Telluride, Colo. -- The major league baseball strike hasn't kept people from playing. When documentary filmmaker Ken Burns had the premiere for his public TV series "Baseball" at the 21st Telluride Film Festival earlier this month, he thought it would be appropriate to produce an actual game.
So Mr. Burns and a team of festival participants went up against a team of residents of this former mining town nearly 9,000 feet high in the Rockies of southwestern Colorado.
The movie team had a surreal quality. Holding down first base was Werner Herzog, the German director with a well-deserved reputation as a mad visionary, thanks to such films as "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo." Mr. Burns played shortstop and, as you'd expect, managed the team. And over at third base was folk singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, a town resident who showed his true loyalties by playing for the filmmaking team.
How'd they do? Not badly, really, though they're much more adroit with cameras and guitars than with bats and balls. The game's 82-year-old umpire, Negro League star and "Baseball" interview subject Buck O'Neil, could only smile at some of their less-than-professional play. (The first installment of "Baseball" airs on WMPT, Channel 22 and Channel 67, tonight at 8 p.m.)
The subject of a festival tribute, Mr. Burns qualifies as a hit here. Anticipating questions about his recently grown beard, the boyish 41-year-old filmmaker quipped during his tribute acceptance speech: "I grew this beard so I would look a little older, and somebody said, 'Now you look like you're 18, not 16.' "
Mr. Burns' just-for-fun baseball game is an example of what sets Telluride apart from other fall film festivals that serve as indicators of which studio releases and quirky independent films will be coming our way in the months ahead. Unlike the Venice, Toronto and New York film festivals -- mammoth affairs -- Telluride is an idiosyncratic little festival that combines major releases with cinematic esoterica.
In that spirit, this year's event included world premieres of Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway" and Tim Burton's "Ed Wood," as well as the American premieres of such arcane stuff as an Algerian movie called "Bab El-Oued City."
Truly quirky is that the festival schedule isn't announced until the day before it starts. It's no wonder a recent article in Variety about this season's film festivals described Telluride as "the funkiest of the bunch."
Among the movies that will definitely come down off the mountain and appear in a mall near you is Mr. Allen's delightfully silly "Bullets Over Broadway," a Prohibition-era story in which John Cusack is cast as a playwright whose Broadway debut is bankrolled by the mob. Mr. Allen's script is sharp, the large ensemble cast zestfully over-emotes, and the period set design is more opulent than the frugal Mr. Allen's norm.
More problematic is writer-director Michael Tolkin's "The New Age," about what happens when post-yuppies Judy Davis and Peter Weller lose their jobs and have to scramble to find ways to keep their house beautiful in Los Angeles. As you'd expect from the screenwriter of "The Player," there is some wickedly on-target satire. But Mr. Tolkin is also the guy who wrote and directed "The Rapture," so the New Age mysticism in "The New " Age" similarly leaves you creepily uncertain about how he feels about such religious outbursts.
Ms. Davis, who promises to become the Katharine Hepburn of her generation, was the recipient of a Telluride tribute. It was
especially pleasing to see clips of this intensely intuitive Australian actress in "My Brilliant Career," "A Passage to India," "Naked Lunch" and other films. After a clip from Mr. Allen's "Husbands and Wives," one of the actors in that film, director Sydney Pollack, stepped forward from the audience to present Ms. Davis with the tribute medallion. It's the kind of clubby moment one can count on out here.
British director Ken Loach, whose brutally rank depictions of lower-middle-class life in such recent features as "Riff-Raff" and "Raining Stones" have brought him a lot of critical attention, was represented by his latest film, "Ladybird, Ladybird."
Starring Crissy Rock in an amazing screen debut, it's the relentless tale of a woman who has four children by as many fathers. The intervention of the British welfare state -- which takes away her children -- evoked such visceral responses in the festival audience that sophisticated people were actually shouting at the screen. Look for this movie to make many "10 Best" lists, and look for Ms. Rock's forceful performance to make her a household name, at least in movie art houses.
Sure to arouse interest among the urban intelligentsia is Louis Malle's "Vanya On 42nd Street," which reunites the great French director with Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, with whom he collaborated on "My Diner With Andre." This is a film version of Mr. Gregory's stage production of a David Mamet translation of the Chekhov play "Uncle Vanya." Because it was only staged for small, invited audiences, the creative team decided it wanted to make a permanent film record. So they filmed a rehearsal in the derelict New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, once home to the Ziegfeld Follies and now slated to be renovated as a live theater by Disney. This may not be much more than filmed theater, but Mr. Shawn's performance as Uncle Vanya is priceless.
Of other films at this year's festival, favorable buzz was heard about several films from Australia and New Zealand, including the comedy "Muriel's Wedding" and the Maori-family-centered contemporary drama "Once Were Warriors."
Also well-received was renowned Romanian film and theater director Lucian Pintilie ("The Oak"), who was represented by "An Unforgettable Summer." His astutely constructed story about how a military family is affected by ethnic strife in the 1920s is gripping and reminds us of more recent ethnic conflicts in the Balkans.
Another film worth a look is Werner Herzog's documentary "The Transformation of the World Into Music." This behind-the-scenes study of Wagnerian opera productions at Bayreuth is conventional by Mr. Herzog's loony standards but is still of interest to opera mavens.
At the disappointing end of the festival spectrum, Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea ("Memories of Underdevelopment") has a new film, "Strawberry and Chocolate," whose story about a gay man who picks up an ardently straight communist makes you wonder why Castro's censors let it out of the country. The movie is OK, but it's done in by a turgid pace.
Truly disastrous is "Arizona Dream," already shown in European theaters and only now making it to America. As crazy as its cast -- Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Lili Taylor, Paulina Porizkova and Michael J. Pollard -- it resembles a "head" movie from the '60s. The Dunaway character's attempt to build a flying machine leads to a lot of crashes, which is exactly what the movie does.
Of the assorted events at the festival, one of the most outstanding was "Writing for Hitch," featuring two of Alfred Hitchcock's screenwriters. Charles Bennett, whose association with Hitchcock goes back to the late 1920s, was unable to attend due to illness, but his 94-year-old voice participated via long-distance phone hookup. Making it in person was John Michael Hayes, who scripted "Rear Window." Moderator for the event was documentary filmmaker Errol ("The Thin Blue Line") Morris.
It was poignant that these two screenwriters, talking together for the first time, both have associations with Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much." Mr. Bennett worked on the 1934 version, and Mr. Hayes on the 1956 remake.
The genuine revelation of their conversation involved Hitchcock's wife, Alma, whom scholars have generally considered an important screenwriter and general collaborator throughout his career. Mr. Bennett asserted that Hitchcock, who loved money as much as he loved making movies, had Alma's name added to screen credits in order to build an extra salary into the budget.
"Creatively, no, she did nothing," Mr. Bennett insisted. "They worked together as man and wife, but she wasn't a creator. I know that, because I worked with Hitchcock on six pictures in England. Alma was around and gave us beautiful cocktails."
Another program of the sort you only get at Telluride was composed of clips and a feature film starring Ninon Sevilla, the Cuban-born star of Mexican cinema who was known as the Marlene Dietrich of Latin America. Her madcap melodramas from the 1940s and 1950s have more plot twists and dance steps than you can count, and the actress had a great time at the festival blowing kisses and waving to everyone within 30 feet of her. She sported a different colorful outfit at every appearance and clearly was having a great time. Weren't we all.