Film festival tribute to its nurturers
The SFFilm Festival’s bash at YBCA on Friday, April 7, provided filmmakers and film fans with a kind of recreational respite. It was like gathering around a campfire with fancier-than-camping vittles — by McCalls — the break in the middle of the cinephile’s traditional festival trek from comedy to tragedy to documentary to panel conversation.
There was talk of movies and stars and distributors, of course, but there was also pleasant random conversation. Fred Levin, son of Irving Levin, the movie house owner who 60 years ago founded the festival, told Sheila Ortona, wife of Italian consul general Lorenzo Ortona, that 61 years ago, the Italian consul general had approached his dad, telling him that high-end department stores were going to be featuring Italian wares and clothing for a week.
Could Levin schedule a week of Italian movies to be shown at the same time? He agreed, and the event was so successful that the next year, at the suggestion of Arts Commission president Harold Zellerbach, Levin decided to expand from Italy to the rest of the world, and to make the festival an annual occasion.
This party was particularly loose because the traditional formal awards gala has been postponed until winter. But the festival, of course, is still giving awards.
On Sunday, April 9, friends and admirers (and he has many) gathered at the Castro to pay tribute to Tom Luddy, winner of this year’s Mel Novikoff Award, which is given to “an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s appreciation of world cinema.” Luddy’s cultural interests go beyond filmmaking — notably, to music and art and food, particularly Bay Area passions — but the award paid tribute most of all to him as a “deeply human bridge-builder,” said SFFilm Executive Director Noah Cowan. Luddy was cited for personal generosity — his appreciation of filmmaking masters and his championing of filmmaking newcomers — and for his wizardry at connecting them. Luddy’s influence, said Sony Pictures Classics CEO Michael Barker, “is vast . ... Tom Luddy is the connector ... with the most impressive address book of all time.”
The audience included an array of local boldfaced names who consider Luddy a treasured friend: Alice Waters, Jeannette Etheredge, director Phil Kaufman, as well as filmmaker Eleanor Coppola and film scholar David Thomson. (The next day, Coppola’s “Paris Can Wait” was shown when she received the George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award; Thomson was to speak about “Vertigo” on Sunday, April 16.) Waters said Luddy had made Chez Panisse famous, by bringing film people there; afterward, Etheredge said the same of Tosca.
Peter Becker of the Criterion Collection of movies described a summer afternoon (presumably in the Wine Country) when Luddy, Wim Wenders, Akira Kurosawa and Francis Coppola attended a county fair together, and Coppola’s vehicle broke down. Filmmaker Les Blank came to the rescue in his truck. It was a hot day, they saw a pond, and the filmmakers stopped to take a dip. “The intimacy of that moment,” said Becker, “was something like paradise.”
I’ve been attending too many memorial services. But “too many” is an injustice; they shouldn’t be considered together. Every gathering is for one woman who spoke with her own voice, one man who shook hands with his own grip, one listener who laughed at one joke and not another.
On Thursday, April 6, every seat in every pew at Grace Cathedral was filled with people mourning the sudden death of Charlot Malin ,48.She was a businesswoman, an ardent supporter of the arts — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Neal Benezra and the San Francisco Opera’s Matthew Shilvock spoke of her dedication to their institutions — and a beloved wife and mother of twins.
The crowd was so big that more than a hundred stood in the rear of the church, listening to the prayers, homily and music. When Ennio Morricone’s “Gabriel’s Oboe” was played by members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra with soloist Ming jia Liu, that group’s principal oboe, the plaintive sound wafted to the vaulted ceiling.
I looked behind me, and there stood those who hadn’t been able to find seats, parallel trees in a forest, each standing a few feet away from the closest person. Afterward, the crowd spilled out into the plaza, reassured on this cloudy but warm afternoon to find old friends and share good thoughts about Charlot.
“So nice to see the sun,” one woman said, and I nodded but I couldn’t see it.
“He thinks he knows all about girls because he has two moms. He doesn’t know.” Teenage girl talking to boys, overheard on Park Street in Alameda by Mary O’Connor