September, 2007
A ROCKY MOUNTAIN OASIS FOR MOVIE LOVERS
 |
Every year I post an effusive summary of the Telluride Film Festival, which takes place over Labor Day Weekend, and this will be no exception. Gary Meyer and Julie Huntsinger ably stepped into the shoes of co-founders Bill and Stella Pence to join Tom Luddy in running this four-day event. The festival takes place in one of the most beautiful settings imaginable—and it’s the only movie-related event I attend where sunscreen is a necessity.
What’s more, Telluride gives equal weight to cutting-edge world cinema and retrospectives. It’s all about discovering great movies, and I don’t know of another program that covers so wide a range of films, from this fall’s most provocative new releases to classic silent pictures.
There’s just one problem: it’s impossible to see everything, even if you have an iron constitution and no need for sleep. As a result, I usually find myself skipping some of the most intriguing and talked-about new movies (Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There), which I’ll eventually see at home, in favor of one-of-a-kind events.
 |
On opening night, for instance, Telluride honored Daniel Day-Lewis with an hour of excerpts from his extraordinary career, followed by an on-stage interview with film scholar and author Annette Insdorf. Annette had her work cut out for her, as Day-Lewis (like so many great artists) can’t explain how he does what he does. That doesn’t mean he’s inarticulate, however. He was particularly eloquent in talking about two of his favorite actors—Charles Laughton and Robert De Niro.
I faced a similar challenge the following night when I interviewed film composer Michel Legrand on stage. He, too, finds it almost impossible to talk about his inspiration or his process, which is why we decided to have him sit at a grand piano. Sure enough, he played some of his famous themes and even, after a bit of nudging, agreed to improvise a musical piece on the spot. (After all, he’s just as fine a jazz pianist as he is a composer.) His most definitive statement came when I asked him about contemporary film scores created by someone who plays a one-fingered theme on a synthesizer. A child prodigy who trained at a prestigious music conservatory, Legrand works with pencil and manuscript paper, because he doesn’t want to limit his imagination to what he can produce with two hands on a keyboard. He also insists on doing his own orchestrations, which he sees as a natural extension of the composing process. As a result, he says of the modern marvel who works with a computer program, “Composer, my ass!”
Our conversation was followed by a screening of the rarely-seen 1989 film he wrote and directed, Five Days in June. An autobiographical story set in 1944, it focuses on a teenage piano prodigy (named Michel Legrand) who flees from Paris by bicycle to return to his home town, along with his intrepid mother (Annie Girardot) and a sexy, flirtatious young woman they chance to meet (Sabine Azéma). Why this charming and evocative wartime story never received a proper theatrical release in the U.S. is a mystery to me.
________________
 |
Actor-director-producer Norman Lloyd, who regaled Telluride audiences with anecdotes from his long career several years ago, returned this year (at the age of 92) along with an excellent documentary by Matthew Sussman called Who is Norman Lloyd? The filmmaker told me he doesn’t yet have distribution for this film, a situation I hope is remedied in short order. Norman ’s career on-camera ranges from playing the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur in 1942 to an eight-year run on television’s St. Elsewhere to a juicy supporting role in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes with Cameron Diaz. On stage and behind the camera, Norman worked with Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, and Hitchcock again, as associate producer of his long-running TV series. Following the screening, Norman offered still more anecdotes from his bottomless reserve in a lively conversation with Variety’s chief critic Todd McCarthy and Telluride regular Pierre Rissient.
Todd also screened his feature-length documentary, Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a loving tribute to this behind-the-scenes figure who (as gadfly, publicist, consultant and occasional producer) has championed countless films and fledgling filmmakers over the years, and helped to launch careers. Interviewees include Clint Eastwood, John Boorman, Claude Chabrol, Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, and Pierre ’s onetime p.r. partner and longtime friend Bertrand Tavernier.
One of the weekend’s highlights was a screening of a restored 35mm print of the 1929 German film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sontag), renowned because of the young people who collaborated on it: screenwriters Billy Wilder and Curt and Robert Siodmak, directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, and cinematographer Eugen Schufftan (whose assistant was an uncredited Fred Zinnemann). This incredibly modern film uses amateur actors to integrate a slight storyline about a double-date on a Sunday afternoon with actuality footage of people on the streets of Berlin . The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra provided ideal accompaniment, playing musical director Rodney Sauer’s compilation of popular songs and themes from the period. But the most exciting part about watching this film, on the huge screen at the 500-seat Galaxy theater, was realizing that the audience was completely engaged. This was no museum piece: it was a still-vital piece of filmmaking that enveloped and invigorated a modern-day audience. I found it thrilling. (Incidentally, if you’ve never heard the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, I encourage you to visit their web site and learn about their recordings, DVDs, and upcoming appearances. Go to www.mont-alto.com).
______________
I did get to see a handful of new films, though not as many as I would have liked. Even though I look forward to Into the Wild and other hot fall movies, it’s always more fun to see them at Telluride, where there is a shared sense of discovery and excitement, and the ability to hear the filmmakers discuss their work.
 |
The films I did manage to see include Persepolis , an exceptional animated feature by comic-book artist Marjane Satrapi, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Vincent Parranoud. This is a remarkably personal, diary-like narrative about Satrapi’s upbringing in Iran and the way her life was shaped by the enormous changes that occurred while she was growing up. Her fervor in telling this story is matched only by her disarming sense of humor. Marjane later told me that as a complete newcomer to the medium of film, she had no idea of what could or couldn’t be done. The resulting picture is not only emotionally involving but beautifully designed and animated.
I also liked Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Having gravitated to the world of mainstream Hollywood in recent years, Wang was happy to return to his indie roots for this absorbing, small-scale story by acclaimed writer Yiyun Lee about a Chinese-American woman whose father comes to visit her. Besides a generation gap, there is a barrier between them because he has never been able to talk to her. The film is all about communication and language, and is expressive in its simplicity.
An Israeli feature called The Band’s Visit was one of the festival’s great pleasures. A wistful, low-key comedy about an Egyptian police band’s misbegotten trip to Israel , its deadpan tone reminded me of Milos Forman’s wonderful picture The Firemen’s Ball. When I asked director Eran Kolinin if he’d ever seen that film, he broke into a big smile and said that he admired it and all the Czech New Wave films. He also considered it a high compliment that I compared his film to Forman’s, which was my intention.
 |
I also liked Alison Eastwood’s debut feature Rails & Ties, best described as a “weepie,” with Kevin Bacon as a railroad engineer and Marcia Gay Harden as his wife, who’s dying of cancer. At first I resisted the story and its contrivances, but ultimately I surrendered to the honesty of its emotions and its fine performances. Toward the end you could hear the entire audience sniffling in unison!
On Sunday afternoon I had the privilege of presenting my own program called Rediscovering Vitaphone. This October marks the 80 th anniversary of The Jazz Singer, and in honor of that, Telluride’s co-director Gary Meyer asked me to put together a show of recently-restored 35mm Vitaphone shorts. I consulted with Ron Hutchinson of The Vitaphone Project, who not only listed his favorites from the dozens he and his cohorts have brought back to life (finding long-missing discs and funding restorations at the UCLA Film and Television Archives), but told me which ones had played especially well at New York’s Film Forum and the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library. I compared these to my notes from showings at UCLA to compile what I hoped was a varied and foolproof program.
Jeff Joseph of Sabucat Productions offered to have a new print struck from the original camera negative of Warner Bros. Silver Jubilee, a delightfully odd 1930 short that features introductions (by “Little Miss Vitaphone”) of everyone–from Loretta Young and Joe E. Brown to such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The folks at Triage Motion Picture Services came through on this last-minute request and enabled us to show a more complete version of the short than any of us have ever seen on video.
I was a bit nervous as to how the Telluride audience would respond to the joys of vaudeville, so vividly captured in the Vitaphone one-reelers...but as soon as they cheered for the Foy Family I knew all was well. Other headliners included Burns and Allen, Mayer and Evans, Georgie Price, Shaw and Lee, Harry Wayman’s Debutantes ( once seen, never forgotten) and of course Al Jolson. Many people asked how they could see these shorts again (including some who couldn’t get to the show) and I was happy to inform them that twenty of these gems will appear on the upcoming Warner Home Video DVD release of The Jazz Singer in October.
At the beginning of this program I was honored, and flattered, and humbled by being presented the Telluride Silver Medallion. This is a kind of lifetime achievement award and I’m not sure how I qualify to join the people who have received this prize...but I wasn’t going to turn it down! Having it presented to me by Bertrand Tavernier, whom I admire as a filmmaker and film lover, was icing on the cake.
I don’t think next year’s 35th Edition of the Telluride Film Festival can offer me anything so exciting on a personal level, but I’m looking forward to it just the same.
