Joe Winston's award-winning account of America's largest countercultural event. Thousands of people gather each summer in the Nevada desert to erect and burn a 40-foot tall human effigy. A temporary city rises from the dust and 100-degree heat, and a sort of anarchist society emerges. Festival goers strut naked, dance in the mud, create theatrical "Theme Camps," invent religions, shoot automatic weapons at stuffed animals, or whatever else they don't get enough of at home.