The Denver Post

Tom Luddy, a behind-the-scenes force in cinema, dies at 79

- By Penelope Green

Tom Luddy, a quietly influentia­l film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncra­tic Telluride Film Festival, died Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complicati­ons of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-centuryold gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.

A transplant from the East Coast, Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964.

He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a twoscreen art house that had once been managed by film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art- house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the UC Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.

By the early 1970s, he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospect­ives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the U. S. premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistad­or who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.

As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicate­d film about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinancea­ble project.” Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.

In an email, Schrader described Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousn­ess.”

He had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboar­d.

It was Luddy who suggested that Agnes Varda, a French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times.

When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Luddy asked her to phone film critic and essayist Philip Lopate for a tutorial.

It was a measure of Luddy’s influence, the Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrantg­angster epic, to Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and showed “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”

And it was Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of French filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “Cesar,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institutio­n that ignited the farm-to-table movement.

“We saw the films on three consecutiv­e nights, and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh, no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’ ”

Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Luddy’s dining room where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemakin­g ethos of that decade, or at least of Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

In 1974, Luddy and friends Stella and Bill Pence and film historian James Card conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesqu­e former mining town of Telluride. (Bill Pence died in December.)

There would be no prizes, no angling for distributi­on, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceiva­ble amount of screenings, talks and shenanigan­s. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.

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