TELLURIDE: Opening Day
The weather is perfect, and the sun is beating down on our shoulders, which are still red from our Orvis Hot Springs Experience the day before. Telluride is a fabulous jewel of a movie-set-Western-Town in a box canyon surrouded by towering peaks, and dominated by a 400 ft. tall waterfall gushing out of the eastern end of the canyon. The town was crowded with the $200-sunglasses-set, along with swarms of workers looking like Oompa Loompas putting the final touches on the grand spectacle of one of the top five film festivals on earth.

We immediately, (and possibly illegally) parked our car in the center of main street.  We grabbed the folding lawn chairs out of the trunk and nabbed the best spot in the town park for the free film fest movies at night. (BYOB).  In the park last year, we watched “Into the Wild,” (with Sean Penn in the audience) through a thunderstorm-from-hell. Seemed like the perfect setting.

After marking our territory in the park, we started a desperate search for a Festival program.  (Telluride is famous for not releasing it’s film program until the day before the Festival…mainly because they don’t have to – people will come anyway) The first store we went into, the bored clerk said “What Program?”  “Well, the Telluride Film Festival program of course!“ “The WHAT? he replied, eyeing us suspiciously. Pouring over the elusive, finally-found Program while leaning over a broken down picnic table in the town park, we high-fived each other when we saw that the shorts programs were moved from 9:00 in the morning (a pretty depressing time of day for my sisters and I) to later at night.  Great change! 
We looked further into the program and when I remarked “Oh, a tribute to Jean Simmons!” Shelly immediately blurted out “that was my favorite band in high school!”  It was not that Gene Simmons it turns out, but the classic, legendary actress Jean Simmons, who appeared in films such as Great Expectations, Hamlet, Guys and Dolls, and Sparticus.  How exciting to possibly meet a legend!   We immediately put Jean Simmons on our list of possible celebrities to target…

Our little condo (that will ultimately sleeps god-knows-how-many-people), is a half-block from the gondola that takes you up to the Chuck Jones Theater, and the “Brigadoon” which is a DIA-like tent that serves as the Telluride Film Festival headquarters each year.  The first thing we did at our condo was to hang the Boulder International Film Festival banner up on our balcony.  We’re taking bets on how long it will last….

The opening night film in the park was a Swedish film from 1997 called “Frozen Dream,” about a perky hot air balloon team from Sweden that attempted to fly across the north pole in 1897.  I don’t want to give away the ending, but you can infer from the title what that it will not be happy.

One of the films with a lot of buzz this year is Director Steve McQueen’s controversial new film “Hunger” (no, not that Steve McQueen, he’s dead) will screen at Telluride. It opened Cannes this year as well.  Hunger is a film about Bobby Sands and The Irish Republican Army hunger strikes, which features almost no talking, except for a singular scene. Quite a few people left the Cannes screening because they were shocked by the violence.  The program says the film is supposed to “possess tremendous contemporary resonance” …whatever that means. Can’t wait to see it.

We went to the movie in the park last night with friends Kitty Nicholason, Bill Vielehr (Boulder sculptor and BIFF Board member) Laird Grimm and Kevin Shand, the Colorado Film Commissioner, who dropped by earlier to say hello. That’s us with Kevin under the Telluride Film Festival banner. Parties later.

More stories to come, because as you know, what happens in Telluride – gets blabbed all over Boulder!