Nature willing, within the next few weeks, Main Street will be temporarily closed to make way for snowboarders to ride down its snowy center, showing off in front of Jim Mangan’s camera. The episode would make for a sweet shot for “I Ride Park City,” Mangan’s second feature film project for Park City Mountain Resort. He says he’s already asked Park City officials for their blessing.
Since last week, Mangan, director of action sports marketing and chief terrain park designer for Park City Mountain Resort, has logged 18-hour workdays, pushing his own limits when it comes to his newfound career as a filmmaker.
This past weekend was crucial, according to Mangan. Shaun White came into town to compete in the World Superpipe Championships, and Mangan wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to shoot the opening sequence to “I Ride Park City.” Since last week, he’s been helping to install a 2,000-foot cable over Kings Crown Terrain Park and a 200-foot cable over the Superpipe for a remote-control fly cam, and directing still and motion photography on dollies from Aerie Drive to the Town Lift. Monday, he spent the day shooting White in still and motion photography in a Steve McQueen-meets-television’s “Entourage” style on location at Aerie Drive, down Main Street and to Park City Mountain Resort’s Town Lift. “I’m a wreck,” he admits while sitting in front of the glow of two flat-screen computers at his home editing suite. “But I want to make something that I feel is fun and new. I like being creative.”
If Mangan works hard and dreams big these days, it’s because he has to in order to top “City. Park City,” his first film for the resort. Since it debuted in October of 2006, “City. Park City” has received two nominations at X-Dance, with 450,000 DVDs of the full-length film distributed through the glossy pages of magazines: 200,000 copies through a December 2006 edition of “Future Snowboarding” and, recently, 250,000 subtitled copies through a January 2008 edition of “Snowstyle,” a Japanese snowboard magazine.
Three years ago, Mangan might not have thought on such a grand scale. In fact, back then he knew little about what he knows now — of gaffers and cinematographers, and music licensing. All Mangan says that he knew then was he wanted to make a destination snowboarding film called “City. Park City,” inspired by the James Bond classic “The Spy Who Loved Me.” He wanted to show off the park features he designs for the resort and the talent of Park City’s professional riders, and he was prepared to do it on his own to avoid any red tape.
After speaking with a few filmmakers, including seasoned filmmaker Whitey McConaughey, Mangan leveraged $160,000 against his house and, before finalizing support from his employer, called Shaun White.
“I wasn’t asking anyone’s permission. I was financing it myself and that was a big risk and I didn’t know what would happen,” Mangan explains. “So right before I did it, I called Shaun to ask if he’d be interested and he said he would help me for the fact that I had taken out this loan. He wasn’t obligated by the resort, he did it as a friend, and that really got all the other riders interested.”
In the film, Mangan included athletes like Aaron Biittner, Torah Bright, Mark Frank Montoya, Jeremy Jones and Pat Moore taking on Park City Mountain Resort’s three terrain parks, riding rails, getting big air off of three-story-high jumps. The action is filmed using a range of cameras from a remote-controlled helicopter cam with 35-millimeter film to a standard camera the ground with Super 16 film and follow cams that trail the riders from a few feet away.
“You learn by actually making films especially independent films,” he reflects. “I directed, I produced, I filmed and I probably learned more than I would have by going to film school.”
What defines “City. Park City” from the league of snowboard films is its beginning scenes: White relaxing in a Brighton Estates chalet with a buxom “Russian spy” begging him to drink a cocktail she’s secretly poisoned, followed by White racing outside to ride the slopes of Park City Mountain Resort, chased by snowboarding snipers hurling hand grenades. “The difference with our film was the whole opening scene and introduction in a core snowboarding film,” Mangan confirms. “It was very unique.”
At 2007’s X-Dance, the action sports festival that coincides with the Sundance Festival, the film was nominated for “Best Soundtrack” and Mangan was nominated for “Best Emerging Filmmaker.”
The film also helped to solidify Park City Mountain Resort’s reign as a park rat’s haven. Earlier in the season, a clan of Japanese photographers in town to take pictures of the resort recognized his name from “City. Park City.” They asked Mangan if he wouldn’t mind getting his picture taken.
“Having an iconic figure like Shaun White in the film ride at Park City makes the resort a bit iconic in a way, at least in the way kids are watching it,” Mangan says. “And, it’s weird, because you’re creating this film and you’re presenting this image of the resort and what you’re presenting is real, and for a kid, when he watches it, he can not only imagine himself there, he has the ability to experience the same things that these professional snowboarders are experiencing in the film. It’s something they can relate to and that’s not what they’re getting in other snowboarding films that are filmed in the backcountry somewhere. Kids know they can get to Park City.”
The promotion and the creation of Park City Mountain Resort as a snowboarder’s Mecca is the reason Mangan left Aspen in 2002, where he helped to promote and design parks at Buttermilk and Snowmass. It was right after the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, when the resort hosted the half-pipe and saw how much interest the country’s youth had in the sport.
“Park City Mountain Resort had only two parks and they weren’t that great, and the owner, John Comming said he wanted to keep it alive,” he explains. “They really started allocating funds to create this environment.”
Erin Comstock, a professional rider for Roxy who appeared in “City. Park City,” and who will also appear in the upcoming “I Ride Park City,” says she began riding Park City Mountain Resort only after Mangan arrived.
“Brighton used to be the hot spot for snowboarding. Then, once Park City stepped it up and brought in Jim, a lot more people came here,” she explains.
Comstock observes the film brought in a lot of kids as well. “Just the other day some random person was like, ‘I loved your part in ‘City. Park City!'” she says, “so I know it’s reached an audience out there for sure.”
Last week, before heading to Colorado to promote Roxy, Comstock was Mangan’s subject in Kings Crown Terrain Park, in a more traditional scene for the upcoming film. The idea is to balance scenes that resemble his debut film to promote new features he’s created at the resort, while also expanding the viewer’s notion of what it means to ride in a resort that abuts a historic mining town.
“Obviously we want to show the mountain, and again how fun it is to snowboard at Park City, but the goal of ‘I Ride Park City’ is to also showcase more of the town,” he says. “I really want to tie the mountain and the town together and really show how they run together.”