 She wants to know what you're doing. She wants to know what you're doing. I mean, they're supposed to be over. We need like a whole stack. And we do have another set of codes. Yeah. I mean, I think they are kind of distributing from. We're going to have to use a note. Fairfond. Fairfond. I would imagine. I don't know if that's the way they're going to do that. Yeah. Nobody has heard of this one. Oh, so the calibrary. The library. So then to have you this afternoon, the library is very pleased to be partnering with the Green Mountain Film Festival for the festival. Thank you to Orban Media for coming and for being here. And it's always a pleasure. And it's fun to hear your stories about being here at different times and different topics. So today, founder of Green Mountain Film Festival and author of Save Me a Seat, Life with Movies, Rick Winston's here with me. Thanks so much. Thank you, Michelle. Hi. It's wonderful to be here as part of the festival after being one of the people responsible for putting it on for many years. Nice to be in the audience. Trying to choose like everybody else what I'm going to go to next. I'm not actually going to read this afternoon, but instead talk about the five chapters in which I discuss the origins and evolution of the Green Mountain Film Festival. And starting with a cartoon. Now, why is the remote working not now, but it was five minutes ago? I've been carrying around this notebook for about 15, I don't know how long. It's a cartoon. You may not be able to read the caption on it, but it's two guys who are sitting in the coffee house at the top of this incredible Italian countryside, and one of them says to the other, what this place needs is a film festival. I cut it out and this was my festival notebook for many, many years. And oddly enough, in the late 90s, there were film festivals popping up all over the place. But we at the Savoy had really not much desire to go to. My wife Andrea Cerrota is here. We would go up to the Montreal World Film Festival once in a while and say, wow, what a great thing. There are hundred people show up at nine in the morning to see a Polish film that nobody has ever heard of, but somehow that didn't translate into doing anything right in Montpelier. In 1997, three, I'll say younger people in Montpelier approached us at the Savoy. So at that time, Gary Ireland and I were the partners at the Savoy. Andrea was the manager of the Downstairs video. And Sean Garvey, Cindy Leung and Jane Knight of the three, Jane Knight is still around running the children's department of Bear Pond. They came in and said, we've got an idea. How about a week-long film festival? So we talked it over and they said, OK, we'll do that. And we said, this is what you have to do. This is how much we will rent you the theater for for a week. So the film festival happened and it was moderately well attended. But Sean, one of the three people running the festival, got a job in California the week before the festival opened. And Cindy got a job in California the week that the festival ended. So basically, that was the end of that version of the Green Mountain Film Festival. So there it sat for a year and a half. So some of you may remember Chris Wood. Chris is alive and well. He's living in South Stratford, Tunbridge area. But at that time, Chris was a projectionist at the Savoy. And he was a community organizer par excellence. I don't know how many organizations he either helped start or helped run. And one day in 1999, he sat down with the three of us and said, anything ever going to happen with that film festival again? We had the name. We had a nonprofit organization that was the Umbrella sponsor. And we all looked at each other and we said, Chris, if you have anything to do with it, definitely let's do it. Because we knew that Chris had great expertise in throwing together something with many, many moving parts. So that was the first film festival in 1999, a photo by Emily Sloan of Worcester. And this is why there is some confusion. When exactly the film festival started? Just yesterday, seeing a movie at the Savoy, it said Green Mountain Festival established 1997. But 1999 is really when we at the Savoy were able to put our own stamp on things. And one thing that we all agreed on was that this was a unique opportunity for a community involvement. And for every, just about every film that we showed, we got various organizations to cosponsor, to put on a panel, things like that. And these were some of the movies that we showed that first year. In 1981, a filmmaker named Ira Wall did a wonderful documentary called Best Boy about his developmentally delayed cousin Philly. And Philly's desire to have an independent life. Well, now, 15 or so years later, Ira Wall did another documentary about Philly. And Philly expressed a desire to have a bar mitzvah. And so it was called Best Man. And we had, for this movie, the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights, the Vermont Center for Independent Living, Beth Jacobson, Agog, were all the cosponsors. Nora Jacobson, the filmmaker who now lives permanently in Norwich, but back then she was going back and forth from Norwich to Hoboken, New Jersey. And she did a film about the gentrification in Hoboken called Delivered Vacant, which is what the post office stamps when you're no longer, there's no longer anybody to deliver the mail to. And so for that we had the Central Vermont Community Land Trust, the Citizens for Vital Communities organization, some of which don't exist anymore around here. The movie was called A Healthy Baby Girl, and the filmmaker was Judith Hellfand, who came up from New York. And this was an incredible documentary. It was about her mother, who unknowingly, like many, many other mothers in the 1950s, took the synthetic DES drug, creating a lot of havoc for their family and health problems that persist for Judith, who was, even as she was getting into her 40s. And so for that one we had the Vermont Commission on Women and a whole bunch of other community organizations. The farm was a documentary about Angola Prison, and we had the Commissioner of Corrections, who came to be on a panel with somebody you might know, Dr. Dworkin, a Montpelier resident who had done, like, death row appeals as a younger attorney. And we had scored quite a coup getting one of our feature films. That man's name is David Riker, and he did a movie called La Ciudad, The City, which was four discrete stories about immigrants from Mexico and Central America, making their way in New York City. And at that time there was quite an act of support groups for El Salvador, Nicaragua, et cetera, here. And David was thrilled to be invited with his movie that had not been yet released commercially. And it's still, after all those years, one of the high points of the many years of the festival. We invited the documentary in John Cohen, familiar to many as one of the three New Lost City ramblers of the old folk era. But John is a polymath. He did so many different things, and one of them was a filmmaker, and he showed the high lonesome sound, the documentary about Appalachian folk music, and he had made many, many, many trips to the Andes, and this showed his documentary, Mountain Music of Peru. So that's some of the films from the first year, and it was clear that the festival was a great success. People loved it, and no sooner was it over than, okay, what do we do better next time? More next time. So right into the, every year we had a different artist in the area to design the cover. So this will kind of take you through the years. Ann Davis of Barry, Ed Epstein of Montpelier, Ed Corrin of Brookfield, and he gave us permission to use the mousse as our logo for whatever we wanted. Mary Azarian, her woodcut of people waiting online outside the Savoy, and Hal Mayforth, who took the International Film Festival rubric literally. And there's a little story behind this last cover. That's John O'Brien, the filmmaker, and Fred Tuttle, who he immortalized in the movie Man with a Plan. John's just one of these people who, everything he touches turns to art. And one day we got something in the mail addressed to the Savoy in a manila folder, a padded envelope, but on the other side of the padded envelope, so he was a little homage to the New Yorker artist Stahl Steinberg, and we have the Green Mountain Film Festival as the separation for before the festival and after the festival, this way to summer, holidays in the rearview mirror. So we said to John, this would make such a great cover for the festival. He worked on it and worked on it and he just couldn't get it right. He said, but I got another idea, and how's this? And it turned out to be one of the most popular programs we ever did. I love the sweat beads coming off the Robin's head. So this, I think that year we made a t-shirt of this. So I devote one chapter in the book to a highlight of the festival for me and some of which took place in this very room, which was Conversations with Film Critics. And this had kind of a roundabout start. A neighbor of ours in Calis, the poet Ron Padgett, told us about his friend who is a writer, a poet filmmaker named Rudy Burkhart. And Rudy had just died like a year or two earlier and Ron said, how about if I curate a showing of Rudy's films and I'll come up and introduce it. And so that went well. And then Ron said, you know if you ever want to get Philip Lopate, who is a great poet, writer, essayist and who has written many, many film essays, I'll put you in touch with Philip and we'll get him to come up and speak. So I think that it would have been 2002 I interviewed Philip and I was very, very, very apprehensive. As I was with all these, you know, you get to interview somebody you've read for years and it can be intimidating. But to a person, all these film critics who came to Montpellier just were so friendly and generous and loved being here. And so Philip and I had a great chat and he said, well, now if you want to be put in touch with other people, you know, just let me know. So the next year, Molly Haskell, who I'd been reading for years in The Village Voice and other periodicals and you can tell from the blinds that it's happened right over there. Stuart Clowans, who is the film critic for The Nation magazine for many, many years. You can see what a good time he was having. And one of my favorites happened across the street at the Unitarian Church, Kenneth Turan, who at the time was the NPR. He did commentaries every Monday morning, Friday morning on NPR. And at the time was still a working critic for the Los Angeles Times. And when it came time for questions, it was really funny because our friends had made a reference to Will, the glamorous life of the film critic. And he started to laugh and laugh and laugh. And he said, well, if your idea of glamorous is being in LA freeway traffic for three hours and then eating Korean takeout food before the screening in your car, well, maybe that's glamorous. And the pressures of that daily reviewing for the LA Times made it just a special treat for him to be in Montpelier. And while we had him, we got him to, on that weekend, introduce two other films of his choosing. Let's see. So much for that remote. There we go. In 2010, we not only had a critic, but a critic who had just made his first movie. Godfrey Cheshire did a documentary called Moving Midway. It was about a family's house in North Carolina. Not where he grew up, but members of his extended family that had been a big plantation house. And it was getting surrounded by shopping malls, so they decided to move the whole thing. And in the course of researching the film, he found out about a totally unknown to him branch of the family, one of the black workers who was on this estate. So that became another dramatic part of the movie, the reunion of these two branches of the Cheshire family. So the next year, the film critic was Gerald Peary, who wrote for many years for the Boston Phoenix. And he, too, had made his first film, a history of American film criticism. So that was also a great treat. So another chapter in the book is devoted to the music that happened at the festival. And the Savoy, as you can picture the Savoy, has hardly any room up front to fit more than three or four people. But we were showing, our second screen was at City Hall. And there was a lot of room for a lot of things to happen. And one of our favorites was, we did not have Leonard Bernstein here, no. But I don't know how many of you remember way back the TV show called Omnibus. Yeah, some of us grew up with it. There was a great program of culture that was on Sunday afternoons. And this is a program that Bernstein did about Beethoven's fifth. And he did four different shows for Omnibus. And in one of those coincidences, that is like too much to believe, the two forces behind the TV show Omnibus were Alastair Cook, who was the writer and host of the show. And the TV producer Robert Sadek, who had the idea to do the score on the floor of the studio and many other ideas for what was going to be happening on camera in Omnibus. Now, what are the odds that Alastair Cook's daughter and Robert Sadek's son lived with a 10 minutes of Montpelier, Susan Cook Kittridge, who at that time was living in East Montpelier, and Dick Sadek, who is still living in Montpelier. Dick was, at that time, was the only one who had access to these recordings of Omnibus. So through him we got to show these episodes. So they had a great question and answer session where the two of them remembered being kids and playing backstage and going to, every Sunday when the show ended, everybody would repair to Alastair Cook's apartment to celebrate and drink. We discovered that there was a documentary about sacred harp music and invited the local sacred harp group to come and whoever wanted to join them, we had, I think, there were 50 strong singers after we showed this wonderful documentary. Anybody ever see this movie? Cool and crazy. So it's a documentary about a small Norwegian fishing village right up the Arctic Circle, Bervelag, and they are famed for having a men's chorus that travels all over Norway. And this documentary followed them through a year and various tours. We got to know them. And after that movie, we had a performance by the just newly formed Montpelier gay men's chorus. It doesn't exist anymore, but we remember it well. The man at the piano is named Bob McQuillan. He is kind of the dean of the New England Contra Dance Musicians. At the time he was 80 years old and one of his young protege's named David Millstone, who was himself a Contra Dance caller, did a documentary film about Bob McQuillan called Paid to Eat Ice Cream. And we were able to have a, think of it as what they call a hat trick. We showed the movie with David and Bob answering questions. And then everybody repaired across the street for a Contra Dance with David calling and Bob playing the piano with his band at the time. It was a memorable evening. So I had an old friend from teenage years who lived in Brattleboro at the time, Peter Tavelin, who was a remarkable jazz and classical musician, who made a specialty of writing his own scores for silent movies. So we had, I think we had him up three or four times, most memorably for safety last. And Peter said this is just an ideal thing to write music for because the entire last half hour is up and up the face of this building. And Peter told me afterwards he never, these scores were not written down. He just never did the same one twice. And he had a veritable orchestra on this incredible electronic keyboard. So over the years we look forward every year to having a film that we could have panel discussions, people in the community. This was a film called The Business of Being Born. So we had three local midwives who came. A documentary about California's Black Bear Commune. You can't really see it. It was narrated and featuring Peter Coyote who was a member of this Commune for many years. So it was fascinating for people in the 2000s to look back at the heyday of this Commune in the late 60s and 70s. And we had quite a panel discussion after that, people who had been on the Quarry Hill Commune in Rochester. And somebody who had grown up at the New Hamburger Commune in Plainfield. So that was a great evening. And then there were the very memorable guests. So many of them over the years and I'll just talk about a few of them. There's a documentary called Strange Fruit. Of course it's the song that Billie Holiday made famous. And right around the time, it was a documentary about the song, the making of the song about Billie Holiday. And what made it such a fascinating story is that many people assume that she wrote it. She certainly made it her own. But the song was actually written by a New York City school teacher named Abel Mirpal. And Abel and my father were taught together at D. Wood Clinton High School in the Bronx. And I grew up knowing Abel's two adopted kids. They were adopted from... they were the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. So they were living in Hastings and very close to where I grew up in Yonkers. So they were very close family friends. And Robbie came up to talk about the film, to talk about his father, and to talk about just the incredible evolution that this song had gone through. So many jazz musicians and singers that I remember vividly, the film ends with a rendition by Cassandra Wilson that was just chilling. So there was a documentary called Burma VJ. And it was about the... VJ stands for Video Journalists and it was about the citizen journalists who covered all the trouble that happened when the military took over in Burma before it was Myanmar. And through a friend of mine who is a Zen priest out in California, he connected me with three recent refugees, monks who had come over recently and were staying in upstate New York. And this was really an incredible experience. We had one show where the monks appeared, but another show in which two people from the Vermont Resettlement Organization came of whom was Burmese. He had... This show acted as their translator, but at the second show he told his own story about having to live in a refugee camp for many years and how he got out of that. This is a very unusual film for us to show. I don't know if anybody has seen it. It's called Harvard Beats Yale 2929. It is not just a sports documentary, so there is a game that was played in... I think it was in 1970, 69 or 70, the height of the Vietnam War. Harvard and Yale had this incredible rivalry and Harvard was... the people who were on the team were all... many of them scholarship students. They were a very real scrappy team and the guys on the Yale team were to the manor born. And so the filmmaker Pierce Rafferty was interviewing these people many years later. In fact, one of the Harvard players was Tommy Lee Jones, who was interviewed in the film. Anyway, Yale went off to an incredible start and was leading by about 30 points with... No, it couldn't have been 30 points. They were leading by a lot with two minutes left and in the last second of the game, Harvard tied it. And so that was the headline in the Harvard Crimson the next day. Harvard Beats Yale 2929. So a funny thing happened when I was screening this film. The process was we had our eyes on a film, find out who's distributing it, email, call, can you send a screener so we can look at it. And so I was very eager to see this film and the opportunity came in a very slow night in the video store. We had a television set there, just put it in. And at a crucial moment in the film, I turned around because a customer had come in and I thought I recognized a voice in this film. And so the customer left and I rewound it and it was a guy who played for Harvard named John Kelly. And I said, he sounds exactly like my friend Tom Kelly, who lives in Plainfield. Sure enough, this is his older brother. Would he be able to come up for the movie? Yes, yes, of course he'll come up for the movie. And he had never seen the movie. He hadn't seen it yet. And he brought his teenage kids and they, you know, he said they were saying, Dad, you're a hero. He said it was such an amazing experience for him. So it was also a great night. This is Albert Maisels, who is one of the real pioneers of documentary cinema, especially what they call Cinema Verité. He started making films just when they were inventing portable cameras that you could, you know, put on your shoulder. And he and his brother David made some pioneering films. One of them was Grey Gardens. And with this new technology, they could really get in close wherever they went, sometimes too close for comfort. So a friend of mine in Plainfield, Charlotte Potock, said to me one day, gee, you ought to get my old friend Albert Maisels up here for the film festival. And he said, wow. And so sure enough, she made the connection. And he said, I'd be glad to come. Tell me what movies you'd like me to talk about. And his assistant said, okay, well, he needs a few things. You know, he's 85 years old. Where he's staying should be in close proximity to where the films are. You should allow enough time for him to take a nap each afternoon. And a bottle of Southern Comfort in the refrigerator. Or was it Gordon's Gin? I can't remember. And oh yes, and is there somebody around who might sort of take him from place to place? So we had a friend, David Raisman, who was just studying to be a videographer. And David was just thrilled to be Albert's chaperone. Well, it turns out Albert didn't want any naps. He wanted to, even though he's seen his own movies about 30 times, he wanted to sit through each screening. It was the first well-known film, Salesman, Grey Gardens, and Jimmy Shelter, which was filmed at the Altamont Festival, the notorious Rolling Stones concert. And David Raisman was just in heaven after his weekend with Albert, who was just a full participant who was just great. And he died two years after that. Anyway, the festival just continued. And here is a scene that could have been any year between 1999 and 2000, well, before the pandemic, 2019. And so really happy to see that it's coming back to life. We saw a great movie at the Savoy yesterday, and we hope to see some more. And now, if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Any favorite festival memories I'd love to hear about the Bunks movie? Was that when you were on Sanzuki? I think that was after her. I don't know exactly what the chronology was. But the name of the movie is Burma VJ, and the VJ stands for Video Journalists. And the focus of this film was how people just kind of took the news gathering into their own hands and had to be very careful about what they did with their footage afterwards. I think Aung San Suu Kyi may have been in exile at that point. How did you come to learn about all these different movements that you showed up here? Was it a word of mouth that people told you about different movements? Like the movie about Angola in Louisiana? Yeah. There are a number of ways we found out about these films. Andrea and I would go to festivals in Waterville, in Montreal, sometimes in Lake Placid, sometimes we'd see a film. I've got to find out who's distributing that one. Sometimes we relied on other... There were friends of ours. There grew up to be kind of a network of people who were putting on festivals. They said, oh, right. The people who did this festival in St. Louis, they did it in November, which would be great timing for us to figure out what we wanted to play at the march. What did well? Did anybody come and speak? And at that time I was subscribing to a lot of film magazines and reading reviews, the New York Times every day. You know, I read something and say, correctly, this sounds good. It sounds like it's for us. And then Rick would do the late march, like that, and then often films just came to us. Yes, yes. We weren't a... You know, the 97 festival that Sean, Cindy and Jane ran, they were really, they were so excited. Okay, we're going to have a call for entries. And very soon they got swamped. They didn't have any staff to look through all these movies they were getting. So occasionally movies would come that way to us. Hey, I have a new movie out and something like that. But another part of this was we were running the Savoy at the same time. So occasionally we would see a movie and we're able to say, well, I don't think that would get a crowd for a week at the Savoy, but it sure would get a crowd for three shows at the festival. And my prime example of that is a wonderful Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories. Anybody seen it? So the plot is a tiny Norwegian town and somebody from Sweden, there's some technological... This takes place in the 50s. He's doing a motion study, how people live, how efficiently people get things done. And he's assigned to follow this farmer, this bachelor farmer in Norway, as he goes about his daily routines than this farmer who doesn't say a word. And it's about the relationship that happens between them. It's just a lovely, lovely film. And if I remember right, we sold out three shows because I think people look at a festival program differently than they might look at what's playing at the movies. Oh, this looks interesting. Maybe I've never seen a movie from Norway. We were constantly surprised by what became really popular. We were in Montreal. World Film Festival. It doesn't exist anymore, sadly. And at any given time slot, there could be 13 or 15 films showing all over Montreal. And those descriptions were really one sense. So it was very arbitrary. One day I said, oh, there's a film from Montreal and I had even said, where's Bhutan? And I didn't know, yes. And we chose it because, why not? And it was... The cup. Wonderful, wonderful film, yes. And it was a big hit. I think we showed it at the festival. Maybe one we showed at the festival and we got back because it was such a hit. And we learned also anything from Mongolia or Nepal, Tibet. All you have to do is say those words and people will come to the movies. Yeah. The Khan Film Festival? Does that play any role and influence on... It's kind of a trickle-down effect. The films get seen at the Khan Festival that are picked up for distribution. So that's when they make it to the States. And we tried a few times to get films that did not have a U.S. distributor where you have to rely on, you know, a print that is shipped from... If you're lucky, Canada, but... You know, and the costs are so prohibitive. Oh, it's physical. Heavy movies. Yeah, cans that weigh 35 pounds each. Yeah. And then every once in a while, the other thing we had to keep our eyes on, there were certain smaller distributors that specialized in at least two or three times a year, they would put out a restoration of something that either hadn't been seen or hadn't been seen properly. So we did Fellini's Nights of Kibiria that way, The Third Man. Yeah, usually one of those... Oh, and Kent Turian was here. We did Renoir's Rules of the Game, which he spoke about. Lawrence. I'm not sure if there's a question in here, but a couple things. I was struck by the number of coincidences you realized. Oh, yeah. An Elster Cook son had lived down the road. He discovered this guy walked into the store and he was turned out to be the guy. Yeah, yeah. It's like the hand of God was in this or something. I don't know. Well, yeah. That sounds like a whole other book for you to read. It really is remarkable, but it was five or six. I was kind of... Yeah, but I just, you know, I talked about my own coincidences, but it happened too with other people who were on the festival committee. Oh, I have this friend who is a screenwriter and she'll come up if we show this movie. Right place, right time, right people. Right. Imagine. Yeah. My question that I do have a question. Yeah. Did you tailor this to what your knowledge of the Montpelier audience was? Was there anything special about that? Or different than if you were doing exactly the same thing in upstate New York somewhere? I think you can speak to this too. Well, everything hasn't described yet as how films were selected. So, Rick was not only the... and in fact, the programmer, but we had a committee of up to ten people, I think, who would... So, these films were, in the early days, available on videotape, what we call preview screeners, and then later DVDs. And so, somebody on, for example, would come in and check out one of these films and we had a very kind of loose review form. And one of the questions was, if you liked this film, why not? Then, even if you didn't like this film, do you think this would be of interest to whatever you think our audience is? And often the answer was, I didn't like it, but I think there would be interest. And that, in fact, happened when we finally would show the film great crowds, something maybe I didn't like or Rick didn't like and say, this is how it is. So, we were not alone in choosing these films. But, in fact, it's also kind of... At times it seemed kind of almost arrogant to me that it was our taste that was making these choices and I think, well, who would, you know, impose our taste on our city? But it was also our knowledge of the area and to have the idea, oh, we're going to show this film. We should get that person. We should get that organization. All this was already there. There's one little story about the screening committee that I tell in the book. One film, it was a... I don't know if anybody has heard of Julia Butterfly Phil. Yes. Okay, she sat in a redwood tree for a year or something like that. So, somebody made a documentary called Butterfly. And so, we got the things back from the screening committee and one person said, I wanted to strangle this person before the movie was over. She made me so mad. She was so privileged, so self-righteous. But we should show it. Because there is Vermont Forest Watch. There's this organization. There's that organization. And sure enough, people came and they loved it. And my friend Susan Ritz would say, okay, what's going to be our Butterfly film this year? So, one year it turned out we had, I don't know, half a dozen films about people with disabilities of various kinds. And so, that became something we showcased and promoted in a particular way. Well, there was the music. But then what would happen invariably every year was that somebody would come up to us after having just seen 12 or 15 films. Did you know how many of these films have to do with mothers and daughters or this theme or that theme? And it had never occurred to us. But they were able to pick out their own themes. That one film really kind of spoke to another one. I think we didn't really evolve the screening committee until the festival started to grow some. But boy did we have great volunteers and a lot of them. And we had a very active ticket office. And we were not doing anything by computer and envelopes and tickets and counting the tickets. And so we had a great, a spree decor in this room that nobody, no festival goers could actually see. But they would come in going through trash cans. And you want to tell us story about the boxes and that night you realized that... No, we got a phone call one day in the ticket office. I'm at City Hall and I'm walking around. I have a movie that's starting in 10 minutes at City Hall. And everything's locked up. It was a Sunday and I don't know how to get in. There's nobody else here. We started to ask here. But then so she was in Burlington. But it took like 15 minutes. So the story I was going to tell was that we had, I should have had a photo of that, a wall with cubbies. Yeah. And this was facing out with the number of the show, C23 or something like that. And envelopes and all that. And I think it was the day before the ticket office opened. And Andrea woke up in the middle of the night and she said, I did it wrong. This is going to be a complete disaster. I've got to get in there right away and redo everything. That festival did not get off to a great start. Yeah. Okay, well, if you have not seen my book, it's over there. I talk about not only the festival but the history of the Savoy. I'm happy to sell it and sign it. And talk more about the festival if you want. Thanks for coming.