The Circuit

While many festivals seem so much about themselves, there is a dignity with Telluride that only comes with age.  They don't need receptions. They'll do with Feeds.  They don't need five press releases to announce their lineup.  They only need one.  They'll give a good pat on the back to newbie directors, but save their deeper respect for the alum.  Filmmakers want to be at other fests to get flown in, bought or set up for their next project.  They want to be at Telluride because they want the old man's nod of approval.

For regular festers, there is something necessary about Telluride.  It's refreshingly free of the strange fog that envelopes the big fests, where capsule reviews are too-quickly exchanged between reviewers running to the next premiere screening.  Telluride has always been about the discussion of film, and little about the industry.  Staffers (including toppers Tom Luddy, Julie Huntsinger and Gary Meyer, pictured) were more concerned with what you thought of the Michel Legrand tribute rather than where the Sony Classics dinner was.  Yet it's at these intimate restaurants where anyone can talk with Indiana Jones producer Kathleen Kennedy about producing "Persepolis."  At another festival these would be loud after-parties of bad music and over-the-shoulder gazing.

For 2007, audiences got Werner Herzog discussing suicidal penguins in the Chuck Jones theatre surrounded by Looney Tunes characters.  The first reel of Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" predicted how well that film would play, and how shrewd a filmmaker Anderson is for making such a hard left turn. "Into the Wild" proved it had legs upon its second screening, not its luke-warm first.  Some walked out mid-way through Haynes' "I'm Not There" while others were in tears by the end.  With "Secret Sunshine," "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Telluride's program this year can be easily mistaken as the first draft of most best-of lists coming out this month. 

The deadly disease of overhype begins in the film festival petri dish.  Telluride was a must-stop if you wanted films hype-free.  The sneaks of "Juno" and "Redacted," playing on the same day, polarized on equal levels.  Before it won Venice, "Redacted" was despised at Telluride.  Before it was everyone's sweetheart, "Juno" was loved at Telluride.  Similar to the best of Telluride's previous years, the early talk forecast the two films' trajectories.  Toward the end of the season, a panicked distributor tried some quick fixes on "Redacted," not helping it.  Fox Searchlight wrapped all the goodwill for "Juno" into one big sugar pill of a PR campaign, which was hard to swallow sometimes.  But at Telluride, neither of those films had any kind of baggage yet.  Like "Brokeback Mountain" before the send-ups, at Telluride they rose and fell on their own. 

Telluride was the perfect mix this year.  Moreover, its minimal model is a giant lesson for the current crop rich upstart fests who build sponsored events around their program, overwhelming the films.  Telluride is content to simply build conversation around theirs.  Everything else is just noise.


*The big caveat is an obvious one:  The Circuit is not a half-year old yet.  We missed 2007's Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, SXSW, and many, many others.