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Telluride Diary

Sep 09 2012
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Telluride Diary part seven: The show (part four)

By Cinema, Travel

It’s now Saturday morn­ing in NYC and Telluride already seems like old news. Venice has just announced its prizewin­ners (The Master obv. – or not so obv.) and Toronto is in full flow. Still, I have one more day of my Telluride Film Festival exper­i­ence to record and I’d bet­ter get it down before I forget.

The Monday of Telluride is a catch-up day. Most of the celebrit­ies and hon­our­ees have depar­ted and a lot of the pro­gramme is announced the night before, extra screen­ings of pop­u­lar titles (or at least the films that most people were turned away from. This is an excel­lent plan and I was able to fill in quite a few of my gaps (though not all).

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Telluride Volunteer Fire Station.

The first screen­ing was the Q&A ses­sion for Sarah Polley’s new doc­u­ment­ary Stories We Tell, a film that had gen­er­ated quite a bit of buzz over the week­end. Polley – with gor­geous six-month-old daugh­ter in har­ness – briefly intro­duced a film that at first intrigues, then sur­prises and finally delights. She has done a mar­vel­lous job of mak­ing what might have been an indul­gent piece about her own per­son­al dra­mas into some­thing uni­ver­sal. I sin­cerely hope this gets a decent New Zealand release so I can review it at more length but I’m also going to hold back the details of the story so read­ers without access to Google might come to it as unsul­lied by spoil­ers as possible.

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Sep 06 2012
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Telluride Diary part six: The show (part three)

By Cinema, Travel

Firstly, I should add a vital – totally Telluride – detail to yes­ter­day’s post. By choos­ing to watch Rust & Bone and the Marion Cotillard Tribute I missed the first indoor screen­ing of Hyde Park on Hudson and there­fore a rare live appear­ance by Bill Murray at the Q&A. Regret is an emo­tion reserved for those who only look back­wards but – damn!

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Legend Leonard Maltin wait­ing to gain entry to At Any Cost.

Back to the show. Sunday was always likely to be a very full day and – with my new found con­fid­ence in the “sys­tem” I was determ­ined to take full advant­age. I once begged the New Zealand Film Festival to let me watch a screen­er of Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart, even though they had chosen not to pro­gramme it because I loved the idea so much and because Roger Ebert has been cham­pi­on­ing the tal­en­ted young dir­ect­or for years. In fact, they have only screened one of his three films to date: Goodbye Solo in 2009.

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Sep 05 2012
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Telluride Diary part five: The show (part two)

By Cinema, Travel

Saturday dawned early and I was grate­ful that the first screen­ing of the morn­ing was at the Chuck Jones’ in Mountain Village, barely a fif­teen minute shuttle from my accom­mod­a­tion. Time to grab a cof­fee and then wait in line for an 8.30am repeat of the Roger Corman Tribute from the night before. This time the host and inter­rog­at­or would be Leonard Maltin (famil­i­ar to all New Zealanders of a cer­tain age, I think) instead of Todd McCarthy.

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A fairly rep­res­ent­at­ive pic­ture of Mountain Village architecture.

Before Mr Corman was invited on stage, we got to see an excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary on his life and work, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. After that, Corman entered the stage to a stand­ing ova­tion and we were treated to insights and stor­ies from an exceed­ingly well-educated and thought­ful entre­pren­eur and artist for almost an hour. The sur­prise for me was hear­ing about Corman’s lib­er­al polit­ics and how he might have steered his film­mak­ing in that dir­ec­tion if it had­n’t been for the com­mer­cial fail­ure of The Intruder (1962, star­ring William Shatner as a white supremacist).

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Sep 02 2012
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Telluride Diary part four: The show (part one)

By Cinema, Travel

After two days of “phony war” with even­ing teas­er screen­ings in the Ralph Lauren-funded Elks Park Abel Gance Cinema, Telluride got under way form­ally yes­ter­day with a full slate of screen­ings at all nine venues.

The “unof­fi­cial” pro­gramme – a 90 page news­print guide fea­tur­ing a mostly-there draft of the sched­ule – was made avail­able on Thursday and a press release had announced the names of the three hon­our­ees and the main fea­tures, but there were still a large num­ber of slots marked “TBA” includ­ing almost all of Monday. Even then, we were told not to put too much faith in the unof­fi­cial guide and to wait for the glossy DLE pro­gramme which would be avail­able at Noon on Friday – the first day of the festival!

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Aug 31 2012
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Telluride Diary part three: The journey (part two)

By Cinema, Travel

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.

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Aug 30 2012
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Telluride Diary part two: The journey (part one)

By Cinema, Travel

I should warn you now, this may be bor­ing but if I don’t get this down now I’ll prob­ably lose it forever.

One of Telluride’s charms is its rel­at­ive isol­a­tion. You have to really want to come here. When I first saw pic­tures of the place I thought it was roughly the size of Picton but population-wise it’s actu­ally smal­ler. And yet, one week­end every year it fills up with film buffs, industry types, pub­li­cists and movie stars. The town has one full-time cinema but man­ages to scrape up eight screen­ing ven­ues that start as early as 8am over four extremely busy days every Labor Weekend.

I left Wellington aeons ago (actu­ally 2pm last Sunday) with your common-or-garden flight to Auckland. Then – after writ­ing my CT column in the food court – the twelve hour flight to Los Angeles.

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