As Central to the Art of the Movies as Anyone on the Planet: Tom Luddy, 1943-2023
Tom Luddy died last week of Parkinson’s Disease. He founded film societies at the University of California at Berkeley when he was a student there in the early sixties. He established the independent Telegraph Repertory Theater: out of hundreds of movies we saw there, most vividly I remember F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and, in 1968, just after Ronald Reagan was elected governor, in an example of typically adventurous programming, Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, where, in Reagan’s last role, he played a crime boss in a California Highway Patrolman’s uniform. If you look at the mural A People’s History of Telegraph Avenue, at the corner of Haste and Telegraph, you can see Tom Luddy on the roof of his theater, holding James Rector, dying after being shot in the People’s Park police riots in 1969. “If it takes a blood bath,” Reagan said after students occupied a vacant space between Haste and Dwight, just above Telegraph, which the University planned to use for dorms, and turned it into a park, “let’s get it over with.”