Nearly every year for the past half century, Hollywood mega-stars, studio moguls, and normal people who love films have spent their Labor Day weekends crowding inside a resurrected opera house in a former Colorado mining town for a celebration of cinema unlike any other on the festival circuit. Since its inception, in 1974, the Telluride Film Festival has grown into one of the industry’s most coveted and acclaimed, hosting premieres for My Dinner with Andre (1981), Mulholland Drive (2001), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Lady Bird (2017).
At the festival, forgotten auteurs have been resuscitated and, just as often, burgeoning filmmakers have been propelled into the Zeitgeist. Barry Jenkins first went in 2002 through a student program, returned in 2003 to scoop gunk from popcorn machines, and has volunteered nearly every year since—except in 2016, when he premiered Moonlight, which went on to win an Oscar for best picture.
The Telluride Film Festival is “a cinematic act of faith,” says filmmaker Ken Burns. “Bill, Stella, and Tom are responsible for that.”
Bill Pence literally put up the curtain at the first festival. He and his wife, Stella, lived in Colorado and ran a chain of art-house theaters that stretched across the Rockies. In 1972, when Telluride was a town of a few miners and hippies, they bought the derelict Sheridan Opera House. Retrofitted with a 35-mm.-projection booth, it was refurbished in the grandeur of Telluride’s gold-rush era. “The theater was our community center,” says resident Ken Wolverton. Two years later, with Tom Luddy, who ran the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and James Card, a film preservationist, the couple started the Telluride Film Festival.
Staffers called Stella “Mom.” She “lived in the trenches,” says Debbie Cutler, her longtime right hand. She considered every logistical detail that came with hosting a major film festival in a remote mountain town devoid of nearly all the necessary infrastructure.
Luddy, a producer on films by Francis Ford Coppola and Jean-Luc Godard, was known for his “golden Rolodex.” “He knew every writer, every playwright, every director, in every country,” says Burns. “And he treated them all with equality.”
While Card stepped away from the festival after a few years, Luddy and the Pences led “the Show,” as they called it, for more than three decades. Away from the glitz and glamour of Cannes and Venice, Telluride was special for what it was not. No red carpets, no best-in-show or audience-choice awards, and absolutely no paparazzi.
Barry Jenkins first went to the Telluride Film Festival in 2002 through a student program, returned in 2003 to scoop gunk from popcorn machines, and has volunteered nearly every year since.
It was a celebration of film—not for the industry but for the people who love movies. Bigwig producers and common pass holders stood on the same lines and traveled between theaters via the same public transport. “If George Clooney takes the gondola, you take the gondola,” says Bärbel Hacke, the festival’s original celebrity wrangler.
In the early years, without extensive financing or resources, the co-founders kept the festival afloat with loans and their personal businesses. They eschewed sponsorship deals because they didn’t want the festival to lose its meaning. Luddy secured filmmakers and films, Bill and the guest programmers sourced archival movie prints, and Stella convinced studios to pay their own way to Telluride.
Triptych screenings with synchronized projectors, 3-D projections, and outdoor surround-sound systems were constructed with whatever equipment could be summoned to a town a six-hour drive away from Denver and 8,000 feet high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Climbers jerry-rigged screens sewn by an awning company, while art-house projectionists cleaned chicken poop off projectors borrowed from farms in New Mexico.
The hippie-ish group who returned each year to put on the show did so for the films and the family that developed around the festival. The shoestring budget, long hours, and the absence of a salary was worth it for the increasingly ambitious programming and technically innovative presentations. No other festivals were able to keep their slates secret until the festivities began. “You go because you know the chefs are good,” says Burns.
Instead of programming Hollywood blockbusters, the Pences and Luddy picked films meant to inspire and provoke, such as archival prints from the 19th century with organist accompaniments and resurrected silent epics that hadn’t screened in decades. “It’s a wonderful feeling of being embedded,” says filmmaker Werner Herzog, who first attended the festival in 1975 and, in 2013, had one of the festival’s theaters named after him. “Embedded not only in what is happening right now but in film history—in the culture of cinema itself.”
By the time the Pences retired, in 2006, after 33 festivals, the staff numbered around 500, and the festival had spread across seven venues—among them a converted Masonic Lodge, a high-school gymnasium, an ice rink, and a conference center on a 9,545-foot-tall mountain. Bill traveled between each of these theaters, tasting the popcorn from every machine.
On its 50th anniversary, the festival has never been hotter. Today, it’s under the sole directorship of Julie Huntsinger, who met Luddy in the early 1990s while working as an assistant at Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. With her leadership, 11 of the last 17 films to win best picture at the Academy Awards have premiered at Telluride.
The festival still doesn’t feel corporate—even though it now has a luxury-car sponsor. But to those who have attended since the beginning, it does feel different. Bill died in December 2022, and, 69 days later, Luddy died. The Show is still infused with their enthusiasm for the obscure corners of film history, and for their insatiable desire to throw a party better than the previous year’s. While the founders won’t be present, their spirit lives on.
The Telluride Film Festival begins on August 30
William Zimmerman is a New York–based writer
