Tom Luddy, Telluride Film Festival Co-Founder, Dies at 79

Tom Luddy, the understated co-founder and artistic director of the Telluride Film Festival who championed world cinema, spotlighted overlooked gems and saluted legends during his near half-century run with the event, has died. He was 79.

Luddy died peacefully Monday in Berkeley, California, after a long illness, Telluride senior vp public relations Shannon Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.

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“The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,” Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger said in a statement. “I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some.

“But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He called Telluride a labor of love for a very long time. We’re so much better off because of him and that labor. We at the festival owe it to him to carry on his legacy; his commitment to and love for cinema, above all.”

One of the unsung heroes of the movie business, the well-connected Luddy first made his mark with the University of California, Berkeley-based Pacific Film Archive in the 1960s, then served as director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope.

He also enjoyed a decades-long relationship with the San Francisco International Film Festival that dated to 1962.

Luddy produced a handful of features and documentaries during his career while supporting such international filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Abel Gance, Dusan Makavejev, Werner Herzog, Barbet Schroeder and Agnieszka Holland.

In 1974, Luddy launched the nonprofit Telluride Film Festival with Bill Pence and Stella Pence, who worked for the art house label Janus Films and owned a small chain of Colorado movie theaters, and film preservationist James Card.

Pandemic aside, the laid-back, family-friendly event takes place each year over Labor Day weekend at an altitude of 9,000 feet in the Colorado mining town, a six-hour drive from Denver.

In becoming a major stop on the world festival circuit, Telluride mixes in retrospectives with Oscar hopefuls — and famously doesn’t divulge its lineup until opening day.

“To make the effort to come on blind faith, not knowing what the program is, and to go to the trouble of paying for air tickets and hotels, you have to really be passionate about film and want to eat, sleep and talk film for 24 hours a day,” Luddy said in 2007. He had run the festival with Huntsinger since then.

Luddy was born in New York on June 4, 1943. He said his interest in cinema was sparked by a teacher, a friend of Elia Kazan’s, who took him to see films by Visconti and Bergman at the Beekman and Paris theaters.

He attended college at Berkeley, where he operated the F.W. Murnau Film Society out of the YWCA, wrote film notes for the Berkeley Cinema Guild (after Pauline Kael had departed) and programmed movies for the Telegraph Repertory Cinema.

Back in New York, he distributed foreign features for Brandon Films and wrote the first catalog for New Yorker Films.

In 1968, Luddy scheduled a retrospective of Godard’s work at the Pacific Film Archive, with the director there to introduce his films and hold office hours on campus. He joined the visual arts center as program director in 1972, then spent five years as its archive director and curator.

“Luddy’s growing network of film contacts throughout the world generated a long and distinguished list of film artists who visited PFA during his tenure,” Lee Amazonas wrote in 2004’s Chronicle of the University of California: A Journal of University History.

“Silent film performers, contemporary avant-garde filmmakers, film noir cinematographers, directors of the French New Wave as well as auteurs from Senegal, Vietnam, Hungary and Hollywood helped make PFA the gathering place for those who love film.

“In 1974, for example, Archive audiences were treated to visits by the French director Agnès Varda; experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, whose contrasts in style and content demonstrate the breadth of territory in the avant-garde; veteran Hollywood director Nicholas Ray and up-and-comer Martin Scorsese; the author William Burroughs; Lotte Reiniger, an experimental animator whose career spanned seven decades; and the actress Jane Fonda.

“Then, as now, a PFA program might look at the entire career of a director such as Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray, with the difference that, in the 1970s, these film artists were still alive and came as honored guests.”

Luddy exited the PFA in 1980 to head special projects at American Zoetrope, where he supervised the restoration of Gance’s Napoleon (1927) — its 1981 Radio City Music Hall screening was accompanied by a symphony orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola, Francis’ father — and the U.S. release of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s seven-hour documentary Our Hitler: A Film From Germany (1977). He also helped secure backing for Akira Kurosawa’s epic Kagemusha (1979).

Luddy arranged for Zoetrope to produce with Godard a film about mobster Bugsy Siegel that was to star Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, but the project collapsed in the late ’70s. He did serve, however, as a producer on Godard’s King Lear (1987).

At Zoetrope, Luddy produced such films as Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987), Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), Carroll Ballard’s Wind (1992), Holland’s The Secret Garden (1993) and Gregory Nava’s My Family (1995).

“Oh dear, this is a great loss to the world of cinema — the most important connection of filmmakers around the world,” Coppola said in a statement. “His influence changed and broadened my awareness of what cinema really was. The only way to repay our debt to him is to continue his work, something that Martin Scorsese has done so brilliantly.”

Luddy also handled movies for The Cannon Group, including Makavejev’s Manifesto (1988) and Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi (1988), and assisted Marker on the 1983 documentary, Sans Soleil.

He brought a counterculture vibe to Telluride, and the inaugural festival made headlines when it honored controversial Nazi-era filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl alongside Coppola and silent film star Gloria Swanson, whose 1928 drama Sadie Thompson was shown in all its restored glory.

With Luddy’s help, Gance, then nearly 90, made it from Nice, France, to Telluride in 1979 — “I’d rather die on my way to Colorado than vegetate in this cottage,” the filmmaker told him — and Hungarian cinematographer John Alton (An American in Paris), then 92, was tracked down and feted in 1993.

One of Luddy’s favorite memories was watching 2002 honoree Peter O’Toole riding a bicycle through the streets of Telluride “like he was anybody else.”

Luddy also established the tradition of bringing in Telluride guest curators, among them Errol Morris, Peter Bogdanovich, Bertrand Tavernier, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Stephen Sondheim and Buck Henry.

Luddy lived for a time with restaurateur Alice Waters, and in 1971 he helped her open the now famous Chez Panisse, always a favorite of the film community. (It was named for a character in a trilogy of Marcel Pagnol films.)

And in 1978, he stepped in front of the camera to portray the infected alien/pod person Ted Hendley in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Survivors include his wife, Monique Montgomery; siblings Brian, David, James and Jeanne; nephews Stevens and Will; and nieces Deirdre, Megan and Caroline.

Donations in his memory may be made to Telluride’s General Support Fund or to the National Film Preserve’s Nugget Project.

After years attending the San Francisco International Film Festival, Luddy replaced Claude Jarman Jr. as its director in 1979, volunteering his time. In 2017, the fest honored him with its Mel Novikoff Award, given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.

“While his résumé is borderline absurd in its impact on contemporary film — Zoetrope, Telluride, Pacific Film Archive, our festival and so on — it is the personal and professional inspiration he gives every day to filmmakers and film professionals that defines the character of Tom Luddy,” late SFFILM executive director Noah Cowan said then.

“He makes connections that ensure great art continues to be created, and he is among the greatest showmen in the medium’s history. When Tom says, ‘You’ve got to check this out,’ you know it really matters.”

Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.

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