Telluride Diary – Day 3

The last days of Telluride were about seeing movies but they were also about connecting with people.  Some of them were movie stars.  Some of them were film critics, some were publicists, and some film bloggers.

On one morning I had the occasion to meet and talk to the great Glenn Close, staring in Albert Nobbs. A few of us were given a small window to interview her after the film screened the night before.  She was there to do a q&a about the film.  Close, now in her 50s 60s, is still a strikingly beautiful woman.   Scott Feinberg, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, Jeff Wells and I were all sitting around up at the Chuck Jones theater shooting the shit about the Oscars.  I bet Feinberg a cool $20 that Viola Davis was going to win in the Best Actress category, despite it being really Close’s year.  The reason for this is that I think Davis wins in any category she’s put in but I think they’ll put her in lead. If she isn’t put in that category, Close will take it.  The Oscars are always hard to predict, especially when you try to do it as early as September.

There is no doubt that Close’s Nobbs is a brilliant portrayal. Understated, studied, heartbreaking — Close has delivered her most unusual performance to date.  Where her other performance are much more showy, Albert Nobbs is the more difficult undertaking.  I found myself haunted by her work, haunted by her face.  I told her as much when I had a chance to sit down with her.  I wanted to know why she was drawn to these dark characters we’ve seen her deliver year after year — not just Damages, but Reversal of Fortune, Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons, but Close said that she wasn’t so much drawn to the darkness but to the vulnerability of them.  This is what makes her such an extraordinary actress: she never judges her characters.

We hung around the Chuck Jones as long as they’d have us, but after a while, Feinberg and I were given the boot.  So we headed back down in the gondola.  During one of these rides down the gondola I met the utterly charming Chris Willman, who writes for The Wrap.  You never know whom you’re going to end up with in those little floating cars that take you from the Chuck Jones theater on the hill back down to the town of Telluride proper.  You almost always converse with them. Sometimes they’re movie people, sometimes not.  Willman and I were sitting across from each other when a publicist from the Weinstein co. started talking about The Artist.  Funny thing about going to these things, you read people for years before you meet them face to face.  So it’s always funny to shake someone’s hand you’ve known but not known for years.  Willman and I became semi-fixtures at Between the Covers, the bookstore with a small coffee shop behind it.

That night, a party thrown by Fox Searchlight at the Sheridan in honor of the very successful film The Descendants brought out George Clooney, Alexander Payne and Shailene Woodley.  But it also brought out Pete Hammond, Kris Tapley, Jeff Wells, Peter Sciretta, Alex Billington, Joe Morgenstern, Todd McCarthy and various other sorts — many of them have been covering Telluride for a while now.  But some of them, like me, were there for the first time.  I still never got up the nerve to shake George Clooney’s hand, or say anything at all to him — I suppose, all things being equal, I could have dressed up like Albert Nobbs and tended to his culinary needs. As usual, Clooney couldn’t get more than a few feet in the door before he was mobbed.

The Sheridan has two large rooms.  The back is where they set up the grub — sliders, crab cakes, chips and salsa, and lots of alcohol bathed in dim lighting and wooden furniture.  Hanging around in back was the breakout star of the festival, Shailene Woodley, who chatted with people her publicist put her in front of.  Doing the rounds with Clooney has taught the girl a thing or two about being accessible and charming.  Even when Wells accidentally punched her in the face.  Okay, so he didn’t exactly punch her but he lightly backhanded her.  It was touch and go for a minute there but she laughed it off.

But the front room was where Clooney held court, and therefore, that’s where everyone clustered. His was the irresistible gravitational pull, and the planets spun around him.  According to those who were orbiting most closely, the discussion was all about politics.  I marveled at how my colleagues, Tapley and Hammond, could just go stand next to Clooney, for instance, and talk to him.  Thankfully, I was briefly rescued by Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta and First Showing’s Alex Billington.  Who needs Clooney when you have these cool dudes?

I didn’t last long at the party, despite the good company of Sciretta and Billington.  It was just too crowded for me.  After a few drinks, too many I suppose, I ventured back out in the cool Telluride night.  When you leave a room full of stars to look up on a cloudless night and see the sky populated with infinity more stars, so bright and so jumbled together you feel small.  But it’s a good kind of small.  The natural world towers over even George Clooney up in the mountains of Colorado.  Walking the empty streets back home, under those stars, the various elements of real life shake back into sane perspective.

The next morning I woke up early.  Jeff Wells, who kindly asked if I could stay in the same home that was offered to him by the very kind Zoller family, comes back late and works.  He then wakes up early and works.  He barely sleeps.  But that morning when I came downstairs he was nowhere to be seen.  So I packed up my laptop bag and my camera and headed out into the morning.  Like its afternoon and its evening, Telluride’s morning takes your breath away, almost literally.  It was this morning that I knew I had fallen completely head over heels in love with the place.  This would be just another extraordinary morning if I lived here.  Maybe I will someday.

I made my way down to the Nugget theater where they were showing Bitter Seeds, a documentary about the dominance of Monstanto seeds on rural India causing many farmers to commit suicide because they can’t break even year after year.  The Nugget is the local town theater and it’s very very small.  You have to get your place in line early.  They usually give you a card with a number on it to hold your place so you can go out and do something else and then come back later.  I decided to finally give the Steaming Bean a try.  I’d heard that’s the one go-to coffee place in town.  I’d become accustomed to the coffee room behind the bookstore Between the Covers.  I’d found it by asking a local.  No other bloggers, as far as I could tell, hung out there.  The back room reminded me of Dutton’s in Brentwood, one of the few independent bookstores that managed to last a while until it became too expensive to maintain.  I think the perfect life might be owning this small bookstore in Telluride.

On top of that, the girl working behind the counter had broken her collarbone hiking and was doing everything with one arm: making smoothies, espressos, serving up cake.  It was quite something to watch her whir around in there.  Quiet, free wifi, power outlets.  Between the Covers will be my home away from home should I ever have the good fortune to return to Telluride.

But the Steaming Bean is also the cultural coffee hub.  The line was so long that it almost made me late for the screening.  A bulletin board, comfortable chairs, newspapers and hipsters hanging around — you start to feel like you are dreaming.  What could be better than this?  I bought a vegetarian breakfast sandwich with eggs, red peppers and cheese.  Kris Tapley kept me company while I waited in line.  He was going to see Le Havre.  “I don’t drink coffee,” he said.  There are people who don’t drink coffee?   Tapley has been coming to Telluride for a few years now and used to be the only Oscar blogger who would go.  Now we have all encroached upon his territory but he was cool about it.  It’s always nice to hang out with the dude. We’ve been friends for so long now.  “If you do Cannes you don’t need to do Telluride,” Kris said.

At some point we found ourselves at the Ocilliscope party for We Need to Talk About Kevin, one of my favorite films coming out of Cannes, directed by the seriously talented Lynn Ramsey and starring Tilda Swinton, who was being celebrated with two tributes at the fest.  I finally got to meet my online pal Tim Appelo, and film writer Jean Oppenheimer, whom I’ve been reading for years.  I was given the opportunity to talk to Swinton — talking to her is like breathing in the Telluride air.  We talked mostly about motherhood, funnily enough, about how hard it is, about how people never tell you how hard it’s going to be.  Once it dawns on you that there is a concerted effort to fool women into thinking motherhood is all bunnies and flowers, you can feel slightly helpless and horrified when you’re suddenly there caring for a whole other human being, or in Swinton’s case, her two twins.  Talking with her it becomes more and more clear how brilliant of an actress she really is.  She isn’t playing herself in the least bit – as she flattens and hollows out in Kevin, she becomes almost a different animal.  One can hardly believe that this warm, friendly and intelligent woman in front of me could pull out that character from somewhere inside her.  Of the best performances I’ve seen this year, Swinton’s is at the very top of the list.

Ms. Ramsay was also funny — with a little of the “what the hell am I doing here” thing going on.  It’s apparent that she’s not exactly a person who does a lot of schmoozing so you’re really getting the real deal when you talk to her.  She spoke about working for many years on an adaptation of The Lovely Bones before it was overtaken by Peter Jackson.  I thought briefly about how Ramsay might have done that book.  One thing I love about her work is that she’s one of the few female directors who are also visual.  The well-known styles of Scorsese, Tarantino, Woody Allen, David Lynch, David Cronenberg – they’re always male.  A few of them, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Lynn Ramsay are also concerned with shot set-ups and having a striking, unique vision.  We Need to Talk About Kevin is as much about Ramsay as a visionary director as it is about its subject, mass murder and a mother/son love story.

That night I would see A Dangerous Method and then later, Shame.  Afterwards, Wells and I got a drink at a bar up at the top of the hill to avoid the lines that gather near the gondola after a screening.  There was no wi-fi so we had to have an actual conversation.  We were talking about love.  We were talking about movies.  We were talking about Telluride.  He was on his way to New York and then to Toronto, where the madness starts again.  After that, he flies back to New York for the New York Film Festival.

We walked to the gondola and took a dark night-ride down, the lights below twinkling like a toy village.  We’d be driving out in the morning.  It all went by too fast.  It was a break from reality, a vanishing.  It would be a long drive home through the mountains of Colorado and down into the valley of Albuquerque.  Flying back to Los Angeles from there, I can feel Oscar season the way Timothy Treadwell must have felt his return to the Grizzly maze every year: you know it’s going to be unpredictable and dangerous but somehow you can’t pull yourself away.