Cinema Paradiso

Twenty-two years ago, powered by the impetuosity of youth, a fledgling critic ventured out from the East Coast to a small festival in Colorado, then in just its third year. This is what he wrote:

“Telluride is the name whispered to you as you sit shivering from celluloid overdose in a cafe in Cannes. Go to Telluride, the voices say, only a few years old and already the most respected small film festival in the world. Telluride is different, the voices say, and for once the voices are right.”

The words are mine, and as a considerably more established Telluride prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary with a gala five-day event beginning Thursday, the temptation to reexamine what the Sunday Times of London has called “one of the U.S.’ most exclusive arts events” is irresistible.

Today’s Telluride combines worthy new films, in-person tributes to cinema luminaries and exclusive showings of venerable rarities. Most people who make the trek to this remote town experience varying degrees of ecstasy, praising the festival as artistically adventurous and iconoclastic. Even an unlikely visitor like action director Renny Harlin told an audience he’d turned to producing (he was showing his debut, “Rambling Rose”) because “I knew that as a director I’d never get invited to Telluride.”

But Telluride was not always the way it appears now, and it doesn’t necessarily call forth the same responses from all its visitors. Over its quarter of a century, the festival has made an almost personal journey from being a lionized darling to the focus of questions and doubts to its current position as a battle-scarred but still idealistic survivor in an increasingly commercialized world.

“We live on such a tenuous edge between survival and extinction,” festival general manager Stella Pence says, “that tiny factors become tidal waves.” How the festival has been able to ride those out reflects the fluctuating states of film and festivals here and around the world.

The most obvious differences between then and now in Telluride are, predictably, the surface ones, the inevitable results of celebrity, prosperity and the passage of time. In 1976, you could buy a general festival ticket for $65 and an economy one for $35; today, a regular Telluride pass is $500 and patron passes run $2,500.

Instead of the one theater it began with, the restored 1914 Sheridan Opera House, the festival now has six, four of which have to be built anew every year inside existing structures and then taken down. The theatrical building blocks, from seats to speakers, spend the off-season in rural Colorado inside large trailers with the word “Show” painted on the sides.

Where food was once a catch-as-catch-can activity, the festival, now with as many volunteers (roughly 400) as it once had visitors, has to help out the town’s oversubscribed restaurants by making extensive plans to supply its own people with thousands of meals.

“The executive chef from the Putney Inn in Vermont brings in her staff and sets up an entire feeding operation,” Pence says. “She comes to town in early June, visits the local farmers to tell them what we need, they plant and harvest it, and we give them the leftovers back as mulch. It’s its own weird little cottage industry.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to build a festival where the theaters were already there, a place where there would be restaurants?” Stella’s husband, Bill Pence, one of the festival’s permanent co-directors, wistfully adds. “This is not like the festivals at Sundance or Toronto, which get all kinds of resources from the town. We pay as we go, like a taxi.”

When the Place Was Just a Sleepy Town

As for the town itself, anyone who’s slept through the past quarter-century would hardly recognize anything about it except its celebrated location 8,745 feet high in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, smack at the end of a dead-end road leading into a spectacular box canyon.

Just about a ghost town when the festival started, with a population of only a few hundred, Telluride, especially after a small airport opened just outside town in 1985, has boomed into an example of what’s alternately called the “Aspenification” or the “Californication” of the state. As one reporter put it a few years ago, “a sleepy haven for aging hippies is now a boom town of condos, million-dollar houses and billion-dollar ski resorts.”

In 1976, the Telluride I experienced resembled “a pleasant, if slightly unreal fantasy town, where 70% of the population is 35 or under, a live-in Disneyland for people who never want to go home anymore.” A place where local phones as late as 1989 had only four-digit numbers, Telluride now is overshadowed by the Peaks, a big-deal ski resort, just outside the city and counts as owners of trophy homes such snow-loving celebrities as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Keith Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and Oprah Winfrey.

Where dirt and gravel roads were once the norm and entire city blocks could probably have been purchased for $10,000, even Telluride’s back streets have just been blacktopped because, says one bemused resident, “if you’ve got million-dollar shacks, you’ve got to pave the alleys.”

Paralleling these changes and in some way reflecting them are the more important differences in how the festival has been perceived over time by the international film world. To understand those, it’s important to start from the premise that the hothouse filmocentric universe Telluride creates over a Labor Day weekend has always been closer to a religion than anything else, complete with passionate believers and agnostic scoffers.

The First Screenings--’Let’s Have a Party’

When Telluride began in 1973, Sundance did not exist, and neither did Toronto, currently the Bigfoot of North America’s fall film events. Then there were well under 100 festivals worldwide; now there are six times as many, including several in Colorado itself. “The difference is huge,” says Bill Pence. “The whole thing’s become an industry.”

None of this was so much as a dream in the early 1970s, when the Pences ran the classics-oriented distributor Janus Films and, living in nearby Ridgeway, programmed two old Colorado opera houses, the Sheridan in Telluride and the Wheeler in Aspen.

In 1972, the Pences and James Card, then curator of films at Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., brought a pair of silent pictures to the Sheridan. “The town was filled with refugees from the ‘60s,” Stella Pence remembers. “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.’ ”

With a tribute to controversial German director Leni Riefenstahl attracting media attention, Telluride--with Card and Tom Luddy, director of Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives, serving as co-directors with Bill Pence--was immediately successful. Luddy (now a producer whose credits include “Mishima,” “The Secret Garden” and “My Family”) remains as a permanent co-director with Pence, but after Card and his successor and fellow silent film expert William Everson left, a system of using serious film buffs and scholars as one-year guest directors was instituted.

Butch Cassidy Began to Make His Mark Here

Judged by its often lurid past, Telluride was not a likely place for something as peaceful as a festival to flourish. Named after an element often found combined with more precious ores, Telluride began as a mining town in the 1870s, and its mountains, which once yielded millions in gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, are still laced with enough miles of tunnels to reach from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Telluride was often a violent place, the site of an early bank robbery by the man who went on to call himself Butch Cassidy. And in the closing years of the 19th century, its mines were struck by the Western Federation of Miners, leading to what one source called “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, the bloody past was largely forgotten and, benefiting from a close-to-innocent atmosphere Stella Pence accurately recalls as “spontaneous, loose and easy,” the film festival became a success. (So much of one, in fact, that all kinds of other celebrations, including events devoted to hang-gliding, bluegrass, wine, mushrooms and chamber music, have made the town the de facto festival capital of the Rockies.)

Beginning with Riefenstahl, Gloria Swanson and Francis Ford Coppola that first year, Telluride initially attracted fans because of its one-of-a-kind tributes, homages that over time came to include almost every old and new cinema legend imaginable, from Hal Roach and Ben Carre to Jodie Foster, Clint Eastwood and Pedro Almodovar.

Idiosyncrasies and Breakthrough Films

Starting, Bill Pence says, in the festival’s eighth year, when “My Dinner With Andre” had its world premiere at Telluride, the festival also began to become known for showing important new work. Films like “El Norte,” “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Paris, Texas,” “Blue Velvet” and “Babette’s Feast” all benefited from having either their world or North American premieres at the festival. Some films, like Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me,” even came unsolicited, arriving on the last day of the selection process.

Because filmmakers heard tales of Telluride’s intimate ambience, they often came to experience it for themselves, leading to memorable personal moments like 90-year-old French director Abel Gance’s watching from his hotel window as his epic silent film “Napoleon” was projected on an outdoor screen.

Because it was so small and particular, Telluride also became known for its idiosyncrasies, like the long, long lines outside theaters, a necessity to ensure getting a seat at programs. Also, after a local newspaper made more of a fuss on the eve of an early festival about actress Jeanne Moreau’s canceling for health reasons than about who was actually coming, Telluride has been zealous (and largely successful) about trying to keep its selections a secret until the night before it begins.

Experiencing all this, critic Howie Movshowitz wrote in the Denver Post, is “like taking an unrest cure at some remote, half-crazy and incredibly effective sanitarium. You get no sleep, your eyes wind up sinking into your cheekbones, the films start to run together and you can hardly remember your name. But you’re healed.”

A Monster of Its Own Creation Is Born?

While the festival was universally admired and envied in its early years, this kind of fragrant praise gradually became sprinkled with naysayers. Though it continued to sell out without difficulty, Telluride was increasingly faulted for its exclusivity and claustrophobia, called precious and “almost snobbish.” There were mutterings, Times film critic Sheila Benson reported a decade ago, that it had become “smug, self-congratulatory, elitist.” Even as zealous a fan as Movshowitz noted that Telluride had “flirted with big star syndrome for a while.”

The Pences and Luddy, while noting that they can be viewed as difficult (“We’re not compromising, we don’t make deals, maybe we can be a little bit too curt and honest,” says Bill Pence), insist that from their point of view the festival’s ambience has never varied. And much of what happened could be attributed to the difficulties of an event’s gradually tripling in size as the town itself mushroomed as a ski center and was able to accommodate more people. The idea that Telluride would ever be a place where a boi^te called the Steaming Bean could sell more than 7,000 cups of coffee during the festival would have been inconceivable 25 years ago.

From a financial-logistical point of view, the Telluride festival has increasingly become what Bill Pence ruefully calls “a monster of its own creation.” Perennially difficult and expensive to get to, Telluride is now so pricey a town that people who work in service jobs often have to live elsewhere, and the hotels, none of which existed when the festival started, now charge festival-goers what Stella Pence characterizes as “the highest of high season rates.”

Festival prices, as noted, have also gone way up, a situation the Pences and Luddy agonize over, yet cannot help as long as the money from the sale of 1,300 tickets is needed to pay fully half of the event’s cost. It’s this desperate need for dollars to simply run the event that has led to corporate sponsorship (a Village Voice journalist noted being unnerved by the spectacle of a “Doc Martens’ Southwestern Chili Chow Down”) and the institution of high-end patron passes.

Though the existence of these passes, and the right they confer for admittance ahead of the crowd, have always blended awkwardly with Telluride’s egalitarianism, the Pences defend them as essential to keeping the festival solvent and ticket prices for other attendees close to reasonable. “Patrons drive people crazy by getting in early, but those people are essentially subsidizing everyone else’s ticket,” Stella Pence says.

Main Street Is What Holds It All Together

All of this talk about problems made me a bit wary when I returned to Telluride five years ago for the first time in a decade. What I found was a festival that had weathered its storm: It’s not that its problems had disappeared, but rather that they felt less important in the overall scheme of things.

With new festivals willing to show anything that moves erupting almost daily, and with established events like Toronto and Sundance getting bigger and increasingly attuned to the rhythms of the commercial marketplace, Telluride’s rigor, its sense of standards and its unquestioned love of film seem increasingly of value, even if they’re not to everyone’s taste.

Another trend in the film world that Telluride counteracts is the gradual disappearance of what Bill Pence calls “the great independent specialty houses, the art theaters. There is an audience, albeit small, for specialized films, that does not find a showcase.” From cities across the country, the vanguard of that audience makes its way to Telluride and is important for creating word of mouth for unheralded films. “We want people to go back home turned on about something they hadn’t known about before,” co-director Luddy says. “We wanted the festival to have a ripple effect.”

As for the event’s resilience, he says, “Partly it’s a question of timing; most festivals are too long--they become an ordeal.” And most festivals do without Telluride’s centerpiece, the old-fashioned Main Street that everyone gravitates to. “It’s a proximity I really like; there’s still a sense that everyone’s together in the same summer camp,” Bill Pence says. “You can’t build that artificially; it’s either there or it isn’t.” While that radioactive core remains in place, the Telluride Film Festival won’t likely stray too far from the days that made it famous.