August 28, 2003

Sondheim At Telluride

Every year, the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado (which runs every Labor Day weekend) invites a guest to curate some of the festival's films and in today's Times Elvis Mitchell talks with Steven Sondheim about his involvement this year. Telluride began this tradition after festival co-founder and NYU Cinema studies prof William K. Everson retired.

Cinecultist is particularly fond of anything Everson related because we've been working on organizing and cataloguing his monstrously huge book collection for the last year. The man collected books on everything from Bollywood and classic Westerns to catalogues of Swedish cinema and trashy star biographies up the ying yang. Everson had incredibly ecclectic taste in movies, so it seems fitting that a movie lover with self-avowed equally goofy taste like Sondheim should be assuming his duties this year. As he tells Mitchell in the times:

"I just thought I'm being invited as a freak of nature, as someone who's from another profession who happens to love movies," he said. "I am always stunned when anybody under 50 knows what I do. Because the theater is, as we say, not the province of young people. Movies are."

Posted by karen at August 28, 2003 2:33 PM