Tom Luddy 1943–2023

Larisa Shepitko and Tom Luddy at Telluride Film Festival, 1977. Photo: Richard Leacock. Tom sent this photo to me for our 2016 Larisa Shepitko retrospective.

I did not know Tom Luddy well, but I kept meeting him irregularly since his 1987 visit to the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Lapland where I registered his silent dignity. In 1993 I visited the Telluride Film Festival for the first time, and witnessed his mercurial engagement as festival director.

Tom Luddy was a film programmer of the first order, but there was an even more profound dimension in his commitment, something that I have learned to increasingly appreciate during the pandemic years of enforced distancing.

Our calling is about films, but even more importantly, it's about people. Our calling is to connect the artists who created the films with the people who visit our screenings.

"It takes talent to appreciate talent", said Stanley Donen who visited Sodankylä in 1994, and that could serve as a motto for Tom Luddy.

When Tom met people, they had a feeling of having been seen. Tom had an inner eye, and when he saw, it was not in an instrumental way, not as a means to an end. Seeing was the end. The immense pleasure of that happening was obvious.

The happiness in such encounters was infectious, and the expanding circles of such encounters created a warm and enthusiastic festival atmosphere.

Tom was a wizard of introductions. Between screenings he could simultaneously conduct multiple introductions between guests. Tom was a master matchmaker. He positively glowed in that role.

A special Telluride memory for me is when Tom introduced me to William K. Everson, a grand old man of film history and preservation. Two weeks later I visited Everson's class at the New York University, followed with an invitation to Everson's home for a private screening. The year after, we invited Everson to Helsinki for a series of Pre-Code treasures from his collections.

Tom Luddy had a distinguished official and credited career as a film producer and Francis Ford Coppola's right-hand man. But behind the scenes, his influence was greater, unfathomable.

I liked Kasi Lemmons's recent film I Wanna Dance: The Whitney Houston Movie, and one of the reasons was the affinity with Tom Luddy in Stanley Tucci's quietly compelling performance as Clive Davis, the visionary music industry executive of Arista Records.

I was in correspondence with Tom who sent Telluride programs and followed our Helsinki programming and shared memories inspired by our themes. How he helped Agnès Varda in California to meet Black Panthers and Uncle Yanco. How he guided Larisa Shepitko in Telluride through Brezhnev era surveillance (Tom wrote an excellent memoir about this. I wish I could find a link).

Tom's interest in culture and society was many-sided. He loved music. He was widely read, even in Finnish literature: he followed Sofi Oksanen's oeuvre in Lola Rogers's translations. In Finland, Tom's key connection was Peter von Bagh whom he knew since 1972. Midnight Sun Film Festival was inspired by Telluride Film Festival.

Born in New York City, Tom came to the University of Berkeley in Northern California to study physics in 1962. Stanford University was the other major university of the Bay Area, which kept flourishing into the world's most important center of information technology, including Silicon Valley. In the heart of counterculture and the Summer of Love, in an atmosphere of some of the greatest musical and literary exploration of the era, Tom groomed the Pacific Film Archive into one of the most exciting hubs of film culture.

I was humbled by the fact that Tom was a reader of my blog and sent dvd's and links to watch. When Jonathan Miller died, Tom advised me to view Miller's films. Tom had met the Renaissance man only once: "we were both close friends of Susan Sontag and met at a dinner on the eve of Susan’s burial at Montparnasse." The Sontag and Miller connections are illuminating.

"The company you keep". That, too, could serve as a motto for Tom.

In our calling as film programmers the memory of Tom Luddy lives on as a model in the spirit of inspiration and generosity.

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P.S. 28 Feb 2023. Meanwhile, I have read many wonderful obituaries. I just finished reading a particularly outstanding tribute by Catherine Shoard for The Guardian, 21 Feb 2023.

P.S. 26 May 2023. The brilliant Pacific Film Archive tribute "Ambassador of the Cinema" in June-July 2023.