TELLURIDE, COLO. — The closer you look at the movies playing in the annual Telluride Film Festival, the more you start to see a trend: Almost all share a long and difficult journey to this remote Colorado mountain town.
Last year's most prominent Telluride premiere, "Slumdog Millionaire," which went on to win the best picture Oscar, might be the perfect illustration of this phenomenon -- a movie that scrambled to find financing, was largely rewritten from English to Hindi at the last minute and saw its American distributor close shop just as production wrapped. The rags-to-riches twists at this year's festival, which wrapped up Monday, may not be as dramatic, but among the roughly two dozen features that premiered were any number of films whose path to the projection booth had been anything but easy -- with festival darling "The Last Station"{C9F197FB-642A-460C-A8FE-4F283BB6D1FD}&BusinessUnitID={6A60CB CD-9B62-41ED-806C-CCFA1CCC8D06} standing apart for the arduousness of its journey.
Adapted from Jay Parini's historical novel "The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year," director Michael Hoffman's movie has been in the works for almost two decades. When Parini's book about Tolstoy and his relationship with his wife, Sophia, was published in 1990, actor Anthony Quinn believed it not only was the perfect source material for a movie, but also that he should play Tolstoy. The "Zorba the Greek" actor enlisted a then up-and-coming producer, Bonnie Arnold, to shepherd the project, but for every step forward, there was an equal step back. There were any number of screenplay revisions and false starts, but even Quinn's death in 2001 couldn't shake Arnold's belief in the project. "I always thought it would be a good movie," she said. "So I really didn't give up, ever."
Arnold had plenty else on her plate. Having served as an associate producer on "Dances With Wolves," she had become a top maker of animated features, producing the first "Toy Story" and "Tarzan." But whenever she made a deal with Disney or DreamWorks (where she produced "Over the Hedge" and next year's "How to Train Your Dragon"), Arnold made sure she reserved the right to make "The Last Station."
At one point, Anthony Hopkins was going to play Tolstoy opposite Meryl Streep as Sophia. In another incarnation, Glenn Close was penciled in as the novelist's progressively more unhappy spouse. "I would contact interested people and there was going to be momentum, and then it lost momentum," Arnold said. "One person was interested, and then you don't have the money. Or you had the money, and the person wasn't available."
