Telluride Film Festival

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films. But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do. Fincher, the director of "Fight Club," "The Game" and "Se7en," appeared at the 35th annual film festival to receive an opening-night career tribute award. In addition to his 167-minute director's cut of last year's "Zodiac," the filmmaker brought with him about 20 minutes of footage from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the decades-in-development reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about the reverse aging of a boy born as an old man. The brief glimpses of Fincher's Christmas Day release established a couple of critical facts about "Benjamin Button."

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Two years ago, a prominent Oscar voter left the Telluride Film Festival's world premiere screening of "The King's Speech" and said with certainty that the film would be shortlisted for best picture. At the festival this past weekend, that same voter issued a new prediction: Ben Affleck's "Argo" will be among the finalists for the top Academy Award. The Telluride festival, which concluded its 39th annual installment on Monday, prides itself on eccentric programming (among the offerings was the nearly three-hour Russian film "Stalker" from 1979)

High atop a mountain overlooking the small town that was the site of the 18th annual Telluride Film Festival this week, director Martha Coolidge had every reason to feel on top professionally as well as altitudinally. Here, at the festival's mountaintop Labor Day picnic, Coolidge was the most sought-after of the filmmakers who had ascended the long ski lift for lunch and an outdoor seminar.

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Wearing high-top tennis shoes and headphones, 11-year-old Wadjda doesn't look like much of a revolutionary. But in filmmaker Haifaa Mansour's new Saudi Arabian movie, the young girl is just that - as is Mansour herself. Having its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, "Wadjda" has become one of the event's most talked-about movies, as much as for what's on screen as for how the story was brought to the screen. The first Saudi feature directed by a woman, "Wadjda" was made entirely inside the repressive country.

There are hardly more striking film festival settings than this former mining town: an 8,750-foot-elevation box canyon flanked on the sides by sheer red-rock cliffs and capped at its end by a misty waterfall. So it seems only fitting that land itself — and in particular its custodianship — played such a prominent part in the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival. Though the works in the 38th annual movie gathering covered an assortment of topics and themes, some of the Labor Day weekend festival's most memorable new films cast the land in a starring role, using terra firma as a narrative linchpin.

James Card, 84, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival and the film preservationist who created a motion picture archive at the George Eastman House museum. The Colorado film festival began in 1974 after the visiting Card, by then a highly respected film archivist, suggested that Telluride's newly renovated Sheridan Opera House would make an ideal site for such an event. His hosts, Bill and Stella Pence, and archivist Tom Luddy joined Card in hosting that first festival.

The entertainment industry might be in a tizzy over whether to join Barbra Streisand and gay-rights advocates in their boycott of Aspen, Colo., this holiday, but what Hollywood celebrities think about the issue holds little weight with residents a few hours away in Telluride. Locals there are more concerned with how their town is being discriminated against.

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."

Stringing along: The cash-strapped Pittsburgh Symphony, currently in negotiations for a new contract, is pressing to trim musicians' pay as well as cut back on benefits. Anyone can direct: Stephen Sondheim has been named guest director of the 30th Telluride Film Festival. Swan song: Luciano Pavarotti plans a global goodbye tour, starting in 2004 at the Met, before hanging up his hankie, as already promised, after his 70th birthday in October 2005.

This year's AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival will include a 24-hour movie marathon and a one-man show by writer-director Peter Bogdanovich. The festival, scheduled to run Nov. 1 to 12, will be headquartered at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. But the marathon will be held at AFI's Mark Goodson Theatre and is planned as a fundraising event for the Global Fund, which helps combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries.

The closing credits on Ben Affleck's period thriller "Argo" hadn't even rolled at Friday evening's Telluride Film Festival screening before audience members were signaling their thunderous approval. "Applause in the middle of the movie. Hearing nothing but 'wow' and 'outstanding' outside the theater. A big hit," tweets Hitfix's awards columnist Kris Tapley. The rapturous reception afforded "Argo" isn't exactly a shocker. With its insider-Hollywood plotline, the movie is almost genetically engineered to please those in the industry and festival crowds.

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Keller Doss, a retired oil industry lawyer, is a Telluride Film Festival stalwart. The Texas movie buff first came on a lark two decades ago, camping in a park in this mountain resort town. He's been 19 out of the last 20 years and attends the screenings with a couple he befriended on his very first stay. Because organizers don't announce the lineup until the eve of the festival, Doss has to buy his tickets on faith. But he doesn't mind. "I just trust these guys to put on films that I'm going to like," said Doss, 61, who lives in the small West Texas town of Marfa, which he said "is about 400 miles away" from the nearest art house cinema, in Austin.

Movie fans trekking to Telluride, Colo., for the resort town's annual film festival this weekend are set to see some of the fall's most anticipated performances, including Bill Murray as FDR in “Hyde Park on Hudson,” Michael Shannon as family man and freelance assassin in “The Iceman,” and Ben Affleck as a CIA agent in “Argo.” Other high-profile titles screening at the festival, which opens Friday, include “Ginger and Rosa,” filmmaker...

There are hardly more striking film festival settings than this former mining town: an 8,750-foot-elevation box canyon flanked on the sides by sheer red-rock cliffs and capped at its end by a misty waterfall. So it seems only fitting that land itself — and in particular its custodianship — played such a prominent part in the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival. Though the works in the 38th annual movie gathering covered an assortment of topics and themes, some of the Labor Day weekend festival's most memorable new films cast the land in a starring role, using terra firma as a narrative linchpin.

— Truth can certainly be stranger than fiction. If you look toward the Telluride Film Festival, it might also be stronger. While the rest of Hollywood turns to far-fetched fantasies of flying superheroes, impossible romances and talking toys, the filmmakers behind the standout movies at the Colorado festival are finding that some of the year's most powerful stories can be found in real-life events. While that's obviously the case with Telluride's esteemed documentaries, three of the most enthusiastically received dramatic features at the just-concluded festival — the world premieres "The King's Speech," "127 Hours" and "The First Grader" — are based on the extraordinary accomplishments of actual people.

Opening Friday and running through Labor Day, the Telluride Film Festival is best known for its eclectic (some would say erratic) programming philosophy, which not only keeps its film schedule secret until hours before the first screenings but also will pick some movies that require such audience fortitude (such as this year's 11-language, 5 1/2–hour "Carlos") that, no matter how critically acclaimed, inevitably will not travel far past a festival setting. But when Telluride's programmers select a certain kind of director-driven movie for a world premiere — not that the festival would ever use the p-word to describe a first screening — the audience reaction can be a particularly accurate predictor of how the film will be received in the rest of the country's art houses.

French director Louis Malle received a standing ovation Sunday night at the American premiere of his latest film at the Telluride Film Festival. "Au Revoir Les Enfants" is an account from Malle's childhood of a group of Jewish children hidden in a Catholic school during World War II. "Of all the pictures I've made, this one is completely from the heart," a tearful Malle told the audience. "This was the traumatic event of my childhood. It has stayed with me all these years.

Allow me to correct the statement that I'd already brought to Telluride all of the guests I was really interested in and that "the rest aren't worth bringing" ("Telluride Festival Finds Time for Renewal," by Sheila Benson, Sept. 13). The point I was making with Benson was that my function with the festival has always been primarily to cover the silent period and the early '30s. Most of the giants, known and unknown, from those periods have been to the festival, and apart from the eternal Lillian Gish and Luis Trenker, most of them alas have since passed on. A blanket statement that guests who haven't already been there "aren't worth bringing" (taken out of context)

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.

It can take nearly a full day to get there. You have no idea what films you might see until you finally arrive. And if you're foolish enough to order a big glass of wine instead of water the first night in town, your head might explode from altitude sickness. For all its idiosyncrasies and potential risks, the Telluride Film Festival has become oddly adept at being the first to identify some of fall's most talked-about movies. Opening Friday and running through Labor Day, this year's 36th annual festival -- which arrives just ahead of the much-bigger Toronto International Film Festival -- could help spark awards interest in several ambitious literary dramas, including the long-delayed and much-anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and Jason Reitman's directing of George Clooney in a reworking of the existential Walter Kirn novel "Up in the Air."