| By Kenya McCullum This year, CineVegas - the festival celebrating films that embody the outlaw spirit of Las Vegas - has teamed up with the world's largest social networking website in order to find new and unique talent. The festival, in conjunction with MySpace, hosted a competition for which aspiring filmmakers uploaded their short pieces onto their profile pages. After CineVegas programmers selected their top three picks among the initial entries, the MySpace community was allowed to select the contest winner, which will be featured at this year's festival. "Getting involved with the MySpace community was just a way of reaching out to a wide range of people," says CineVegas artistic director Trevor Groth. "MySpace is great in that it's completely open to everyone. There is an honesty to that, and it's a democratization of the process." It's not surprising that CineVegas came up with such an unconventional way to find new talent; for the last five years, it has been known for showcasing films that are as rebellious as the city in which they are shown. The current festival is actually the second incarnation of CineVegas; the first aimed to be a more traditional event, which did not play well for the Vegas audience. "For Las Vegas, you really want something that has a little edge to it and that pushes the boundaries a little bit - both aesthetically and thematically," says Groth. "There's so much going on in Las Vegas that if you do something that is just a little more familiar, it may get lost there. We really look for films that have a little punch to them and that grab people and take them for a ride." Since Groth became its artistic director five years ago, CineVegas has taken its audience on a rebel ride that has included such films as Jonas Åkerlund's Spun, Michael Almereyda's Happy Here and Now and Michael Winterbottom's Twenty Four Hour Party People. In addition, CineVegas has also shown films that seem tailor-made for the festival - including Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-tep, a cult hit that explores what might have happened had Elvis Presley lived, and Paul Provenza's much-debated documentary The Aristocrats, about the dirtiest joke ever told. It's no wonder that CineVegas features such revolutionary titles, considering it has its own resident rebel chairing the board. After Dennis Hopper won the festival's Marquee Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, he was so impressed with the festival that he wanted to participate in shaping its future. "He fell in love with what we were doing at the festival and wanted to become more involved," Groth says. "He's gone out of his way, above and beyond the call of duty, to help build this thing into what it is today." Other film outlaws who have received the CineVegas Marquee Award include Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, David Lynch, Christopher Walken and Nicolas Cage. Although CineVegas shows fewer features than other week-long festivals, each year its 30 to 40 films stretch the boundaries of filmmaking and are a hit with the Vegas audience. Groth, who is also a programmer of the Sundance Film Festival, says the differences between the films picked for the two festivals are as different as the cities that host them. "They're very different, and that's what intrigued me about doing a film festival in Las Vegas. I'd been approached to do other film festivals in my off time from Sundance, and nothing really excited me because I never really saw the draw of just doing another film festival for the sake of it. But doing something in Las Vegas with the resources that we have in here was really exciting," he explains. "If you look at just the cities themselves, doing something in Park City, Utah - which is a tiny, ski resort town - and doing something in Las Vegas, Nevada, couldn't be more different in terms of what they have to offer. Not to say that one is better than the other; they're just incredibly different. Both festivals are very intelligent in how they utilize either the charm or the resources of their respective locations." This year's CineVegas festival will be held at the Palms Hotel and Casino from June 6 to 16. For more information, log onto http://www.cinevegas.com/. | 
