Telluride Diary: Bright Sun, Strong Coffee, and Great Movies

The 49th Telluride Film Festival has had the good fortune of great weather. You never really know what you’re going to get here in the emerald green mountains of Colorado in the last gasps of Summer, over Labor Day weekend. There are big things happening outside the film festival, which is nestled comfortably at the bottom of a canyon of mountains that lord over us like the Gods of nature: Who are these silly people and what are they doing down there?

A Biden speech, a Trump rally, and Barack Obama wins an Emmy. An invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Inflation. Climate change causing those looming mountains to be without any snow at the top, for the first time since I’ve been coming here. Or maybe there were other times. I just didn’t notice. It is a beautiful town, a slow-moving town, an isolated oasis of pure happiness largely populated by so many who don’t really have to work for a living.

Many who do work here probably drive in from other towns in the surrounding area. Telluride is an exclusive enclave, with massive mansions hooked on this mountainside like gallery art. Big names own them. I’ve heard those names over the years, names like Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey. All we know is that those are homes we’ll never be able to afford.

This is a community, an economy, and a country coming out of the COVID pandemic that closed down theaters for a time. We didn’t have to get tested this time or show our immunization cards, but we were asked to wear masks to screenings. Most of us don’t comply, and it doesn’t seem to matter.

The Telluride Film Festival will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. They have much to celebrate. Through all of these years, the movies and celebrities come and go, but what remains is what drives this festival in the first place: the pure love those who run it have for cinema and the filmmakers who create it. That is the thing that separates Telluride, I think, from all other festivals: it is most definitely a labor of love. That comes across at every screening.

Yes, it is mainly designed to appeal to its patrons who pay thousands to attend every year. Making them happy is really the goal, much more than it is, say, being the premier launchpad for the next Best Picture contender. That was the narrative we Oscar bloggers placed upon it once we started seeing a pattern of winners spring-boarding from here. But times change. The pandemic changed Hollywood. The schedule got reconfigured and upended the Oscar race.

Now, we have no idea where our Oscar winners will come from because we don’t know yet what the driving narrative will be. If last year was any guide, we won’t know where all of this might be headed for months, and even then be surprised. No, this is a festival to enjoy as a luxury few can afford. That doesn’t just mean these are mostly wealthy people. It also means the luxury of seeing movies made mostly for you, or your demographic.

The same way Sam Mendes chose to tell his story of his love of cinema by showing the lives of the people who run the theater, a whole movie could be made about the layers of society, and the people who move from theater to theater, Airbnb to Airbnb, condo to condo. The artists who come here with their films who are expected to hobnob with not just the patrons at the brunch but mingle with us lowly bloggers and critics at parties. Then there are those of us who cover the festival and how we order ourselves by status.

Look there, that’s a highly regarded film critic whose opinion influences much of Film Twitter. He’s standing over there, or he’s crossing past you on the trail, or he’s drinking beer and eating pizza, or he’s walking out of a movie looking at his phone.

Look there, that’s an Oscar blogger talking about flaws in the screenplay of the movie he just saw and whether or not we have seen our Best Picture frontrunner.

Look there, that’s someone who works in publicity for a studio.

Each one of us has our rankings within the larger tribe, the high priests and priestesses of Film Twitter sometimes allow lower-ranking members into their group, but not often. If you are allowed in then you get to have conversations with them at parties, they invite you to sit with them perhaps at the picnic. Maybe they @ you on Twitter or Instagram.

If you are, as my friend David Carr once described, someone with your palms to the glass looking at the people on the inside, you’re likely off to the sidelines, hanging out with other members who are similarly ranked.

And then there are those of us who have been exiled. Maybe we were once high status, but now we’re mostly ignored or even hated. Or maybe we never ranked anyway but no one cares what we think about anything anymore. Or we just have the wrong opinions. Some of us have committed one too many thought crimes and thus, have been wished into the cornfield.

The best thing about being here in Telluride, though, is that you encounter a lot of people on the streets and they don’t know your status ranking. They just see you as a human being. They smile and say hello. You are members of the same tribe, the human tribe.

The danger of social media is that we decide who other people are on flawed criteria and we somehow believe that’s justified.

Telluride is such a beautiful town that the wonder of it all competes with the movies themselves. The very idea of spending any day like those we’ve seen here inside a dark theater is a big ask. All you want to do is take off your shoes, dangle your feet in the sunlit creek, or meander through the woods. Or even just stroll down Colorado Blvd. and look at all of the shops, not to mention the dogs that are everything everywhere all at once.

I found my dog Jack near the Four Corners en route to Telluride in 2014. He was just a scrappy little puppy living under a trailer begging for food. I’d already been coming to Telluride for a few years by then.

It would probably be strange if I was arriving here, in 2022, as much the same person I was when I started. But I have changed. Other people I know have changed. My relationships with them have changed. I am still the outsider I always have been, for one reason or another. I tend to hang out with people who are also mostly on the fringe, either rejected by the cliques of Film Twitter or avoiding them.

I was lucky enough to meet my Twitter friend Scott Kernan finally. We spend our time DMing each other often about politics, and rarely about the Oscars. But he knows a lot about the Oscars and is very good at predicting them. He told me some blowhard on Film Twitter blocked him just because he was friends with me. I don’t know how some people who cover movies for  living can turn out to be so terrible in life. I mean, it’s not like they have real problems or anything. Ideological angst does not count as a real problem.

We exiles tend to huddle together. Scott’s lifelong dream was to come to Telluride and get the full Oscar experience here. He’s very young so his life hasn’t been that long. He came with his whole family. They are good people. You can never go wrong in life if you assume most people are essentially good, yes, even the blowhards on Film Twitter. I mean, probably? Deep down?

I didn’t stay long at the brunch. I personally never do. The press people like Pete Hammond and Clayton Davis are very good at mingling, talking to people, and getting scoops. I am good at hovering on the fringe. Clarence Moye was out there talking to people and even spoke at length to Anne Hathaway. We miss our friend Mark Johnson, who is also very good at mingling with all the guests.

Mark had a health scare this year, which has kept him home for the first time in many years. But in our case, with our little group, that was like removing the log from the forest and then watching the ants scatter about underneath, unsure of where to go next. Mark always made the schedule and somehow made sure we arrived on time. This is my fault, of course, for being, in general, a chaotic person. I lose things. I drop things.

We miss Mark. Michael Grei, my friend of over 30 years, came along again. And this time we had an extra houseguest, Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere. Our fridge is full of the things that tell you who everyone is. Jeff bought a quiche. He hasn’t cooked it yet. Michael has a sandwich he bought in Los Angeles almost a week ago that he hasn’t eaten. Clarence finally made the chocolate chip cookies out of the roll of dough he brought. And I cooked a whole chicken mostly for my dogs.

We saw some of our friends and fellow exiles, like Marshall Flores who is staying up in Mountain Village and who baked biscuits to test out his high altitude recipe. Scott Menzel, Matt Neglia, Erik Anderson, and various other sorts from here and there.

While we were here, my sister texted me photos of Michael and me years ago, way back in the early 90s. When we saw the photos we both had the same thought: it’s funny when you’re young that you don’t realize how all of the mistakes you’re about to make will be permanent footprints that eventually become the story of your life. It doesn’t seem like it when you’re young. But once you get on the other side, as I am now, staring down the past and trying to make sense of it all, that’s when you begin to feel the melancholy of days gone by.

While walking to the Herzog we passed filmmaker Luca Guadagnino with the star of his new film Bones and All, Taylor Russell (Timothee Chalamet was filming Dune). As we passed him I turned to Clarence in shock and surprise, as we all do here when we see famous people. Then I heard a voice behind me say “Is that Sasha?” I turned around, and Guadagnino recognized me.

So in case you missed that, Luca Guadagnino Called Me By My Name. He said that he admired my honesty in my writing — as I fangirled like an idiot in the street. It was great meeting him and especially having a moment with him of such warmth and kindness. Really, friends, it doesn’t get better than that.  We will be seeing his film later in the festival, but his director’s statement really made an impression on me:

There is something about the disenfranchised, there is something about people living at the margins of society that I am drawn toward and touched by. All my movies are about outcasts, and the characters in “Bones and All” resonated with me. In that regard, it’s also interesting to me to tackle texture-wise the mid-West in the 80s. The idea of the traveler, the one who roams, the wanderer in this kind of modern setting felt very American to me and seemed to me to be a good place to start making movies in the USA.

The heart of the movie is tender and affectionate to its characters. I’m interested in their emotional journeys and what is going to happen to them – where is the possibility inside the impossibility for these characters? No, I don’t think the movie is transgressive, but perhaps we’ve moved so far into post modernism that to tell this story in a classical way may feel transgressive.

I am asking my audience to join this journey; it’s about discovery. Who are these people? Why do they behave as they do? What are they learning? And in so what do we learn about ourselves?

I come from a Catholic country and we have the metaphor of cannibalism every day of our lives – the Body of Christ in the metaphor of the thin (eucharistic) wafer. At the same time we are still animals – part reason and part instinct. Part of our drive is social and part is ancestral. It is the ultimate way in which a human being can annihilate another human being, but that’s not what the movie is about. The movie wants to be, for me, more of a meditation on who I am and how I can overcome what I feel, if it is something I cannot control in myself. And lastly, when will I be able to find myself in the gaze of the other?

Guadagnino is challenging viewers of the film to think in terms of metaphor. Todd Field does this with TÁR. These are big ideas that most of us start to ruminate on as we make it through the part of life that is pure struggle. Once our basic needs are met — mostly food and shelter — then our brains take us farther than our immediate needs. There is something in the spirit of all of us that will always try to migrate, whether we do this by traveling to new frontiers or we do by diving into the human condition. A restless spirit will never stop moving in one way or another.

What I come out of this festival feeling, as I do every year, is an appreciation that I am lucky enough to be here at all. I am still alive. My body still mostly works. I have people who care about me and dogs I love. I also have a job that allows me to see movies for free. Sometimes, if I’m really lucky, great directors say my name walking down the street.

It’s easy to see the bad in everything and everyone. It is a challenge to open your heart and your mind even to those society has thrown away like human garbage. That is, I think, the only way to justify taking up space on the planet. Otherwise, we might as well give it all back to nature.