The Old Ridgway Bijou

The Film Festival is coming to town! The Film Festival is coming to town!

Actually, the festival’s worker bees have been in Telluride for weeks now, setting up for the 40th “SHOW.”

Ellen and I had just moved to Telluride in August 1976 when the third TFF raised its curtain, with tributes to Bugs Bunny creator Chuck Jones, the original King Kong, and director King Vidor. That year we met Bill and Stella Pence, festival founders along with James Card and Tom Luddy. The Pences will be in town this week to help celebrate the 40th.

All of this sends me back to a time when our two families, ours and the Pence’s, got together at a place we fondly referred to as the Ridgway Bijou.

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The Fight on Everest

I wish I could have been there for the Everest 50th anniversary show at Mountainfilm, with Jim Whittaker, Tom Hornbein and Conrad Anker.

In the Beginning

I was there at the beginning.

But I think I can be forgiven my fuzzy memories of the earliest Mountainfilm festivals.

Born to Run

I don’t run the Imogene; I’ve never run the 18 miles up and over from Ouray to Telluride. I don’t run much at all anymore, unless it’s to sprint after a grandchild who is crawling toward the stairs.

But I do remember the feeling, from years past, when limbs and lungs were working just right, and the trail led away into Siren-call hills and it felt as if I could run forever.

Ten Years After

With the “royal wedding” of politics and fashion in Ridgway this past weekend, I kept having this fantasy: What if I were stuck on the gondola with uncle-of-the-bride, George W. Bush? What would I say to the 43^rd president?

Netflix Would be Nothing Without the TFF

Netflix, the world’s film library, would hardly have worked for me if not for the Telluride Film Festival, which is coming up next week for its 38^th go-round.

Without the wisdom of the TFF, I would be stuck in first-run Hollywood hell, with a thin veneer of foreign-film awareness; my Netflix queue would be limited to Oscar favorites and the suggestions of movie reviewers – a dubious crowd.

Mountainfilm: Coming Into Its Own

It’d be wrong to say Mountainfilm has finally grown up. It is 33 years old, after all. My 34 year-old daughter has comported herself as a grownup for at least the last 15 years.

Perhaps better to say Mountainfilm has come into its own.

This is not to say the behavior last weekend was always strictly adult. Eating ice cream with your fingers, for example.

Fear of Falling

Years ago, I had a great volunteer job over the Mountainfilm weekend: I would get up before the sun and lead anyone who wanted to go on a ski tour from Ophir to Telluride via East Bear Creek. The festival was smaller then. Just one theater – the Sheridan Opera House. And films were programed only in the evenings, so festivalgoers could get out and climb or ski during the day.

One crunchy, blue-snow morning in 1988, I found myself hiking with a solo festival guest, a powerfully built but shy seeming, somehow reticent young man named John Harlin III.

It Happened in Sun Valley

The last time I was in Sun Valley, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was not yet the governator, broke his femur on the ski hill. The people I was with speculated about it: how big was the fall to have snapped a bone inside all that muscle?

Great Movies You’ll Never See: Alamar

Jorge and Roberta met and fell in love in his native Mexico. They were both young. She was Italian. We don’t know why she was in Mexico – maybe as a student, maybe to work in the Caribbean beach towns of the Yucatan. His Indian blood showed in his mahogany skin and salt-bleached wavy dark hair swirling around his face and bare shoulders.

They had a son, Nathan, a dark-eyed angel.