The Memorial Wall

Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.

om Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.

A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964.

He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.

By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.

As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated film about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.

In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”

He had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.

It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times.

When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.

It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”

And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.

“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”

Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.

Ms. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen.

Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.

In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.)

There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.

You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.

“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”

In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”

Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”

Thomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.

Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.

Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!”

Roger Thibault, who was legally joined with Theo Wouters in Quebec’s first same-sex civil union, has died.

He passed away at their home in Pointe-Claire in Wouters’s arms. They had been together for 50 years.

Thibault was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease six years ago. Wouters cared for him at their home until the end. He died from complications from the disease. He was 77 years old.

“He was the kindest man, and he loved me to bits,” Wouters said. “Even in his last moments, he really loved me, and I loved him.

“I have so much to treasure in my memories with him.”

On July 18, 2002, Wouters and Thibault became the first same-sex couple to be legally joined by civil union in Quebec, two years before the province would legalize same-sex marriage.

In an interview with the Montreal Gazette on the 20th anniversary of their union, the couple said they had no idea what a momentous occasion it would turn out to be until they arrived at the Montreal courthouse, greeted by a throng of photographers and reporters. Strangers rushed across the street to bring them a bottle of wine. Lawyers and clerks lined the upper levels of the courthouse to get a glimpse of the historic moment.

After years of advocacy, the civil union had been established by the Quebec government a month earlier. Since same-sex couples still couldn’t legally wed, it worked as an option that would give them many of the same legal benefits as married couples.

The civil union would soon be overtaken in popularity by same-sex marriage, but it was hailed at the time as a progressive step forward for the province.

“(Quebec) became one of the first places in the world to put forward that two people of the same sex could legally unite together, sharing the same rights and obligations,” said Patrick Desmarais, president of Montreal’s Fondation Émergence, which specializes in fighting homophobia and transphobia, on the 20th anniversary of the union. “And it brought on this push for equality between all people.

“I think it did a lot to educate and sensitize the general public in Quebec and Canada,” Desmarais added. “It really opened the public’s eyes to the fact that it could be possible, and could be legal, and that two people of the same sex uniting didn’t change anything in anyone else’s lives.”

For Wouters and Thibault, the union was largely symbolic after nearly three decades together, beginning when the two met at a gay bar on Mackay St. in Montreal. But they felt it had to be done as part of the greater good, and to send a message.

“At first we said we don’t really need to get married,” Wouters said. “We were already committed in life. But then we thought it over because we were so well known.”

Once it was done, Wouters said, they were also happy to be protected by the same laws that applied to other couples, “because we had been hearing so many horror stories when families get involved when one partner dies.”

Ironically, the couple’s historic union was born partly of hatred. They had been the subject of homophobic slurs, insults, and threats for over a decade, which ultimately spurred a march outside their Pointe-Claire home that drew thousands who showed their support of the couple. That would lead to the creation of the International Day Against Homophobia, and their civil union.

“We were sort of forced to do so because of the situation here,” Wouters said. “It lasted for 10 years, this horrible, horrible hatred — I still cannot believe that people can hate for absolutely nothing.”

While the union brought them fame and accolades, Wouters noted that the hatred continued, and still does to this day. The current political climate, particularly in the United States, means that “we have to be very vigilant that this doesn’t slip into Canada,” he said.

When they first met, Wouters, who is of Dutch heritage, didn’t speak a word of French, and Thibault couldn’t speak any English. So they communicated by sign language, and a relationship that would last half a century was born. Wouters was a fashion designer, creating clothes and hats for Canada’s rich and famous. Thibault was a photographer, working in the department of industrial design and architecture at the Université de Montréal.

“We were quite committed from Day One,” Wouters said. “We were very much aware that we were blessed because, in the gay community, it is not a usual thing for people to stay together for so long.”

The union stayed strong in part because they shared many projects together, including collecting more than 140 tons of rock “from everywhere” to create their elaborate garden in Pointe-Claire.

“When you do projects together in everything, as part of your daily activities, then you have a much better chance to really stay a lifetime together,” Wouters said.

Another project became battling homophobia, which would cost them countless hours, over $240,000 in legal fees, and the loathing of people they had never met.

“It was difficult sometimes to scrape the funds together to pay the lawyers, but we managed,” Wouters said.

In May of this year, Thibault and Wouters were made honorary citizens of Montreal in recognition of their decades-long fight to advance LGBTQ2+ rights.

“We’re very happy that it inspired so many people. We never thought that that would be the case,” Wouters said. “But it was the case.”

Retired Professor Peter Kugel, a long-time member and former chair of the Computer Science Department who devoted much thought to the human dimension of computer technology, died on October 11, 2021. He was 91.

Befitting a scholar with a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University who had worked in the software industry and at MIT before coming to Boston College in 1974, Dr. Kugel focused his research on the connections between human intelligence, logic, and computability. He summed up these interests in an abstract for a 2009 article: “I believe the human mind can evaluate functions so uncomputable that no machine, not even a hypercomputer, can compute them. But I believe that computers can evaluate such functions, too, because computers, like minds, have other ways to evaluate functions that go beyond computing. If we allow them to use these ways—or, as I shall put it, to uncompute—they may be able to do things that only minds can do well today.”

Earlier in his career, Dr. Kugel published an influential article on studying the process of induction—“by which we reason from the particular to the general”—using ideas from the theory of abstract machines and recursion theory. Another article offered suggestions on developing precise accounts of cognitive processes that could be modelled on computers.

He also was interested in how college teachers develop as teachers, and in 1989 published an op-ed piece in The New York Times that explained how bringing a cup of coffee to class helped him create a better rapport with his students.

“My pauses, as I sipped, not only gave my students time to think about what I had said, but gave me time to think about what I was going to say next,” he wrote. “I began to use my pauses to look around the room to see how my students were reacting to what I had just said. When I saw their attention wander, I tried to bring them back. When I saw them puzzled over some concept that I thought I had explained, I gave another example. My lectures became less organized and less brilliant, but my students seemed to understand me better. And my courses became more popular.”

Interviewed in 1989 by the Boston College Biweekly, Dr. Kugel—then the Computer Science chair—discussed how he and his colleagues made sure that the knowledge they passed along to their students was put to use.

“In computer science, you learn to do something by doing. We don’t simply lecture. We give students at least one assignment a week they must complete. And it’s not like doing an essay; a program has to work before your job is done.”

Dr. Kugel retired in 2005, but continued to write, teach, and learn. Among other activities, he took courses at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, where he taught a class titled “Vision and Art.”

A tribute posted on the Computer Science website recalled Dr. Kugel for “his wide-ranging interests and for his humor. He was an exceptional colleague and an especially generous mentor to both students and junior faculty colleagues.”

Dr. Kugel is survived by his wife, Judy, and sons Jeremy and Seth, who were all at his bedside when he died.

University Communications | January 2022

Justin O. Schmidt, an intrepid entomologist who measured the agony of insect stings by allowing himself to be stung hundreds of times in creating a renowned and vividly descriptive pain scale that ranked them, died on Feb. 18 in Tucson, Ariz. He was 75.

His wife, Dr. Li Schmidt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Schmidt, who brought a joyful exuberance to his work and gained a measure of pop culture fame from it, spent his career investigating the biochemistry and lethality of bee, wasp and ant venom, and how they used their natural weaponry to deter predators. And he suffered, willingly, for his research: He was stung, sometimes on purpose, more than 1,000 times by his count.

“Humans are fascinated by stinging insects,” he wrote in The Conversation, a nonprofit news website, in 2016. “Why? Because we have a genetically innate fear of animals that attack us, be they leopards, bears, snakes, spiders or stinging insects.”

Dr. Schmidt got over that fear. He studied stinging insects professionally for more than 40 years and wrote hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, earning the sobriquet “king of sting.” His 2016 memoir, “The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science,” brought him renown for his colorful Pain Index for Stinging Insects, which he began in 1983.

He ranked, from 1 to 4, the pain caused by the stings of 80 types of bees, wasps and ants that he had encountered, and gave vivid descriptions of what they felt like.

Anthophorid bee, Level 1: “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

The bullhorn acacia ant, Level 1.5: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”

Red-headed paper wasp, Level 3: “Immediate, irrationally intense and unrelenting. This is the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”

Bullet ant, Level 4: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

“When Schmidt recalls a certain agonizing sting, a memory that remains vivid decades after the pain has faded, he’s not just spinning a tale,” Avi Steinberg wrote in a profile of Dr. Schmidt in The New York Times Magazine in 2016. “He’s documenting a theory about how sting pain functions: as a deterrent, whereby it creates a memory of pain that stays with a predator for life.”

Dr. Schmidt insisted that he didn’t necessarily want to be stung.

“Want is kind of a dual word,” he told NPR in 2016. “I want the data but I don’t want the sting.”

Justin Orvel Schmidt was born on March 23, 1947, in Rhinelander, Wis., and grew up in Boalsburg, Pa. His father, Orvel, was a forestry professor at Penn State University, and his mother, Jane (Groh) Schmidt, was a home economics teacher.

He grew up among weeds, wildflowers and insects. One day, he recalled, he and several other boys threw rocks at a hornet’s nest in an old apple tree, hoping to topple it.

After their attempts failed, Justin moved closer to the tree and delivered a direct hit. Half the nest fell to the ground. As he ran away, he was stung multiple times on his back.

“It felt like someone had repeatedly struck the back of my neck with a hot branding iron,” he wrote in his memoir. “That was my first experience with what would decades later become a 2 on the insect-sting pain scale.”

He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Penn State in 1969 and a master’s from the University of British Columbia three years later. But he turned to entomology for his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia because, he wrote, chemistry lacked “living, moving” nature — “insects to be exact.”

He studied harvester ants, collecting them on drives around the country with his first wife, Deborah Wragg, a zoology student.

“Wham, an ant stung me,” he wrote, as he started his travels around Georgia. “Serendipity had struck. This was no ordinary sting. This sting really hurt. The pain, delayed at first, became piercing and excruciating.”

A life’s work had begun. After postgraduate work at the University of Georgia and the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, he was hired in 1980 as a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, part of the United States Department of Agriculture, which works to improve the health of honey bee colonies.

He retired in 2005, but by then had also established his own nonprofit laboratory, where he conducted his research until recently. One project was recording the mating habits of vinegaroons, an arachnid that sprays a combination of acids that smells like vinegar, on property that he owned in a wildlife area in southeastern Arizona.

“He was one of the most insatiably curious people I’ve ever met,” Stephen Bachmann, a colleague at the Hayden center and a close friend, said in a telephone interview. “He questioned everything and didn’t suffer fools, especially administrators.”

Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Schmidt was an adjunct scientist, called him “an amazing natural historian” with an extensive knowledge of the plants of the Sonoran desert, in addition to stinging insects.

“The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like,” she said. “It’s the last thing I would do.”

The tarantula hawk, a kind of wasp, ranked a 4 on the pain index:

“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped in your bubble bath.”

“I know some people think me crazy, but I am no masochist, and only occasionally am stung on purpose,” he told The Guardian in 2018. “When it does happen, I initially react as anyone else would — cursing, more than I should admit. Then I get out my notebook and stopwatch, sit down and make notes.”

In addition to his wife, Dr. Schmidt is survived by their sons, Kalyan and Veris; a daughter, Krista Jewell Schmidt, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his second wife, Pat Figuli, which ended in divorce; his sister, Freya Phillips; his brother, Dan; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Ms. Wragg ended in her death.

In recent years, Dr. Schmidt’s easy-to-understand insect pain scale brought him to a wider world outside entomology. It was mentioned in the 2015 superhero film “Ant-Man” and was central to the Ted-Ed animated cartoon “It Hurts” (2021), for which he was credited as the educator and was a character. The scale was cited in a clue on “Jeopardy!” this year.

When he appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2016, Dr. Schmidt wore a red T-shirt with the image of a bug on it and brought along several types of stinging insects, including red and black harvester ants.

“The black ones only hurt for four hours,” Dr. Schmidt said. “So if you can imagine someone taking some needle nose pliers and digging underneath your skin and grabbing tendons and nerve and kind of ripping them for about for four hours.”

But the pain of the red one, he said, “goes on for eight hours. You get the bonus with no extra charge.”

Longtime Wellfleet resident Robert DuBeau succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on Jan. 21, 2023 after trying to ignore the affliction for years.

Bob was born in Willimantic, Conn. in 1934, the third of four children of Conrad and Esther (Parent) DuBeau. He attended Windham Regional High School, where as a freshman he met his future wife, Marsha Turshen. He was admitted to Harvard, where he worked to pay his tuition by establishing a food concession at the residence houses. By the time he graduated in 1956, his multi-employee business was taken over by the college as part of its food service.

Bob first fell in love with the Outer Cape when, shortly after graduation, he was drafted and stationed at Camp Wellfleet — then an Army outpost near Marconi Beach in what is now the National Seashore. After his discharge, Bob attended the University of Connecticut Law School and entered practice in nearby Rockville. Bob, Marsha, and their growing family soon started vacationing in Wellfleet.

After several years of renting, they purchased a cottage on Lieutenant Island before it had electricity or telephone service. As their children reached driving age, the tide-ruled access to the island became untenable. Wishing to stay in the area, they were among the first to purchase a parcel of the former Camp Mar-Ven and Camp Chequessett, converting the old counselor and guest house into a summer cottage. When they retired, they renovated the house for year-round use and moved to Wellfleet.

Bob quickly became a member of the Wellfleet Housing Authority, helping to provide affordable housing for year-round local workers. He helped found Nauset Neighbors, the volunteer network to help aging residents stay in their homes. He was the first representative from Our Lady of Lourdes parish to the area interfaith council. He was an enthusiastic golfer at the Chequessett Yacht & Country Club and a volunteer at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.

Bob was full of wit and fun, once leading a passel of family kids down Commercial Street in Provincetown after a Marx Brothers movie at the Waters Edge Cinema, all striding like Groucho. Many friends from Rockville were invited to visit the DuBeaus on their Wellfleet vacations, and several, including Pat and Dick Dimock, established their own connections to the Outer Cape in part based on Bob’s enthusiasm.

“You don’t have a boat,” said one curious friend. “You don’t seem to like sitting on the beach. What is it about Wellfleet?” to which Bob answered, “I just love to look at it.”

Bob is survived by his wife, Marsha; his five children: Dr. Catherine DuBeau of Lebanon, N.H., Matthew and wife Leslie Haynes-DuBeau of Nyack, N.Y., Peter and Lisa DuBeau of Norfolk, Va., Adam and Lauren Love-DuBeau of Marcellus, N.Y., and Sarah DuBeau-Farley and Stephen Farley of Dorchester; his grandchildren, Madeline, Henry, Julia, Jack, August, Sam, and Elise; and the families of multiple nieces and nephews.