Telluride Diary Part Two – Yes I Saw a Bear

It’s hard to get to Telluride. It’s harder to leave. I still have one more day of screenings to go but I know that tomorrow morning I will be cleaning up the place, stuffing my clothes back into my suitcase, wiping away any trace of having ever stayed in this condo. Knowing that another year of memories here have left their mark on me.

Waking up early to walk the dogs one morning, a hungry bear hurries across the street, looking like he just robbed the grocery store and was making a hasty getaway. Only in this case, no one would dare chase him. Or her. That bear has as much right to be here as we do, if not more. The relentless heat and lack of water has dried out the waterfalls the town is famous for. It dried out the pond near the Herzog for the first time since I’ve been coming here.

Taking the shuttle back from the Patron’s Brunch — a Gatsy-esque affair where the patrons who spend big bucks to come here are treated to delicious local foods, and an array of cocktails — bloody marys, champagne mimosas. The wind was turning over the leaves, prompting Jeff Wells to tap my shoulder and tell me it was going to rain. I didn’t think it could possibly. It was so hot, so dry. I caught a fast look at Jason Reitman, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton then quickly made my exit, and headed up to the shuttle just as Peter Bogdanovich was getting out of his car and heading down to the brunch.

On the way back down, I couldn’t help overhearing the driver of our shuttle talking to one of the passengers sitting next to him. Two old timers from Jersey. “I first came here there was nothing but miners and hippies. There was no Mountain Village, no big houses — this was all cattle and sheep. But it’s a different world now,” he said. “Celebrities live differently than you and me. Tom Cruise’s house is up over that hill. Huge place.”

He was the same driver who had taken us up to the brunch and had gotten lost — he drove us a mile or so past the road that leads higher to the mountain top. When he stopped to radio in for directions there were grumblings from the people in the back, a few shouted at him that they knew where we were and that he should turn around. But the man was old-fashioned. He wanted to hear it from the boss. Eventually he relented.

Listening to him tell his life story to the stranger sitting next to him is among the most memorable things that happened to me here. He had served in the army before going to work for the federal government. He woke up one day and decided he couldn’t live the way he was for one more day and moved out to Colorado to work on a cattle ranch. He crossed paths there with a woman he went to college with. “We started going together, then we got married.”

He and his wife live in Montrose, a town he said was a lot more “down to earth” than Telluride. His oldest child was born without enough oxygen to his brain and that left him disabled so they spend a lot of time at the rec center, he said. He sounded happy. Happy to have a wife he loved, a son to care for, a life he loved. When the subject turned to politics because of John McCain’s death he said “I was a McCain supporter for the primary but when the election came along for some reason I voted for Obama.”

The silent beat that came before that was the Trump silence. That moment you are talking to someone and you don’t know whether they’re a Republican or not, and whether they’re a Trump supporter or not. This conversation took them right to that edge but the old timer put his new friend at ease by telling him he’d become more liberal in his older years. They never did mention Trump. They didn’t have to. No one has to. We are all just waiting for it to be mercifully over.

This small town has felt the golden touch of deep-pocketed Hollywood’s annual Oscar hunt, and that’s reflected in jacked-up prices at the local market — $22 for a small bottle of Tide! Condo rates keep edging up every year, and why wouldn’t they? Everybody wants a piece of it, and the best pieces are scarce. Who wouldn’t take the opportunity to make a little extra cheddar if people who want to help shape the Oscar race are desperate to come mingle, marvel, and report back from the front lines.

Those prophesized rain clouds decided to show up on the second day, pounding festival goers with angry skyscapes and a steady downpour. There was Laura Dern in a leather skirt standing under a tent to escape the rain as we all waited in line to see Emma Stone in The Favourite. Stone came out on stage for a tribute as her La La Land director Damien Chazelle rushed on stage to present her with an award. She said she thought herself too young for a tribute, “what am I doing up here,” she asked, laughing.

There are moments, though, when your body remembers you’ve hardly slept, you’ve only eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches your friend and roommate Mark Johnson remembered to pack. The lingering headache and continual thirst from the altitude can hit you all at once, and whether you want it to or not, your body decides it’s time to shut down. You hope it isn’t during a movie you really want pay close attention to. Your brain must then do battle with survival instincts telling you that if you don’t pay now you are going to pay later.

Awards Circuit’s Mark Johnson, along with my old friend Michael Grei (who used to be my boss at a video store back in the 1980s), have been coming here with me for four years now as a threesome. Mark and I go to every movie together and that’s mainly down to his innate sense of organization and being on time to things. I am not organized and I am always late so it is a rare luxury to follow someone around who is a master at these tasks.

After seeing one movie that neither of us much cared for, we talked to a few people about it and none of them seemed willing to admit the obvious flaws. Mark turned to me and said, “Now I know when I am not there to see the movie for myself to be skeptical of the responses.” What he meant by that is that thing that happens at film festivals almost all of the time, but especially Telluride. By default, we’re on the side of movies here. We’re always wanting them to be good. That’s different from how critics watch movies outside of this context. Or you could look at it another more cynical way and say, as one old friend of mine who used to work in the business said, “Everybody has been bought off.”

I find that the films I’ve seen here live inside of me long after the movies come to an end, even the weakest of them. The best of them I can’t stop thinking about.

Crowded House has a great song called Weather With You that goes something like this, “Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you.” It’s the idea that nothing can defeat you because “nothing can conquer the blue sky.” The same goes for movies, except not as instruction for happiness, necessarily.

Such is the case with Damien Chazelle’s magnificent First Man. It was a film that left me needing to remind myself to breathe when it came to an end. I had to pinch myself from applauding after some of the sequences. Since no one else did I stayed quiet. Do you ever see a movie and you just can’t believe how good it is?

When I saw that a controversy had bloomed online over gripes that Damien Chazelle didn’t show Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the surface of the moon, I remembered the guy driving my shuttle down from the Patron’s Brunch. I knew then that I was listening to a true American and a true patriot — someone who fought for this country, who was concerned about the future and not just himself. He was not someone driven by fear, but instead by curiosity and love. How dare these complainers criticize anyone involved in this film. And how dare they call themselves patriots when they’re backing a man who is destroying this country. They have no right to sit in judgment of Chazelle or any artist.

I didn’t care that much about the fracas because I was not hooked up to the nipple of controversy on Twitter and Facebook — and I didn’t care about it because I knew it was, as the great Barack Obama said, a manufactured controversy. I didn’t care about it because I knew the film I saw was a thrilling, daring, accomplished work of art — a shining example of the best thing human beings, and Americans, can do.

The other film that I carry with me moment to moment is Alfonso Cuaron’s cinematic masterpiece Roma. The contrast between the life we live and the lives depicted in this film and the way our probably-illegitimate president diminishes the Mexican people makes Roma all the more poignant. It isn’t an overtly political film, of course, but it’s a deeply personal, deeply moving expression of an ideal to which politics should aspire.

So yes, everywhere I go I will take these movies with me. I will take the fleeting sight of the bear who came down from the mountain, risking life and limb for a little food, and the way a cup of warm coffee in a paper cup feels in my hands while standing in the rain. I will take the memory of the black crow that landed outside my window this morning, the smell of pine needles, the friendly faces, the kindness of a woman who held my dog so I could use the bathroom just because she could see I needed help.

You have to love a town that has as many dogs as people, with little bowls of water placed outside every storefront. That might be why the mood is so serene here. Dogs have a way of calming everyone down.

One more day.