A Mention in the LA Times

Telluride Film Festival is a labor of cinephilia for its SHOWCorps

What makes the Telluride Film Festival so beloved by its SHOWCorps workers? Movies, certainly, but also community. Even love.

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The general scene at the Telluride Film Festival. (Kevin Van Rensselaer / Telluride Film Festival By Celine Wright

August 23, 2013, 12:00 p.m.

KatieTrainor spends her working life surrounded by the movies as film collections manager of New York's Museum of Modern Art. No one would blame her if she took a break from the world of motion pictures during her annual vacation to the mountains of Colorado. But in the days leading to Labor Day, as summer begins its exit and Colorado's leaves get ready to turn, Trainor will work more than 40 hours as a theater manager at the Telluride Film Festival. It's been her late-summer ritual since 2001.

"I don't do it for the money," Trainor says. "It's the least-paying festival job I've had, but it's the one I won't ever give up."

George Christensen, who has been working the festival for 21 years, arrives in Telluride each year from his home in Chicago by bicycle.

He used to bike all the way from Chicago, but now the 65-year-old professional bike messenger takes the train to Grand Junction and makes the 128-mile climb up to Telluride's nearly 9,000-foot elevation — a breeze compared with his annual journey to the Cannes Film Festival, which he attends and then stays to follow the Tour de France. On that trip, between the tour route and his traveling, he rides more than 5,000 miles.

"I love only bicycling more than cinema," says Christensen, who always comes to Telluride in early August to start work in the festival's shipping office processing sponsorship material.

He first heard about Telluride from the writings of the lateRoger Ebert, who famously said the festival is "like Cannes died and went to heaven."

Celebrating its 40th edition this Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival is a gem among film festivals not only for its location and film selections but also for the heart behind it all: the nearly 900 volunteers and staff who run the operation.

SHOWCorps, as the festival's conglomeration of hardworking staff and film-buff volunteers is known, draws people ages 21 to 80 from all parts of the country — 117 of the more than 900 who help run Telluride are from California alone.

Marked by the green passes around their necks, the job requires a minimum of 40 hours of work during the festival, which this year is running five days instead of the usual four.

Trainor, who started at the festival as an assistant theater manager and is now the manager of the new Werner Herzog Theatre, a 650-seat venue that required the festival to hire nearly 100 additional staff members, says the experience is less like work and more like adult summer camp. It has all the familiar camp touchstones –- the fresh air, the excitement of being reunited with good friends, and even the mess-hall-style meals.

"The biggest perk is the landscape and then the movies," says Trainor, "I love the mountains. I don't usually get to see stars and hear such quiet."

Trainor also works as a projectionist at the Sundance Film Festival and the Traverse City Film Festival. But Telluride, she says, is special.

"Telluride is the one everyone wishes they could go to," she says. "It's about watching the films and talking about them. It's not about the parties; it's about having thoughtful discussions."

That tone was set back in 1973, when the town was just finding a new identity after its mining era had long passed and the ski resort was in its earliest days. James Card, head of the motion picture collection at Rochester, N.Y.'s George Eastman House, one of the world's oldest film archives, envisioned the festival after he got a look at the town's newly renovated Sheridan Opera House, owned for many years by Bill Pence, a partner in the foreign and classic movie distributor Janus Films, and his wife, Stella.

Card rallied the Pences and Tom Luddy, then program director of Berkeley's influential Pacific Film Archive, to join him in bringing films and filmmakers to Telluride. A tribute to Gloria Swanson opened the first festival, which began on Aug. 30, 1974.

Decades later, the festival still finds its home within the walls of a box canyon surrounded by the peaks of the San Juan Mountains. World premieres from recent festivals include "Slumdog Millionaire," "The King's Speech" and last year's "Argo," all Academy Award winners for best picture.

The festival also highlights foreign films, unique silent films and old favorites picked by a new guest director each year.

Secrecy is another thing that sets Telluride apart. Neither the ranks of employees nor the 2,000 pass holders have any idea what the guest director's film selections will be until the program is released on the Thursday of the festival. This rarely keeps away attendees or volunteers.

"Everyone takes this big, blind leap," says Julie Huntsinger, the festival's executive director. "It's alchemy, really. Everybody loves the balance of the films and the beauty of the place."

"This is part of my life; I can't imagine giving it up," Christensen says. "There are a couple thousand film festivals, and they are all vying to get actors and filmmakers, but when they come to Telluride they recognize it is in a class by itself."

For SHOWCorps members working the festival, prerequisites are minimal, but enthusiasm is a must.

"We're looking for a volunteer who is willing to do anything and go with the flow," says Lucy Lerner, head SHOWCorps manager. "Someone who is willing to put on gloves during the opening-night picnic and sort through a Dumpster." She isn't kidding. She notes that even HBO executives have done such tasks in the past.

The man scooping popcorn might be a doctor who's given up his scrubs for the festival, as long as he gets to see a few films.

"These are accomplished professionals and some of them take their vacation off to come work with us," Huntsinger says. "I want to make sure that we continue building that kind of devotion, because it is invaluable."

With a population in Telluride of nearly 2,400 and a need for SHOWCorps members at a number roughly equal to half of the town's residents, only a fifth of the festival's staff and volunteer crew is local.

"People who live here have families and kids and lives," says Lerner, herself a local. "They can't necessarily take the week or two off. It's easier when you can dedicate yourself 110%."

Ann Marie Jodlowski, who has lived in Telluride since 2004, juggles raising her kids and volunteering for the festival each year. "My ex-husband knows that these eight days are my time," she says. "It's like my vacation.

Jodlowski started off cleaning toilets at one of the theaters — a job that was made enjoyable, she says, thanks to the camaraderie among the staff. Jodlowski is now the "Bennie Queen," which means she hands out goodie bags, or "Bennies" (short for "benefit bags"), filled with a festival T-shirt and other sponsored items.

"It's such a fun culture," she says. "I never think that I can live off of Diet Coke and popcorn for four days, but every year I do."

For some, the fun advances to more serious relationships.

It took Pamela Chandran seven years of working at the film festival to finally go out with her longtime crush, Bruce Mazen. They met in Telluride in 1991 — she was the first staff member he met: Mazen was lost and she pointed him in the right direction.

Chandran originally came to the festival when she was 18 and a student at Dartmouth College, where Bill Pence was the film director. Now a Californian and a lawyer who lives in Glendale, she worked a variety of odd jobs in the first years but now is a film inspector and introduces movies. She's what the festival calls a "ringmaster."

"It was overwhelming how the people who had been coming for so many years were like family to each other," says Chandran of her early years at Telluride. Little did she know that she too would forge lasting bonds here.

"It took a while before we realized we had a mutual crush," she says of the years that passed when Chandran and Mazen would see each other only during the festival.

Eventually the two got married — with many other Telluride Film Festival staffers in attendance. This will be the first year they'll bring their children, 4 and 1.

The Tuesday after the festival, when all the madness is over, they go with their children to the Sheridan Chop House, the same Telluride restaurant where they had their first date.

And so another Telluride tradition will be passed to a new generation.

"Chasing the Chimney Sweep"

Just as we did last year after I returned from The Tour de France, Janina and I drove up to Michigan for some R & R--camping, hiking, biking and a dose of cinema at Michael Moore's film festival in Traverse City.

Moore modeled his film fest, now in its ninth year, after Telluride, considered the "crown jewel of film festivals."  They both offer a nightly free screening in an outdoor park and a handful of other free films in other venues along with free panel discussions.  They both open with an opening night feed on the town's Main Street and include tributes to film luminaries in their program.  And most importantly, they are dominated by a strong sense of celebrating, not marketing, cinema. 

Traverse City makes for a good appetizer to Telluride, which I head out to for my annual four-week stint looking after its shipping department after returning from Michigan.  We enjoyed Traverse City even more than we did last year and extended our stay an extra day caught up in Michael Apted's Up series.  Apted was one of the tributees and Moore played the entire series he is famous for, which began in 1964, and even brought one of the subjects of the film to Traverse City--Susan, one of the East End girls.  It was her first time to America. She is well accustomed to talking about the films, as every seven years, when the next one is broadcast on British television, it is a huge national event and she is invited to appear on every British chat show around.  Janina and I were the lone stalwarts seeing each of the installments, though quite a few others, who we got to know very well, saw a good many of them.

Though there were no bicycling films in the festival, I did discover a cycling book at the local library that had somehow eluded me since it was published in 2006--"Chasing the Chimey Sweep."  The Chimney Sweep was Maurice Garin, the winner of the first Tour de France in1903.  In 2003 four touring cyclists from New Zealand ventured to France to follow the route of that first Tour de France.  "How did I not know about this book?" was my first reaction upon pulling it from the shelf.  It was all I could do not to plunge immediately in to it and forsake the film festival.  I immediately went on line to check worldcat.org to see if any library near Chicago might have a copy.  Not another library in America had it on its shelves.  Traverse City made me acquire a library card to use its computer.  It didn't matter that I lived nearly 400 miles away.  So I was actually able to check the book out and read it as soon as I returned home.  

This was the tenth book by Selwyn Parker, all of them mostly about history.  That promised good research as well as good writing.  I was given some pause though when the back of the book referred to this endeavor as a "bizarre quest."  There was nothing "bizarre" about it in the least.  It was a great idea for a book and as good of a bike tour as bicycling around New Zealand, as I have done, or any other country, with the added benefit of reliving that first Tour de France. 

That was an initial warning that this book might not be quite up to snuff and the reason why it hadn't caught  my attention.  Though Parker was a veteran cyclist, he hadn't done much touring.  He was novice enough that he and his wife chose to ride mountain bikes, as he was uncertain of the quality of roads he'd find in France. He couldn't have done much research on that, as the roads of France are as good as any in the world.

An even bigger mistake was to decide to travel with packs on their backs rather than panniers.  His wife, who turned fifty at the end of their travels, quickly switched to panniers.  Their travel companions had more touring experience and rode with panniers from the start.  They also traveled with a tent and sleeping bags and camped, while Parker and his wife stayed in hotels.  All too much of the book was devoted to them trying to find hotels and also trying to find their way.  They were repeatedly getting lost.  At least Parker was fluent in French.

Their undertaking was sabotaged by the hottest summer France had experienced in years.   The heat repeatedly forced them to cut their riding short, once after only twenty-five miles.  At one point he admits he was so done in that it felt as if his "brain was suffering from a slow puncture."  His wife whines about the hygiene of squat toilets, rather than being happy about the ubiquity of public toilets.  They remain clueless to cemeteries being a source of water, something that would have made the heat much more endurable.  The book doesn't exactly live up to its subtitle--"A joyride around the first Tour de France."

They quickly discovered that following the entire route of that first Tour was beyond their capabilities even though it avoided the Alps and the Pyrenees, which really would have had them staggering.  Rather than continuing from Lyon all the way to Marseille, they turned west towards Bordeaux well before reaching the Mediterrean.  Nor did they continue all the way to the Atlantic, turning north back to Paris without even coming close to Bordeaux.  At the end they give up on going to the Parc des Princes velodrome where The Tour finished.

The book is fully redeemed though by its regular updates from that first Tour.  They aren't as frequent or as long as my tastes would prefer, but at least they elevate this from a mere touring book.  Parker understood enough of Tour history to include much material on its founder, Henri Desgrange, a character as interesting as any Tour rider. Parker aptly credits him for being "at the forefront of making cycling much more than a tool of transport...embedding its intoxicating pleasures into the marrow of French culture."  He doesn't get all his facts correct though, such as stating that Desgrange was on the scene when Eugene Christophe repaired his broken fork during the 1913 Tour, one of the most legendary events in Tour history.   The book regularly quotes books, but does not include footnotes.

They conclude their 28-day, 1250-mile tour before that year's Tour de France commences, not even trying to intersect with it.  They had a naive concern that they needed to complete their ride before July when they feared the roads would become clogged with French motorists on vacation, a concern even more misplaced than the quality of the French roads.

Despite its many shortcomings, the book did receive New Zealand's Whitcoulls travel book of the year award.  There is no denying that Parker had a great idea for a book.  But it was a book that needed to be written by someone who was more of a bicyclist and Tour enthusiast.  It is another example that it takes more than a little research to truly understand a subject.  Parker is an accomplished writer, but he was often straining to meet a quota of words when he didn't have something relevant to write about, even observing at one point, "the sun returns from the east after having gone down in the west."  He is so prone to excessive detail that he mentions nocturnal visits to the loo.

I don't regret in the least though discovering this book.  If nothing else, it informed me of a plaque in Lyons marking the conclusion of the first stage of the 1903 Race that I will have to search out.  He also mentioned a bike shop in Fourchambault owned by a former Tour rider, though he didn't mention who, that I will add to my list of places to visit next year.