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Sondheim, Herzog, McNamara, and S. Coppola make the Telluride scene
BY GERALD PEARY
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I was last at the Telluride Film Festival two decades ago, in the high mountains of Colorado, and I savor memories of Labor Day weekends there. An awesome seminar with Hollywood character actors Margaret Hamilton, John Carradine, and Elisha Cook Jr. Thrilling interviews with personable veteran performers Woody Strode and Joel McCrea. Werner Herzog’s 40th-birthday party (which I crashed), where cinematographer Ed Lachman met director Susan Seidelman (they went on to collaborate on the 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan). The 1983 midnight world premiere of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, with Philip Glass’s music ringing through the Sheridan Opera House. Animator Chuck Jones holding court, showing how his definitive Bugs Bunny walks about like Groucho Marx. French directing legend Abel Gance watching out a window at an outdoor screening of his monumental 1927 silent, Napoleon. Many of the above-mentioned are now deceased, though the hallowed terrain where Napoleon was projected is enshrined as the Abel Gance Outdoor Cinema, and, a gondola ride above Telluride, you can locate the state-of-the-art Chuck Jones Cinema hidden behind skier-occupied condos. There are now eight venues for films, and that allows for abundant crowds; people fly in eagerly from all over the USA. As for once-sleepy little Telluride (year-round population 2500), it’s a developer’s wet dream, with property prices more absurd than in the Back Bay and restaurants charging as if this mountain town were East Hampton. Tom Cruise has a place up in the hills. The film festival began in 1974, in an environment "refreshingly uncluttered by commercial interests and development," co-director Bill Pence remembers. Somehow it’s kept its integrity, its focus: great vintage movies, tributes to important figures from movie history, world premieres of astonishing films (Lost in Translation, Breaking Glass), and an incredible array of famous personalities weighing in about the cinema. "We have returning alumni and family," Pence announced in his opening-night speech. "Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Denys Arcand, welcome back! And Sofia Coppola is the only filmmaker here who was at the first festival, with her father, Francis, though she doesn’t remember it. She was three years old! This year, we have a new generation on view: 10 films are first-time. Where else, in one weekend, can you see Budd Schulberg, Robert S. McNamara, Ted Turner, and Stephen Sondheim?" Schulberg took part in a stirring Q&A concerning his screenplays for the 1954 On the Waterfront and (shown at Telluride) the 1957 A Face in the Crowd. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, appeared to talk about The Fog of War, the brilliant Cannes-premiered documentary in which he’s queried on camera by Cambridge’s Errol Morris. Turner received a Special Medallion for Turner Classics film preservation. And Sondheim was this year’s Guest Director (last year it was Salman Rushdie), a VIP outsider who came to Telluride, Pence said, "with a free hand to express his love of film." Sondheim is one major movie fan. "Who is it that audiences at Telluride might not know well?", he said, standing on stage and explaining his selection. "I thought of Julien Duvivier, the most popular French director of the 1930s; he and Marcel Carné were leaders of the movement of ‘poetic realism.’ I saw his films at the Thalia in New York when I was between 15 and 20, and I remember them vividly." An inspired pick. I was among the many who had never seen the Duvivier films Sondheim introduced: La belle équipe (1936), Panique (1946), and Un carnet du bal (1937). Even better, Sondheim opted for the never-revived movie that he considers the greatest American sound comedy, George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943). It was hilarious. Among those chuckling in the audience was McNamara, a non-filmgoer whose last keen movie experience, he said, was seeing Doctor Zhivago. Telluride was a grand occasion for Beantowners. The Fog of War proved an SRO superhit, and it was discussed everywhere on the town streets. And our very own Alloy Orchestra — Ken Winokur, Terry Donahue, Roger Miller — soared with a popular original score for Buster Keaton’s The General (1927). Then they came back with a second inspired accompaniment — jubilant polkas, French accordion tunes, somber "noir" — that brought to life a recently restored 1929 silent, Charles Vanel’s Dans la nuit. A masterpiece of a movie, and a masterly score. Joy at Telluride.
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