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CinemaTravel

Telluride Diary part three: The journey (part two)

By August 31, 2012No Comments

As I write the Telluride Film Festival pro­gramme has been released so I had bet­ter fin­ish my notes about the jour­ney before I get left behind.

When we left our hero he was sit­ting in a Motel6 in Denver about to depart for the sev­en and a half hour drive to Telluride. But first, errands to be run.

I always planned to get a US sim card for my phone so I could con­tin­ue tweet­ing etc from the road (and also use the phone for nav­ig­a­tion) and got con­flict­ing advice from vari­ous people and web­sites about the belt­way to do it. There’s an entire post to be writ­ten on how I even­tu­ally (sort of) man­aged it, suf­fice to say for now it took vis­its to four dif­fer­ent retail­ers and much driv­ing to finally sort it out. And it does­n’t work in the Telluride town so there’s a con­stant search for wifi while I’m here.

My plan was to vis­it the AT&T store at the Denver Town Center (actu­ally an enorm­ous col­lec­tion malls and super­stores cov­er­ing sev­er­al blocks) and then vis­it the site of the recent Aurora movie theatre shoot­ing so I could pay my respects. It turns out it was only a short-ish walk around the Sears store to find the Century 16 pic­ture theatre, still sur­roun­ded by a tem­por­ary fence and very much off-limits.

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Across the street was this make­shift shrine, full of memen­tos, keep­sakes and hand­made signs.

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I was­n’t expect­ing to be quite as moved as I was by this and stuck around for longer than I had planned, think­ing of how a night at the pic­tures could be dis­turbed by some­thing so much worse than annoy­ing talk­ers and texters.

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After, finally secur­ing a T‑Mobile pre­pay SIM card I found U.S. 285 – which I had been told was the scen­ic route to Telluride – get­ting used to which lane I needed to be in, the ever-changing speed lim­its, and try­ing to keep an eye on the scenery, passing places called Fairplay and Bailey. On the out­skirts of Denver I could see the dir­ec­tion of the sprawl to come. They’ve built the high­way and – sens­ibly – built the shop­ping first, encour­aging developers to fill in the gaps with res­id­en­tial development.

The road soon turned into a rur­al two-laner of the kind that would be famil­i­ar to any­one who has drive a NZ state high­way: farm­houses up long drives from either side of the road, with rusty machinery sit­ting in lean-to sheds. Every so often, though, you’d crest a hill to be con­fron­ted by wide open coun­try with moun­tains in the dis­tance. This seemed to hap­pen over and over again.

I got to Gunnison, CO, at about 5.30pm, just enough time to check-in to the ABC Motel, grab a bite to eat at the Blue Iguana (in the pro­cess dis­cov­er that American beer has no oblig­a­tion to state the alco­hol con­tent which is a chal­lenge to a 2.5% max per­son like myself), and walk through the University of Western Colorado to find the Ruby Cinema.

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Gunnison is an out­door recre­ation centre, rur­al hub and – increas­ingly – a stu­dent town. Huge amounts of money is being spent on the UWC and all the build­ings look no more than a year old. And des­pite the drought, I had to dodge a few sprink­lers as I made my way to the Ruby.

The Ruby is actu­ally a state of the art per­form­ing arts ven­ue for the uni­ver­sity, donated by alum­nus Don and oper­ated by loc­als Mark and Ali Drucker. It’s a live theatre, so the rake is not ideal for cinema but the tech­nic­al fit out is superb and The Expendables looked splen­did. Sadly, for a Monday night there were only about sev­en of us there (plus to sleepy stu­dent box office and con­ces­sion staff) but much fun was had by all.

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Next morn­ing, I hung around Gunnison for break­fast (very fine cof­fee and free wifi at The Bean) and then hit the road again for the two (more like three, thanks Google) hour drive to Mountain Village above Telluride.

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The final 45 minutes from Ridgeway to Telluride are quite spec­tac­u­lar (and would be chal­len­ging driv­ing if many NZ roads wer­en’t just as windy). After set­tling in with my hosts, sort­ing out the wifi (again), get­ting some tips about the free pub­lic trans­port (shuttle buses and mul­tiple gon­dolas), I headed down to the town in time for a spec­tac­u­lar sun­set and din­ner – where I met San Francisco International Film Festival board mem­ber Barbara Tomber and her hus­band Don. What a great start – a chance to talk fest­ivals and get some tips. They were also (as San Franciscans) very inter­ested in Christchurch and were dis­mayed to hear my report.

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Then I made it back up the hill in time to con­nect to the Cinematica stu­dio in Petone so we could record the show you can hear in the post below. Like I said in a tweet, whatever you may think of the con­tent, being able to record a decent qual­ity pod­cast with co-hosts in com­pletely dif­fer­ent time zones seems like a not-bad achieve­ment to me.

Last night the fest­iv­al pre-show got under way with the first out­door screen­ing in the park: Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, and we were teased that the choice of title was a clue to one of the guest honorees. It’s too early for Skyfall, so the smart money was on Mads Mikkelsen and so it proved.

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He’s one of three spe­cial guest honorees and the fest­iv­al is screen­ing Vinterberg’s The Hunt and A Royal Affair (both of which I’ve already seen).

I’ll pre­view the rest of the fest­iv­al tonight when I’ve had a chance to absorb the 96 page pro­gramme and work out what I can­’t afford to miss. There’s a whole after­noon and even­ing of TBA on Monday at all eight venues!