Telluride

The News

By Ray Pride

July 18, 2020

“Although Telluride intended to waive the requirement that all films be accompanied by at least one of their creators, ‘Every single tribute was attending, and they were good ones! I had two filmmakers tell me that if they had to walk to Telluride, they would… On Friday, I was at a facility that was manufacturing tests for us, thousands of fifteen-minute turnaround tests that we could use. We had everything in place to have a safe festival.’”

Todd McCarthy: “To rework an exchange William Wyler and Billy Wilder had at Ernst Lubitsch’s funeral 73 years ago: “’No more Telluride. ‘Worse than that, no more Telluride films.’” That’s the way I, and I know many others, feel with the announcement that the best-curated and, due to its small size and remote setting, most rarified and pleasurable of American film festivals has canceled… During the long, enforced absence from theaters, which now looks destined to continue for months, are even we big-screen die-hards being weaned from the shared cinema experience provided by theaters to a relative comfort level with seeing films privately? Will the universally virus experience actually provide the final turning point away from the now less-universally shared memory of watching films in the dark with strangers as opposed to watching them at home, either alone or with a handful of others? It looks like we won’t know the answer this year, and recent reports of a big Sundance party late last January having lit the fuse for early significant contamination might cast a pall over festivals as well as cinema re-openings for months to come.”

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