Background
Tom Luddy was born in 1943 in New York, New York, United States.
Tom Luddy was born in 1943 in New York, New York, United States.
Tom had come west originally to attend the University of California at Berkeley. While there he shifted his major from physics to English (and found golf as the marriage of the two), and attached himself to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley as viewer, helper, and eventual director (1972-79).
One service Tom did at the PFA was to offer and show movie classics to Francis Ford Coppola as his career bloomed—this was the late sixties and the seventies. It’s fair to say that Zoetrope’s great interest in foreign directors (from Gance to Kurosawa, from Syberberg to Godard) owed a lot to Tom’s urgings. So it was natural that when Tom left the PFA (officially) in 1979, he became director for special projects at Zoetrope. Those ventures included the restoration and showing of Gance’s Napoleon and Syberberg’s Our Hitler.
Over the following years, therefore, Tom served as a producer on a number of exceptional ventures: he assisted on Sans Soleil (82, Chris Marker); he produced Mishima (85, Paul Schrader); Tough Guys Don't Dance (87, Norman Mailer); Barfly (87, Barbet Schroeder); Wait Until Spring, Banditti (90, Dominique Deruddere); Wind (92, Carroll Ballard); The Secret Garden (93, Agnieszka Holland); My Family, Mi Familia (95, Gregory Nava)—and had a helping hand in many other productions.
Beyond that, in 1974 (with Bill Pence and James Card) Tom founded the Telluride Film Festival, a unique event, still led by Tom and Bill. It is a film festiv al that occurs over the Labor Day weekend in a small town in Colorado; it is intimate, it regularly mixes retrospectives and early viewings of important new works. It has a claim to be the most rarified and exhilarating film festival in the world.
He fell in with Alice Waters, lived with her, and helped her found the restaurant Chez Panisse (named after Pagnols character, and a favorite place for the film community).