Tom Luddy, “Irreplaceable” Mentor & “Spirit Of The International Film Community,” Celebrated At NYC Tribute

Jill Goldsmith
Updated ·4 min read
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Filmmakers and executives, creatives of music, theater and art remembered Tom Luddy as friend and mentor, tastemaker and cultural force who deployed an astonishingly vast network to nurture talent and bring people and projects together over decades.

The co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival passed away in February.

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“I am thinking of getting a tattoo of you on my arm,” said Irish director Mark Cousins at tribute event at the Paris Theatre over the weekend. “Here is Hitchcock on my arm, and here is and Kira Muratova. Maybe you would fit between the two?” He added, “For the rest of my life, I will see partly through your eyes. I miss you and I love you.”

“Tom Luddy was a constant presence. The sun around which so many of us have revolved,” said Ken Burns. The two met when Burns screened Huey Long at Telluride in 1985. “For the next 35-plus years, he would champion my work with a ferocity that surprised me and touched me, and fed, in that subtle way he did with every filmmaker, my confidence and energy to persist.”

The documentary filmmaker was joined at the mic by Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, producer Rosalie Varda, the daughter of Agnès Varda, theater director Peter Sellars and Criterion President Peter Becker. Cousins, Werner Herzog, Alexander Payne, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Francis Ford Coppola delivered tributes via video. Annette Insdorf emceed.

The common threads — Luddy’s gift of knowing everyone, putting them in touch and championing their work, as well as his curatorial chops, erudition, and intuitive connections within cinema and across the arts.

He rescued SPE’s The Lives Of Others, Barker recalls, with a Telluride spot for the Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck film that was turned down by Berlin, Cannes, Venice and the New York Film Festival. It went on to win the 2007 Oscar for Best International Feature. “That is only one story. There are so many,” he said. Luddy “has always given me personal courage and always made me a better person. Those mentors are irreplaceable.” Luddy’s gifts also extended to speaking Russian and playing a mean round of golf.

Payne said he had been rereading email exchanges with Luddy. “I told him I was having dinner with Krzystzof Zanussi. And within an hour, he sent me a picture of himself out on a hike with Zanussi, and Andre Tarkovsky.”

“This was our beloved Tom, the holy spirit of the international film community. His friendship and his generosity and his love of life, his love of film, his love of filmmakers and artists of all sorts was the spiritual glue that held us all together.”

Luddy’s legacy, according to Sellars: “Anyone you admire, please call them. Just calll them. Be present. That was Tom’s beautiful way to live life. If there was somebody he admired, he would find that person, and he would meet that person, and he would introduce them to ten other people who needed to know that person.”

Telluride Festival Director Julie Huntsinger introduced the memorial. “When you think of him, when you miss him, promise me you’ll see a movie,” she said.

The Paris is also hosting a retrospective of Luddy’s work (he was the producer of numerous films for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios) and projects, including a collaboration with Agnès Varda on her influential 1968 Black Panthers documentary while he was at the Pacific Film Archives. “He knew my mother almost as long as I did,” said Rosalie Varda at the tribute. “They kept in touch, like close friends do. Their conversation never stopped. It was a chosen family of cinema.”

Bill Pence, who founded the festival with Luddy, passed away in 2022. Luddy launched the festival with Pence and his wife Stella Pence, along with film historian James Card, who became the event’s co-director alongside Luddy. Inaugurated in 1974 at the Sheridan Opera House, it featured tributes to Coppola, Gloria Swanson and Leni Riefenstahl and was a surprise sellout.

Attendees at the New York event included Lisa Taback, Adam Del Deo, Errol Morris, Mollly Ringwald, Linda Reisman, Christine Vachon, Ted Hope, Jonathan Sehring, Gerilyn Dreyfuss, Dan Cogan, Laura Poitras, Joshua Marston, Bob and Jeanney Berney, Sean Berney, Eugene Hernandez, Nicolette Aizenberg, Paul Schrader, Scott Foundas, Jimmy Chin, Chai Vasarhelyi, Richard Brody, Ed Lachmann, Ira Deutchman, David Byrne, Julian Schnabel, Linda Lichter, Courtney Ott, John Vanco, Toby Talbot, Bill Plympton, Joan Juliet Buck, Phillip Lopate, Larry Kardish, Ron Yerxa, Ryan Werner, Albert Berger, Anne Carey and Jacqueline Lyanga, among others.

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