Festival Love

One town, two audacious ideas and 50 years of Telluride festivals

By Erin Spillane

Image the Telluride of 1974: A small town (the 1970 Census counted 553 inhabitants) with mostly dirt roads (only a small span of Colorado Avenue was paved back then) that relied primarily on a declining mining industry (the town’s last commercial mine would close in 1978). The brand-new Telluride Ski Area had opened in 1972, but it was tiny, with supporters who seemed more hopeful than confident.

Still, though, the town had a few things going for it. It was staggeringly beautiful. It was a National Historic Landmark District that boasted some wonderful historic architecture. And, more and more young ski bums were finding their way to what was fast becoming a fabled spot, adding some youthful energy and optimism to the wisdom and grit of the mining families that had lived in and loved these mountains for decades.

Add to this mix visionaries — impresarios, aficionados, dreamers — who each came up with the same audacious thought: Let’s start a festival.

Sounds improbable, right? And yet, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Telluride Film Festival, both founded in 1974, still exist today, pre-eminent gatherings in their respective genres the world over. In this time, Telluride itself has grown into a true festival capital with a cherished summertime culture that has grown over the years and across interests as diverse as the arts, hot air balloons, architecture, yoga, wine, classic cars, craft beers and mushrooms.

It’s safe to say that generations of festivalgoers in Telluride have learned to queue early for the tarp run and know that Chuck Jones and Able Gance are places as well as people. They have experienced the thrill of the main street balloon glow, gasped in unison at one of Mountainfilm’s mind-blowing offerings and marched joyously in the Mushroom Festival’s main street parade. They have danced in Town Park beneath full moons and summer snows, struck a pose in unison with a hundred other yogis and gotten down at late-night Juke Joint and Jazz After Dark gigs.

They are festivarians who know how to festival. As Bluegrass and Film celebrate their 50th annual events, what do we know about the characters and community that created them?

Origin stories

That old saying about mighty oaks growing from little acorns applies to both of Telluride’s half-century-old festivals. The story of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, for instance, begins with a local band called the Fall Creek Boys that was comprised of John Herndon, J.B. Matteotti, Kooster McAllister and Fred Shellman. “We had this little four-piece bluegrass band,” Herndon says modestly. “It was pretty funky. We played locally and did some outdoor stuff like the Fourth of July thing.”

That “Fourth of July thing” was an outdoor concert the Fall Creek Boys held at Telluride’s annual Fourth of July celebration in 1973 in Town Park. The concert seems to have been well received locally and, if nothing else, had prompted the construction of a stage in the park. Shortly after that, Shellman suggested a road trip to the National Flat-Picking Championship, a festival of bluegrass music held in Winfield, Kan.

There, Herndon recalls being blown away. “The headliners were Doc Watson, Norman Blake and New Grass Revival. We were just stunned. We had been listening to traditional bluegrass music and these guys were taking it in a whole different direction. It was really exciting what they were doing.”

He continues, “We were standing around a campfire one night after the last show and started talking about whether we could do a festival in Telluride. My favorite memory of the thing was that a friend of Fred’s had this bowling ball and somehow a game was started of rolling the bowling ball through the campfire and each time there was a shower of sparks. I always remember those sparks as signifying the moment the Telluride Bluegrass Festival was conceived.”

Herndon had grown up in nearby Norwood and as a teenager put on small rock concerts on the local tennis courts there. “From that, I had this vision in my head that you just make some posters and put up a PA system and people will come. And so that’s what we did with the first festival. We just winged it. It was more like a party, but the response was really good and people seemed to have a lot of fun — we had a lot of fun — and it pushed us to go forward to do it again the next year.”

And so it came to be that the first annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival was held on the Town Park stage June 22-23, 1974, the summer solstice weekend. Terry Tice, who opened main street clothing store The Telluride Toggery in 1972 and was a town councilmember in 1974, was one of a group of locals drafted in to help with security. He echoes Herndon: “The first Bluegrass was like a really great party.”

It was in the early 1970s that Bill and Stella Pence also entered the local scene. A Denver couple with deep professional and personal connections to movies and moviemaking, the Pences had acquired the leases on a number of theaters in Rocky Mountain towns, including the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride. Local Jim Bedford, who managed the opera house for them, recalls that early in 1974 Bill Pence, then a vice president at Janus Films, brought his friend, film historian James Card, on a tour of their theaters for the showing of a pair of classic 1920s films. As Bedford recalls it, “The shows at the Sheridan Opera House sold out, the only theater of the tour that did, and Card, calling the SOH ‘the jewel box in the Rockies,’ said to Pence that this would be a great place for a film festival. When they got back to Denver, they went to work, enlisting Tom Luddy, then from the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco, to assist with programming.”

The first Telluride Film Festival took place Labor Day weekend 1974 and had an eclectic but intriguing lineup of guests, including Francis Ford Coppola, then an up-and-coming director; the famed actress from film’s Golden Age, Gloria Swanson; and Leni Riefenstahl, the talented filmmaker whose work as a propagandist for Hitler’s Third Reich had made her infamous. Says Bedford, “Bill and Tom’s connections with European and avant-garde film and Jim Card’s connections to silent and classic film and filmmakers provided the mix and magic that became the Telluride Film Festival.”

Bedford continues, “That first year there were only two theaters, the opera house and the Airport Bar (where Clark’s Market is now). The opera house had 35mm projection equipment, but the bar just used a 16mm projector on a table and a cheapo drop-down screen. The second year we lost the bar, but started using the community center (a 1940s Quonset hut just west of the old high school) and expanded into the Nugget Theatre by year three.”

The way Bedford tells it, no one was more surprised than its organizers to find that each year’s Telluride Film Festival was a success. “For many years, they said that they only ever planned one year at a time, that at any time the festival could have gone down the tubes and they would have stepped aside. But, as it turned out, it didn’t go down the tubes.”

Serendipity

In fact, neither of these nascent festivals went down the tubes. In part because of some support from a community that itself was undergoing seismic changes as the local economy began to transition from mineral extraction to outdoor recreation. For some of those who lived in town at the time, embracing the new festivals made sense.

Says Tice, “The ski area opened in ‘72 and we all started to try to make our way in this new era. There was the notion, and it was the experience of other ski areas, that we would be busy during the winter season but the summer months would be lackluster. There was a feeling that bringing in some additional activity for summers was a good idea and I think there was consistent and widespread support for this early on.”

Gary Hickcox moved to Telluride in 1975 and later served as town manager and executive director of the chamber of commerce, among other roles. He also worked the Bluegrass festival for 35 years. Hickcox agrees that the relationship between the town and the newbie festivals was “symbiotic” at that time, adding, “It was serendipitous the way these things came together for both sides.”

Says Herndon, “The faction that really supported the festival in the early days included a lot of businesses in town because at that time summer just didn’t produce much income and people were really struggling. Suddenly, there was this really intense revenue stream that literally kept several businesses from going under, so they supported the festivals.”

Boosted in part by this early enthusiasm, the festivals grew in size and impact. Says Tice, “All of these events started as pretty mellow endeavors and then burgeoned over the years until each became quite a different creature.”

Hickcox adds, “I think one of the things that is unique about Telluride in terms of these events and how they grew is this: In my mind, those early

events were not ‘do a Lollapalooza’, they were ‘let’s have a party’ and then ‘well, that worked, let’s do it again next year’ and ultimately these festivals turned into big things.”

It would seem that another factor at play was timing.

Herndon and Bedford point out that there weren’t many festivals at this time, leaving a relatively uncrowded field of competitors vying for audiences. Explains Bedford, “There wasn’t a Sundance back then. There was a New York and a Chicago and a San Francisco festival, but they tended to be more of a local festival than an international one. By its very nature, Telluride had to appeal to an out-of-town audience.”

Of the rise of the Bluegrass Festival, Herndon echoes Bedford — “Music concerts in an open park weren’t terribly common back then. I think a lot of our success was down to timing.” — and also points to the “newgrass” movement that was gaining momentum in the 1970s.

“The other key thing is that we didn’t stick to traditional bluegrass music,” he says. “When we brought New Grass Revival to Telluride, people here were astonished by their musical ability and innovative approach. And the New Grass Revival guys, they then connected with other newgrass musicians elsewhere and told them what a great time they had had. All this played into our exponential growth — word just spread like wildfire about what was happening with bluegrass in Telluride.” >>

The three Ps

If Bluegrass was finding success in part because its focus on newgrass was dovetailing with trends in the genre, over at the Telluride Film Festival, there was a similar acknowledgement that innovative programming mattered.

Here, Bedford tells this story: “Bill [Pence] came up with this idea of the three Ps: people, programming and place. He felt that they were linked and that you had to have all three working together in order for a festival to work.”

Bedford pointed out that this emphasis on programming led to two rules specific to the Telluride Film Festival that have contributed over the years to the gathering’s mystique: “Every film that came to Telluride had to have a North American premiere in Telluride and every film had to have one of its filmmakers come with the film to Telluride. There have been exceptions, but the exceptions were rare, and these rules made the event different from every other film festival.”

Of the “people” element of Pence’s triumvirate, Bedford said, “When it came to people, Pence didn’t just mean the stars and the people who came with the films, he meant the people in the town. He meant the audience. He meant, especially, the staff, who he and Stella became very close to. They operated very much as a family, especially those first 10 years or so.”

Tice worked the Telluride Film Festival for many years, including as the emcee of the Able Gance outdoor cinema in Elks Park. He notes that the low-key nonchalance of Telluriders was appreciated by many of the festival’s celebrity invitees, in turn forging some lasting relationships. “I remember sitting at the Sheridan having a beer with Jack Nicholson, and the informality of interactions like that really caught on with the Film Fest crowd. They began to really dig it and many have made some deep connections with this community over the years.”

It sounds like it was the same for Bluegrass, where many of the same musicians come back year after year and there are festivarians who have been sitting with the same people for decades. “We were a contagious, good-time festival where people made a lot of friends,” Herndon says. “When they came back the next year, they saw those same friends again. They bonded over the years and that — seeing your old Bluegrass friends — became a thing.”

In thinking on Pence’s three Ps, there was, of course, also “place”. Tice notes, “From the get-go, most of us had a sense of how unique Telluride was as a place to hold a festival. It was a village, well-defined, with historic buildings and this incredible natural beauty, plus energetic, intelligent people who understood what was there and that it needed care and nurturing.”

Says Hickcox, “It’s the most beautiful place to have a festival. Period.”

And now?

Today, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is considered the preeminent Americana roots festival in the world. An award-winning event that sells out each year, the festival draws 10,000 festivarians each summer solstice weekend to the Fred Shellman Memorial Stage in Town Park for music, workshops and more. With an eye to the future, the festival has a longstanding commitment to sustainability with initiatives to reduce waste, incentivize reuse and recycling and send leftover food to local food banks. Bluegrass offsets 100 percent of emissions created by the event, including travel to and from Telluride, something it has been doing since 2007. For some years now, the event has donated the considerable proceeds of its beer booth tip jar to area nonprofits.

The Telluride Film Festival likewise has an international reputation as a gathering that is both eclectic (“a film buff’s film festival” is how it is often described) and relevant. How relevant? For an incredible stretch beginning in 2009 with Slumdog Millionaire, eight of nine winners in a row of the Oscar for best film had their premiere in Telluride. From its humble beginnings with just two venues, today’s event, which sells out months in advance, now has 10, seven of which are created especially for the festival, still always held Labor Day weekend. Sadly, in recent months Bill Pence (who along with Stella stepped back from Film Fest in 2006) and Tom Luddy have both passed away, leaving the Sheridan Opera House’s “SHOW” sign, itself a festival emblem, a little dimmer.

Still, Tice remarks, “It’s pretty impressive to see what these events have become.”

Says Bedford, “Whether it was for Bluegrass or Film, there was just this idea of Telluride, a beautiful place that was always welcoming to those crazy people who came to us with great ideas.”