actually, it was The Postman that drove him to kill his mother.

Ebner: What kind of dreams and fantasies did you explore as a young Danny Rosen coming up in Baltimore?

Rosen: I wanted to play for the Bullets.

Ebner: How did you get sidelined into entertainment?

Rosen: My family is entertainment oriented. They’re not in the business, but they always wanted to be.

Ebner: What does your father do?

Rosen: He was the Executive Director of the Jewish Community Center of Baltimore. When I was nine or ten, I was in a show that my father put on at the center; then I got into magic, and I became a stand-up comic and did that for a long time. I was always a funny kid.

Ebner: You owned a comedy club at 18, I’m told.

Rosen: I did.

Ebner: What brought that on?

Rosen: I was doing stand-up in Baltimore, and I did not like the place I was playing, so I started my own club. We’d get big people: Paul Reiser, Rosanne, Rosie O’Donnell...

Ebner: When did you make your film foray?

Rosen: When I was in Reno, my girlfriend called and told me she wasn’t in love with me anymore. She was in love with my best friend Tom. So, there I was, in Reno by myself. I was a little depressed. So, I took to my laptop, and wouldn’t leave my hotel room until I’d written ten pages a day. And that became The Last Supper. [The Last Supper, a film about a group of liberal grad students who decide the way to make the world a better place is to invite a group of right wing extremists to dinner premiered at Sundance a few years back to excellent critical reception there, and lackluster box office later].

Ebner: When did you hatch the idea for Dead Man’s Curve?

Rosen: In 1984, a friend of mine, David Weiner, who went to Hopkins, told me after the fact that his Freshman roommate had killed himself, and he was offered a 4.0. I wrote a bit in my act about it. Still, to this day, I get recognized once a week by somebody who saw me do it on MTV’s Half Hour Comedy Hour.

Ebner: MTV Films produced a movie called Dead Man On Campus, being released in March by Paramount. What’s your feeling about that clear-cut rip-off of your material?

Rosen: I’m sure that Paramount, when they bought the script had no idea, but I’ve heard rumors that the writer was inspired to write his script after seeing a comic on MTV doing a joke about it. I started doing the joke in ‘84, it wound up on MTV in ‘91. You do the math.

Ebner: Sounds like some serious "comic rights" issues here, but you took the high road and made your own film. How do you think this controversy affects your work, and the marketing prospects for it?

Rosen: It depends, you never know. There are a lot of options. Their film could do really well, and then all of a sudden we become the I Know What You Did Last Summer to Scream. Or their film completely disappears, and we are what we are.

Ebner: And you went back to Baltimore to shoot the film? Did you get much hometown support?

Rosen: Unbelievable support from my old college, Towson University. They were amazing.

Ebner: And The State Of Maryland is throwing you a party at Sundance?

Rosen: Oh, yeah. With Maryland crab cakes.

Ebner: Count me in. How do you think the Scream copycat murders in LA will affect your movie? Will Matthew Lillard be brought up on charges?

Rosen: Well, in a general way, if more people in that age range are murdered or go to jail, that’s my market, so it’s less people to see my movie.

Ebner: Your movie has already been touted by Sundance Programming director, Geoffrey Gilmore as the single most commercial movie in the festival. Does that make you a pariah?

Rosen: Yeah, but it’s not as cool as being shut down by Courtney Love. [Courtney Love caused the first Sundance scandal by shutting down the Sundance premiere screenings of documentary filmmaker, Nick Broomfield’s film Kurt & Courtney. She issued personal and legal threats to Sundance officials, and the pussies caved in]. In a weird twist, we got sued by Gloria Estefan. When did Courtney love get to decide what screens at Sundance anyway? When did that happen? Where did the world go wrong? Sonny Bono dies and Courtney Love continues to walk the earth. I don’t understand.

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