Founder of the Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado, the American was the right arm of Francis Ford Coppola and the Sherpa of Jean-Luc Godard. He died on February 13, at the age of 79, in California.
by Thomas Sotinel
He was the right arm of Francis Ford Coppola, the sherpa of Jean-Luc Godard during the American expeditions of the director of Souffle de Bouute, an unparalleled archivist, the producer of Paul Schrader and Barbet Schroeder and, finally , the creator of a festival in the depths of the Colorado mountains, in Telluride, a demonstration that has become, over the years, one of the major institutions in American cinema. Eminence Grise du Nouvelle Hollywood, Tom Luddy died on February 13, after a long illness, he was 79 years old.
Born in New York, on June 4, 1943, Tom Luddy left for California, where he studied physics, then literature, at the University of Berkeley. He is above all the main leader of film buffs on campus. His diploma in his pocket, he leaves for the east coast, where he tried the profession of distributor. But he quickly returned to the Bay of San Francisco (California), where he was entrusted with the Pacific Film Archive, which is then a minor department of Berkeley. He made it one of the first cinematheques in the world. Programming hundreds of films each year, he celebrates as well as the ascending stars, like Werner Herzog, who made his American debut thanks to him, as the stars then forgotten, like Douglas Sirk (1897-1987).
Encyclopedic knowledge
In 1968, he organized a retrospective Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), in the presence of the filmmaker. It is the beginning of a professional relationship which will lead them until the 1980s. Molly Ringwald described, in a New Yorker article published in December 2022 , how Tom Luddy had organized their meeting -she, the young star of the teenage comedies of John Hughes (1950-2009), and he, the director of the Chinese -, an interview which leads to the casting of Molly Ringwald in the King Lear (1987 ), de Godard.
Tom Luddy, discreet man, not very expansive (in the tribute she pays him on the festival site, Julie Huntsinger, the current Director of Telluride, talks about a “sphinx”), is at the heart of Californian cultural revolutions. He became friends with Coppola and George Lucas. We read, in a portrait that the New York Times devoted to him in 1984:” We can measure the influence of Mr. Ludud to the fact that before the shooting of the godfather [1972], he showed the Italian [1915, produced by] Thomas Ince, to Francis Ford Coppola, Les Vitelloni [Federico Fellini, 1953] to George Lucas, who was about to shoot American Graffiti [1973] and La Fortress Hidden [1958], from Kurosawa, before Lucas embarked in the war of Stars [1977]. “In 1978, Tom Luddy made his only appearance on the screen, in the remake of the invasion of the profaners, which Philip Kaufman produced in the streets of San Francisco…
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