A look inside Hollywood and the movies : What, Skip Telluride? A Boycott Puts Hollywood to the Test

What becomes a legend most? For this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it turns out to be an unexpectedly strong whiff of controversy.

Unexpected because this year’s Labor Day weekend festival in the Colorado Rockies is Telluride’s 20th, ordinarily a reason for unbridled celebration. And unexpected because Telluride almost alone among the world’s film festivals has achieved a kind of cult status, acclaimed by ardent partisans who often turn to supernatural imagery when describing its charms.

So Telluride has been called “a cinematic Valhalla,” “the Shangri-La of American film festivals,” and, by critic Roger Ebert, “like Cannes died and went to heaven.” Animator Chuck Jones, with a nod to the town’s altitude, even called it “the most fun you’ll ever have without breathing.”

So when action shooter Renny Harlin (“Cliffhanger”) brought “Ramblin Rose,” his debut as a producer, to the festival a few years back, it was no surprise when he told the approving premiere crowd: “I moved into production because I knew that as a director I’d never get invited to Telluride.”

Not that everyone is gaga over what Newsweek called “an extraordinary fusion of life and art.” Though the festival prides itself on its egalitarianism, on being a place where stars and star-struck can easily rub shoulders and where journalists have to pay the same fee ($325 this year) for a festival pass as ordinary folks, dissidents have called it precious, elitist, claustrophobic and then some.

“I can see everything important at the Toronto Festival and it’s a much nicer place to be,” said one former Telluride-goer, while another added, “it’s as if two different festivals were going on, one for the public and one for insiders. They devote so much time to hand-holding the rich and powerful it leaves very little for the unfamous and insignificant.”

This year, however, the controversy around Telluride has a different focus, and one that is especially painful to the event organizers. For Telluride’s 20th festival is the first to come after Colorado voters passed the state’s Amendment 2, forbidding the enactment of any laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination.

The community of Telluride, a liberal enclave where everyone from Oliver Stone to Oprah Winfrey has or has had homes, voted 2-1 against Amendment 2, and almost immediately after its passage voted more than 3-1 to pass a local anti-discrimination ordinance that includes protection for homosexuals.

Despite this, when opponents of Amendment 2 organized a boycott of the state, the Telluride Festival was very much a target. A letter to the periodical the Nation supporting the boycott, for instance, specifically included the film festival when it said “no more powerful act of protest can be imagined than moving an internationally known event.”

Even within Colorado, the boycott is controversial, with not all gay rights organizations in the state favoring it. Chris Moore, director of Equality Colorado, says that “If a person is coming into the state and wants to promote the visibility of lesbians and gay men as human beings, they need to come here. We can’t turn the state over to right-wing fanatics.” Those who support the boycott, however, are passionate about it.

“Boycotts work, they are the most effective form of pressure to create change, and if you oppose this boycott, you oppose gay and lesbian civil rights,” Boycott Colorado’s director Terry Schlater says flatly. “It’s frustrating to us that the film festival is still going on. If Amendment 2 had targeted any other group of people, blacks, women, Native Americans, this festival would not be happening here. They certainly should have moved it to another state.”

In response to Boycott Colorado’s actions, at least one film program that was asked to Telluride this year has declined its invitation. Filmmakers Rob Epstein (“The Life and Times of Harvey Milk”) and Jeffrey Friedman (“Common Threads”) are in pre-preproduction on a new documentary, “The Celluloid Closet,” based on Vito Russo’s book about the depiction of homosexuality in the movies.

Asked to do a work-in-progress presentation at Telluride, where “Harvey Milk” had its world premiere, the filmmakers, says co-producer Michael Lumpkin, “came to the conclusion that we couldn’t do it because we wanted to honor the boycott. It was the first thing we thought of, it was always there in our minds.”

To Bill Pence, one of the festival’s directors, and his wife Stella Pence, Telluride’s general manager, the situation with “The Celluloid Closet” was an example of why the boycott became, in Stella Pence’s words, “a very conflicting time for us. Just to have Amendment 2 pass in Colorado was like waking up to a bad dream.”

Though the boycott does not appear to have affected ticket sales, the issue has been emotionally troubling. Bill Pence estimates that he “probably had 10 letters about it, and I can remember what every one of them said. It really disturbed us.

“But like most nonprofits, we operate on the edge of jeopardy, and if we had a bad year it would be the death of the festival. We had invested 20 years in bringing the circus to town, it is part and parcel of Telluride. To move it would have been a suicidal gesture.”

Set in a picture-book box canyon and now a noticeably placid place, Telluride, founded in 1875 and named after tellurium, a gold-bearing ore, is in fact no stranger to uproar and controversy. Butch Cassidy robbed a bank here in 1889, and in the closing years of the 19th Century its mines were struck by the Western Federation of Miners, leading to what one source calls “a miniature war” characterized by “the terrorization of the local population by armed guards and deputies and the dynamiting of company property.”

By the early 1970s, all this was mostly forgotten. At that time, the Pences ran the classics-oriented distributor Janus Films, owned a chain of art houses and programmed two old opera houses, the Wheeler in Aspen and the circa-1913 Sheridan in Telluride.

In 1972, the Pences and James Card, curator of films at Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., brought two silent films to the Sheridan. “The town was filled with refugees from the ‘60s,” remembers Stella Pence. “They gave us a wonderful reception. We were all so excited, we decided to do a festival there the next year, a one-time deal. We didn’t start with any ideal. It was just ‘Let’s have a party.’ ”

The party was so successful, that--aided by co-director Tom Luddy and a guest director who changes every year and staffed with volunteers from as far away as the British Film Institute and the Cinematheque Francais--it has been repeated ever since. Its aim, says Bill Pence, has been to have a festival that would be “a celebration of film, as pure as it could be.”

This celebration breaks down into 27 programs over four days, including new films that make the general festival circuit as well as arcane and venerable items that will be seen nowhere else. Most characteristic of the festival are its splendid in-person tributes to film luminaries ranging from Abel Gance and Michael Powell to Jodie Foster and Clint Eastwood.

Along the way Telluride has developed its share of idiosyncrasies. After an experience early on when the local newspaper made more of a fuss about actress Jeanne Moreau canceling than about who was coming, the festival keeps its selections a secret until the night before it opens. (Rumors, however, do circulate, the strongest this year being that director Wayne Wang’s version of Amy Tan’s novel “The Joy Luck Club” will be shown.) Long lines are part of the Telluride tradition as well, with festival-goers steeled to minimum waits of 30 to 45 minutes.

Unless, of course, they are among those willing to spend a rather large sum (this year it’s $1,750) to be a festival patron and get admitted before the crowds. Though their existence blends awkwardly with Telluride’s professed egalitarianism, the patron passes, which are limited to 150, are defended by Bill Pence as necessary to help keep the festival afloat financially and keep prices down for everyone else. “If there were no patrons,” he says, “the price of tickets would have to be somewhere near $700.”

This possibility of pricing itself out of the reach of its most ardent supporters is one of the festival’s real fears for the future. “The person who can afford to go is already in a much narrower range than it used to be because of economics,” admits Bill Pence.

And while the esprit of Telluride in its early days well suited its laid-back environs, veteran observers note that those surroundings are very different now. “A sleepy haven for aging hippies is now a boom town of condos, million-dollar houses and billion dollar ski resorts,” wrote William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who quoted a festival staffer as saying, “It may well be that the only way to save the Telluride Film Festival is to pack it up and move it to Montana.”

Not very likely, as this year’s boycott proved. Still, says Stella Pence, “we’ve never called it the ‘Something Annual Telluride Film Festival.’ Having it last for 20 years never crossed our minds. And there always exists the possibility there won’t be another one.”