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Telluride Diary part five: The show (part two)

By Cinema and 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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Telluride Diary part four: The show (part one)

By Cinema and 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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Telluride Diary part two: The journey (part one)

By Cinema and 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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