Almost 50 years ago, Tom Luddy co-founded the Telluride film festival, a small and enormously influential long weekend that takes place every year over the Labor Day weekend high in the Colorado mountains.
Telluride is not like other film festivals. It is intimate and inclusive and democratic. Everyone mixes with everyone else – anathema to the likes of Cannes or Venice.
It has high and singular standards. If its curators – Tom and executive director Julie Huntsinger, who joined in 2007 – like a film, they invite it. If not: no chance. They are resistant to industry pressure and studio buttering. The festival may have earned a reputation as a key Oscars launchpad, but at Telluride there is no market or haggling. They just show the movies.
And while other festivals can pay splashy lip service to the politics of the day, the structure of the Telluride programme – lots of talks, lots of archive, lots of proper documentaries – testifies to a genuine curiosity about the world, as well as an encouragement of the kind of debate often deemed unpalatable elsewhere.
Most of all, it is great fun: a magical, high-altitude house party, where the air is thin enough and the films fine enough to make your nose bleed.
Luddy died last week, at the age of 79, after a few years of ill health. His career had stretched beyond Telluride. As a young man, he distributed films by Pasolini and ran the Pacific Film Archive. He produced movies by Coppola and Godard, Schroeder and Schrader, Holland and Herzog, and even acted in a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Yet he was beloved, and influential, because he had such a rare and human relationship with film and its makers. “He invented networking before there was networking,” writes Errol Morris; he had “an almost magical and certainly uncanny gift for connecting people at a soul level,” says Mark Kidel. What made this weird was that he was so unassuming: much more Paul Giamatti than Cilla Black.
We asked colleagues and friends to identify why Luddy – a man whose name was almost unknown outside the industry – was such a pivotal figure.
‘He was the beating heart of 70s and 80s film culture’
Paul Schrader
Tom Luddy was the right man at the right time. By 1970 European cinema had crashed into American film consciousness and film directors were coming out of film schools. From his double perch as executive at Coppola’s Zoetrope and founder of the Telluride film festival, Tom was an inspirational force in international and independent film culture. Generous to a fault, Tom knew everybody and everybody knew Tom. Wherever you went in the film world, Tom’s name opened doors to interesting films and film-makers. He not only programmed films, facilitated movie discoveries and revivals, he also helped films get made. In retrospect my 1984 film, Mishima, is the definition of an un-financeable project – yet Tom got it made. You wish to find the beating heart of 70s and 80s film culture you will find in the person of Tom Luddy.
‘He said: “Go on, tell them how smug they’ve become”’
Adam Curtis
Tom played an incredibly important role in the history of modern cinema. Back in the 1970s, Tom was part of a counterculture generation who saw something new in the arthouse films being made in Europe. To him they were radical in a completely new way. They could change the world. Culture could be political.
Tom believed that very deeply – and he brought directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog over to the west coast and showed their films to a new generation like Francis Ford Coppola. Out of that came American independent cinema which flourished in the 1990s. But Tom was different from many of his counterculture generation. He was very aware of what happened to those radical ideas once they were injected into Hollywood.
I got to know Tom at the end of the 1990s. I remember sitting with him at a dinner he gave in London. He suddenly said: “You know they got lost in the labyrinth?” I didn’t know what he meant and I asked him to explain. He said bluntly that many of the films weren’t really radical any longer. They looked like that, but really many of that generation had changed as they met the big money of Hollywood and the big power of America. And one of the aims of the Telluride festival, he said, was to invite writers and factual film-makers who dealt with questions of power to mix with the new elite of independent cinema, to try and counter that.
He invited me to the festival once. And backstage, just before I had to go on to be part of a panel, he muttered to me something like: “Go on, tell them how complacent and smug they’ve become.” Of course I didn’t. I was far too frightened and in awe of the cinema elite sitting out there. They were very powerful. But now 10 years later that independent cinema is facing a real crisis as their audiences collapse. And maybe they are beginning to realise that they have got lost in the labyrinth. And Tom saw that coming. He was good like that.
‘He was secretly building a vast worldwide network of people and ideas that would never be complete but that was definitely going to make things better’
Laurie Anderson
Tom and I often talked on our day-apart June birthdays. I loved tossing ideas around with him and I loved his obvious satisfaction when he introduced me to a person, a film or a thought and could see it click into place, like he was secretly building a vast worldwide network of people and ideas that would never be complete but that was definitely going to make things better. Human connection was one of his art forms.
Usually after meeting Tom a DVD would arrive in the mail. It had a hand-scribbled label and was wrapped in a note referring to our last conversation. Often it would be the obscure movie I was looking for but more often it would be a film I didn’t even know I needed to see.
I’m pretty sure those of us lucky enough to know Tom hope this network survived and keeps expanding. We’ll have to try to make this happen in our own ways now. Thank you, Tom. I love you.
‘His generosity was humbling, exothermic. He welcomed me into a film family that changed my life’
Mark Cousins
Tom was one of the most influential film people of the second half of the 20th century. Not one for the spotlight, he was a quiet fulcrum that connected American, Mexican, European and Asian cinema.
I met him 20 years ago when he programmed my first feature. We talked, and worlds opened. I thought I knew about the great Mexican melodramas, but he conjured them in new ways. His friendships with Agnes Varda, Gloria Swanson and Ukrainian genius Larisa Shepitko (he was a passionate supporter of women in film) made me feel close to them. He talked about Abel Gance as if he was in the room next door. His generosity was humbling, exothermic. He welcomed me into a film family that changed my life.
Part of my passionate internationalism comes from Tom. A great Californian sequoia tree has fallen
‘We sometimes fought like cats and dogs, but I loved him’
Errol Morris
For me, it’s the end of an era. No Tom, no film career. He gave me the gift of film. Through the Pacific Film Archive, through the NY film festival, and through Telluride. I can’t call him a friend. It was different than that. Much closer to an older brother. We sometimes fought like cats and dogs, but I loved him.
And it would be difficult to capture the thousands of ways he contributed to my life. I could separate my acquaintances into two columns — people I knew through Tom Luddy and everybody else. The first column is voluminous — Alice Waters, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Philip Glass, Nicholas Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag …
He knew and was friends with everybody. He invented networking before there was networking. More than anything, he loved and communicated his love for cinema. Quite simply, I’m a film-maker because of him.
‘He was the least egotistical of men in the most egomaniacal of industries’
Geoff Dyer
I will always remember the first time I met Tom because of the thoroughness with which I misunderstood him. It was at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. I’d recently published a book about the film Stalker and he was interested in my coming to the Telluride festival, potentially as guest director. I liked that idea but I was there with a group of very good friends which is to say I was there for the rough and tumble of no-holds-barred banter.
That was inhibited by the mad rush of names coming from Tom. Usually when people name-drop the name is a pretext for a story. With Tom the names were the story: an unceasing torrent of them, a who’s who of the last half-century of cinema and literature! It made no sense. Only later did I realise that this was how the mind of this least egotistical of men – in the most egomaniacal of industries – worked.
He was constantly putting people together. There was no story because he was so utterly selfless; he existed entirely for the creative enrichment and benefit of others, many of them among the most famous names in the world, plenty completely unknown, and they all rubbed shoulders companionably in that mad, overcrowded Rolodex mind of his. Whoever they were, there was always something he could do for them, someone he could put them in touch with. He was doing this all the time, without pause. And we all loved him.
‘Tom occupied and – in many ways coordinated – a kind of magical slipstream’
Tilda Swinton
I met Tom when we both served on the jury in Berlin in 1987. We shared plates of fried potatoes and a pact to nudge each other in the screenings if we sensed, coming into the warm cinema out of the snow – a reliable feature of the February Berlinale in those days – a nodding off to our left or right.
He became a part of my reliable landscape from that very first meeting.
Tom occupied and – in many ways coordinated – a kind of magical slipstream inhabited by fortunate film-makers across the planet: his bright eyes emerging from the crowds at festivals, glittering with some fresh enthusiasm, the introduction of a new film or friend – often a combo – the eager idea of a restaurant we had to repair to without delay to catch up in and wag the chins. Food was always a high motif.
When I was in San Francisco I always made a beeline for Tom. He was a beacon in every sense. And a gleeful companion.
One Sunday he picked me up and took me, without any preparation, to Glide, the extraordinary countercultural church in the Tenderloin. It was the early 90s and we were in the thicket of the first wave of an Aids crisis that was carrying away so many of our loved ones. Tom knew that it was exactly what I needed, that day, to be in that inspired and inspiring throng of people from all walks of experience, many with HIV, many homeless, all singing our hearts out and dancing together with abandon, in a transported state of spirited life, in the aisles, in resistance. It was his kindness in that gesture that I will always remember above any other. Since I can’t quite grasp what it will be like to be without him among us, I’m going to just keep drawing on him and his mighty twinkle and expecting to find him around all the corners.
‘I used to tell friends: “If you want the Queen’s unlisted cellphone number, ask Tom Luddy.”’
Salman Rushdie
When Tom asked me to be guest curator at the 2001 Telluride filmfestival, to introduce a few of my favourite films, I told him about my meeting with the great Satyajit Ray and how Ray had literally jumped to his feet when I praised the children’s film he made in 1974, The Golden Fortress. (“Oh! You saw that film! You liked that film! NOBODY saw that film!”) At once Tom went to work and miraculously found a good quality print we could screen. It turned out to be one of the hits of the festival, and no doubt Ray would have been jumping for joy up in movie heaven.
Nobody knew more about movies than Tom. Also, nobody knew more people than Tom. I used to tell friends: “If you want the Queen’s unlisted cellphone number, ask Tom Luddy.” The only thing Tom loved as much as movies was putting people together who should, in his opinion, know each other. Through Tom, I met Werner Herzog and Peter O’Toole. He fixed it for us to take my sons to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and he got them to open the archive warehouse, where we saw the Death Star and the Lost Ark. Thanks to Tom, I talked to Terry Gilliam about Don Quixote and to Ralph Fiennes about Nureyev, and when Deepa Mehta and I collaborated on the film of Midnight’s Children, Tom gave it its first screening.
‘It is no coincidence that he brought me together with my wife, Lena, 28 years ago’
Werner Herzog
Tom has been on my side my entire professional life. He was the one who invited me with my first feature film Signs of Life to the Pacific Film Archive more than half a century ago, and he has been my friend and guardian ever since.
But there is much more than that. With him an entire epoch of deep film culture is coming to an end. We are losing a national treasure.
He was a director’s director, he connected film-makers worldwide. And it is no coincidence that he brought me together with my wife Lena 28 years ago. We thank him every day for this.
I have no words to express my sadness.
‘Tom knew the pleasure it would give me to have my fanboy moment preserved for posterity’
Peter Webber
I first met Tom at Telluride. This being my first film festival, Tom was immensely kind, taking me under his wing and introducing me to the array of amazing film-makers who were there, from Herzog to Schrader. We bonded over our mutual love of the mysterious French film-maker Chris Marker who was a friend of his. Tom regaled me with tales of Marker, Godard and other luminaries. He knew so many juicy stories, seemed to know personally all of my film-making heroes.
He later invited me up to San Francisco where he showed me amazing hospitality, even wrangling a visit to Zoetrope and to Coppola’s winery in Sonoma County where I spent the day rummaging through the RKO archive that Coppola has acquired, looking at correspondence and set design for Citizen Kane and other classic movies produced by the studio. The visit was capped any an audience with FFC himself where I bombarded hm with questions about the Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. An unforgettable day. He this the photo of Coppola and I, knowing the pleasure it would give me to have my fanboy moment preserved for posterity.
Tom’s kindness, intelligence and grace will stay with me for a long time. He will be missed.
‘Tom gently drew the producer into his arms and led her with a perfect balance of expressive freedom and precision. It was as sensual as it comes’
Mark Kidel
Tom was the ultimate match-maker, with an incomparable instinct for getting people together, as friends, lovers and collaborators. Wherever he landed on his travels, he hosted a dinner, an infallibly inspired mixer. I was lucky to be invited to several memorable evenings in London, Paris, New York, Cannes, Beirut and Berkeley. There was an evening at the Russian Samovar in New York – Tom was a Russophile with many film connections in Moscow: the poet Yevtushenko, an old friend of Tom’s, declaimed poems at the table, as we downed the icy vodkas.
“Networker” is too cliched a word to encapsulate Tom’s almost magical and certainly uncanny gift for connecting people at a soul level. While the film world is driven by competition and awards, Telluride was unique in not giving prizes. Tom and his team’s selection was accolade enough. His almost childlike curiosity and passion were balanced by encyclopedic cinema knowledge and a cool ability to appraise the greatest value and originality in film.
I’ll never forget a moment that for me sums up Tom’s generosity and grace: after a dinner in Paris, we ended up in a cafe that was playing Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. I knew Tom loved Latin music, but I’d never seen him dance. You learn a great deal about someone when you see them take to the floor. Tom gently drew the producer of my Ravi Shankar film, Jane Weiner, into his arms and led her with a perfect balance of expressive freedom and precision. It was as sensual as it comes, but above all, there was a conversation here, and the sweetest respect for his dancing partner. And, most of all, a display of pure joy and the love of a life shared with others.
‘We were floating in the Colorado river off the back of a rubber dinghy’
Nick James
My fondest memory of Tom comes from a road trip through Utah just before the 2012 Telluride festival. We were floating in the Colorado river off the back of a rubber dinghy whose young woman skipper/rower had just told us how Jon Bon Jovi had shot a video on top of one of the immense mesas looming over the plains.
“I brought Tarkovsky here,” Tom said to me, “I tried to explain to him how the mesas were formed by weathering and erosion millions of years ago but he said ‘No … God made this.’” That was Tom’s way of making you feel like you were on the same cinephile level as the great Russian director.
Most people who came to Telluride felt that way because they were all linked in Tom’s mind as a community of true believers. He was such an endlessly curious, affable guy; a determined encourager of talent to the highest standards, with an incredible pre-digital command of information.
He could be blunt, too, or – as his long-term colleague Julie Huntsinger put it – “Sphinx-like”, though his silence was often followed by a wry smile and a faraway look. He’ll always be indelible to my idea of the best of film culture.
‘Tom was always my biggest champion’
Alice Waters
Without Tom, there would be no Chez Panisse. It probably never could have opened, it certainly wouldn’t have been named Chez Panisse, and it likely wouldn’t have succeeded.
When Tom and I were first dating in 1969, I would talk a lot about how much I loved cooking, or share my unformed thoughts of starting a restaurant. But it was Tom who believed in me; it was Tom who, in classic fashion, identified my passion, helped me think about it in a real and serious way, and started helping me make connections. He would take me to other restaurants so we could see what worked and what didn’t; we went to Paris and ate in all the little family places that I wanted to emulate.
When I became overwhelmed with the thought of cooking everything myself, it was Tom who found a film-maker friend of his, Paul Aratow, an experienced cook with the gumption to help me cook at the restaurant. Tom introduced me to Marcel Pagnol’s wonderful old films, and when we were trying to dream up a name for the restaurant based on Pagnol’s characters, Tom suggested we call it Chez Panisse — “Because Panisse is the only character who ever made any money!” he said.
Tom was always my biggest champion – as I know he was for so many, just for the sheer joy of making those connections happen. He was utterly selfless in that way. After Chez Panisse opened, Tom brought film-makers from all around the world to the restaurant and said: “This is my favourite restaurant! Tell all your friends.” Early patrons included Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola. Tom was like an alchemist – of people, ideas, art forms – and he forged that early community of Chez Panisse so there was always a mixture of culture and art at the restaurant. It was Tom who made Chez Panisse a gathering place for the counterculture.
Because of Tom, I’ve been to 46 out of 49 years of the Telluride film festival. The greatest gift Tom gave me was a lifelong love and appreciation for film and the community of friends that came with it.
‘He made lasting impacts on personal lives and on the making of art’
Karole Armitage
Tom Luddy was warm and generous. He made everyone feel welcome at Telluride. He introduced me to the great director of photography John Alton in 1993, the 92-year-old master of black on black film noir cinematography. I spent a great deal of time speaking to Alton and Tom that year. I was a choreographer with no professional reason to attend a film festival, however, both men were charming and charismatic. I learned a great deal about the thinking behind the art form. Tom was a master at finding great art and connecting people. He made lasting impacts on personal lives and on the making of art, well beyond the realm of film.
‘Apart from his taste for cinema, his biggest talent was match-making’
Agnieszka Holland
I feel I knew Tom through all of my film-making life. He loved cinema. But he loved books also; enjoyed all kinds of art – the art of food and the art of celebrating.
He knew everything about the world of cinema, met everybody, had seen every obscure movie from every faraway country and projected the light of his enthusiasm on small unknown films and on talented but unknown directors with names impossible to pronounce. And he was so happy and proud when the beauty of those films and the talent of those directors was recognised!
The first time we met, he knew my early films and wanted to arrange a meeting with me and the Polish poet living in Berkeley, Nobel prize winner Czesław Miłosz. He took us to the best Berkeley restaurant. Tom was very proud that he recognised Miłosz’s talent before he became famous, and I still remember Tom’s joy that it is all happening orchestrated by him; he watched us eat and talk together with a big smile – he didn’t even care that we spoke Polish, because apart from his knowledge and taste for cinema, his biggest talent was match-making. To present the people from different parts of world to each other, to inspire creative relations, to create a community of kindred souls.
He was one of the producers on my movie The Secret Garden, but his greatest production was the only and unique Telluride film festival. To me, the best festival in the world.
‘He was a truly extraordinary man on every level’
Barbet Schroeder
The movie Barfly was definitely cancelled one month before the first day of shooting by the Cannon film studio of Menahem Golan. Tom himself started by offering to give up every cent of his producer salary on a budget squeezed beyond limits, and after seven years of trying and at the last minute every other company capable of financing the movie in Los Angeles turning it down, the movie was finally made. Tom had helped me immensely all the way, also by convincing Francis Ford Coppola to be part of it. And he introduced me to the writings of Charles Bukowski.
He was a truly extraordinary man on every level, one can meet people like that only a few times in your life.
‘The brutal business side of film never changed his maverick personality’
Sarah Gavron
When my student short film was invited to Telluride, a teacher at the National Film School excitedly ran across the car park saying that I was going to the most unique festival of all. I hadn’t yet been to any festival as a film-maker and didn’t realise how important to my film life Tom Luddy and Telluride would be.
I arrived in the mountains with a group of similarly green international short film-makers and Tom greeted us looking like he was on a casual weekend away with all the time in the world. He passionately talked us through the entire eclectic programme of films from arthouse, to documentaries to big films from big hitters as if each one was equally valuable. And the film we mustn’t miss – a newly restored silent film. Then he introduced us to his friend, the genius, experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio who was going to look after us!
I bumped in to a number of my cinema heroes in coffee shops on the one main drag – Tom seemed always to be around to make an introduction – and I hungrily listened to their words of wisdom. “Watch life as well as movies,” said Edward Yang and audiences would come up and discuss the effect of films. It seemed to me that Tom and his partners, in that beautiful mountain village, had curated/created a kind of film-makers’ heaven.
When I made my first feature length film, This Little Life, Tom was the first festival person to whom I sent it and I was lucky enough to go back to Telluride with Brick Lane and Suffragette. On each trip and at London group dinners in between, Tom introduced me and others to more people in the film world and films new and old that opened my eyes.
Through the years he would send an email if he came across something that might be useful or inspiring or was just an amusing film related anecdote. I knew he was doing the same generous bespoke work for a whole range of film-makers all across the globe – how he found the time I don’t know. And, as far as I could tell at least, the brutal business side of film never got to or changed his maverick personality. I thank the film gods I met him.
‘He had a science-fiction head – that big cranium that contained future generations of brain’
Greil Marcus
I think of Tom Luddy’s Ted Hendley in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update of Don Siegel’s 1958 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “I wanted to take the trend of podiness,” Phil says now of the New Age balm over all emotional distress that in 1978 you could see everywhere, “and transport it to the city I loved most, the most ostensibly anti-pod city in the world – see how it plays out, who succumbs, and who doesn’t.” Who, once the soulless replicants replacing human beings have taken over the city, emit the same hideous shriek at the recognition of any remaining human, fixing them with a pointed finger so the crowd can take them. “Tom got the joke,” Phil says. “He was always aware of this possibility.”
Tom plays one of the chief commanders of the pod army – which is to say, one of the first to make the transition. “I cast him because of his unique look,” Kaufman says. “He could be anywhere without being identified. He had a science-fiction head – that big cranium that contained future generations of brain.” With his preternaturally smooth face, extending over his whole bald skull – in the terms of the movie, someone who did not quite complete his replicant’s emergence from his seed pod, who falls just shy of the flaws that mark any real person, in a small role he communicated pure, unspeaking terror. There’s one moment when, leaving a party where humans still outnumber pods, and don’t yet recognise them, Tom turns Ted Hendley’s face back on the crowd, with a look of disgust, a promise of annihilation, that it hard to watch, and just as hard to forget.
“Tom always relished retelling the story of how he was in a central European city in a crowd waiting for a light to change when he saw a guy staring oddly, curiously, apprehensively at him, making him uneasy,” Phil said. “Suddenly the guy raised his arm, pointed his finger at Tom, and let out a terrifying pod-shriek. He had recognised Tom from the film!” Phil seemed surprised; when he told me the story, a few days after Tom died, I wasn’t.
‘He had a rare, rather cold beauty and in illness he came into a serenity’
David Thomson
He had been the quickest person we knew: he had credits and discredits, phone numbers and modern literature inside out. Then the diagnosis of Parkinson’s became clear and he knew what that meant for the end of his story. But it seemed ironic or even a stroke of fiction that such briskness would be stilled.
So he went to a residential home at the northern end of Berkeley. It seemed an excellent establishment, with gentle care. He did physiotherapy such as he had not dreamed of, and there were days when he nearly danced in the corridors. Several times a week, Meredith Brody read to him, for Tom’s sight was going.
The bad days became more frequent. His voice dropped to a hush. In memory holes he sank into anger or despair. Yet he looked well. He had a rare, rather cold beauty – Phil Kaufman caught it in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – and in illness he came into a serenity, so pale or ghostly, but capable of getting a joke or summoning some detail from the movies he had known.
We were waiting, treasuring every visit, and guessing that the great circle he had ordained might collapse when he died. His distress grew worse and we half wanted the bad day to come. Until the wheel came to rest.
Some recommendations from Tom Luddy
Joan Juliet Buck
Tom’s life was devoted to communicating, connecting, sharing. I want to share some of his recommendations from the last 10 years, some with his notes.
Film
Tiny Furniture by Lena Dunham
Inside Job by Charles Ferguson
Chico and Rita by Fernando Trueba
Elena by Andrey Zvyagintsev
The Target by Aleksandr Zeldovich
The Ascent by Larisa Sheptiko
Diplomatie by Volker Schlondörff
Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, by Maria Schrader
My Journey Through French Cinema, by Bertrand Tavernier
Adua E Le Compagne, La Visita, La Conoscevo Bene, by Antonio Pietrangeli
Books
Elif Batuman’s The Possessed
Curzio Malaparte’s The Traitor, translated by Walter Murch, in the LRB
Artemis Cooper’s biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Miklós Bánffy’s The Transylvanian Trilogy. “When Leigh Fermor died, I thought about what a gift he (unknowingly) gave me ... I found his preface to Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy and then got hold of the books … As great as any novel/novels I have read. If I could only take 10 novels to my exile on a desert isle, one ( or three) would be this...”
Journey to the Abyss: the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1918: “stupendously great”.
This is Not the End of the Book by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière
Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina: Despatches From Family Life
Marcel Pagnol’s My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle: Memories of Childhood
40 Years Of Chez Panisse: The Power Of Gathering By Alice Waters
TV
The Gatekeepers, by Dror Moreh.
New York: The Secret African City and Le Paris Black by Mark Kidel
Borgen
The Bridge
The Killing
The Roosevelts by Ken Burns: “Nothing more important in film or TV this year”
La Maison Du Bois by Maurice Pialat, “surely the first masterpiece of long form television, and still maybe the greatest.”
Broadchurch
• The caption on the main image was amended on 22 February 2023. Tom Luddy is pictured in a chairlift, not a gondola as an earlier version said.
