R2PC: ROADTO PARK CITY

Half a star

Tiresome, barely-watchable “comic” pseudodocumentary about a clueless idiot who decides to become a Sundance-winning filmmaker. Starring John Viener.Running time: 75 minutes. Not rated (nothing offensive). At the Pioneer Theater.

IMAGINE a “Roger and Me”-style expose of the indie film business made by a stolidly unfunny but deeply smug seventh grader and you’ve got something akin to this desperately unfunny pseudodocumentary about John Viener (John Viener), a guy who suddenly decides to make a movie and have it win the Sundance Film Festival.

The problem is that although John is supposed to have worked as a production assistant, he’s a moron who knows much less about movies than the average man in the street.

He has to be told by various real-life interviewees – people who work in film stores, or at the Screen Actors Guild, or Backstage magazine – that you need to know what your film is going to be about before you advertise for actors, buy film, or get a publicist.

When film insurers explain to him that they provide insurance against piracy he asks them whether “piracy is like if a peg-legged man tries to steal my film?”

In between irritating, witless jokes like this, you do pick up the odd piece of useful information about filmmaking: for example what it is that a Focus Puller does on a movie set. And there are times when R2PC could almost be a jokey educational film for slow high school students.

But for the most part it’s a pointless, wincingly snide exercise, and you wonder why the real people interviewed here (including screenwriting guru Syd Field and Post correspondent Jeanne MacIntosh) bothered to give writer-director Bret Stern and his team the benefit of their time or experience.

Here and there you spot the germ of a funny idea, but it would take someone with more wit and talent than these filmmakers apparently possess to bring them to fruition.