The Memorial Wall

Ana L. Schifano Beloved wife, mother and grandmother passed away peacefully on October 9, 2007, after a long battle with Parkinson disease. 

Ana was born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico on June 14, 1930. She is survived by her husband of 50 years, Joseph; sons, Isadore (Lisa) and Joseph M. (Pam) and four very special grandchildren, Anthony and Adam, Stephanie, and Alyssa. Sister Eva Urruita, Monterey NL, Mexico and brother, Fr. Luis Alonso Saldamando, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and many nieces, nephews and grand nieces and nephews. 

Ana brought sunshine into all the lives she touched, and she will be deeply missed by all who loved her. 

A very special thanks go out to all the staff and caregivers from Carondelet Hospice, Frances Care Home and Assisted Living and Dependable Health Services; all had provided outstanding love and care during those difficult months. 

Footprints:

One night I had a dream - -

I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord

And across the sky flashed scenes from my life.

For each scene I noticed two sets of footprints,

One belonged to me, the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of my life flashed before me,

I looked back at the footprints in the sand.

I noticed that many times along the path of my life,

There was only one set of footprints.

I also noticed that it happened at the very lowest

And saddest time in my life.

This really bothered me, and I questioned the Lord about it.

“Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,

You would walk with me all the way,

But I noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life

There is only one set of footprints.

“I don’t understand why in times when I needed you most,

You should leave me.”

The Lord replied, “My precious, precious child,

I love you and I would never, never leave you

during your times of trial and suffering.

“When you saw only one set of footprints,

It was then that I carried you.”

… Mary Stevenson

Kemal Dervis, a Turkish economist who left the World Bank to return home in 2001 as a crisis manager with Turkey’s economy collapsing, helping calm the fiscal storm but stirring protests over austerity measures and international oversight, died on May 8, 2023 at 74.

The death was announced by the U.N. Development Program, which Mr. Dervis led from 2005 to 2009. No other details were given. Mr. Dervis, who lived in Potomac, Md., had been treated for Parkinson’s.

Mr. Dervis’s personal roots were in Turkey, but his professional life was in international economic affairs in support of globalized trade and finance to lift developing countries. As Turkey’s economy modernized and grew in the 1980s and ’90s — along with its aspirations for possible European Union membership — Mr. Dervis watched from afar in executive roles at the World Bank, where he spent more than two decades.

That distance became Mr. Dervis’s strength. He filled a specific niche in Turkey, seen as someone above the political clashes that had helped push Turkey’s economy over the brink.

For years, Turkey’s growth had been underpinned by massive foreign investment, seeking to ride an expanding economy bridging Europe and the Middle East. But a series of rise-and-fall governments, each leaving the economy a bit more frayed, fed international jitters.

Investment money started to pour out of Turkey. Turkish stocks plummeted and the banking system was effectively paralyzed with interest rates hitting 3,000 percent or more. Inflation pushed beyond 55 percent, bringing steep devaluations of the Turkish lira.

In 1990, $1 brought about 2,500 lira. By 2001, the exchange rate was more than 1.2 million lira for a dollar.

“We all should tighten our belts,” Mr. Dervis said at a news conference in April 2001 shortly after accepting the call for help from Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. “Don’t expect me to produce policies to save us just for today. We can’t dynamite our future in order to save today.”

Some Turkish columnists called him a “savior” in his new role as minister of economic affairs. He quickly became known for his blunt, and often dire, assessments of what was needed to rebuild the economy. He cut state subsidies in agriculture and other industries. Government spending was rolled back and hiring for civil service jobs slowed to a trickle. “We just have to tell it like it is,” Mr. Dervis said in 2001.

The biggest lifeline came from the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Dervis negotiated an $8 billion loan package. It came with strict IMF rules on management of the Turkish economy and public spending, which would open the door to further funding from institutions such as the World Bank.

Mr. Dervis threatened to resign if Ecevit’s government stalled on the IMF-ordered changes. The rescue plan was put in place even as Ecevit and Mr. Dervis became the target of protests.

“IMF equals unemployment and hunger,” demonstrators chanted in Istanbul. When Agriculture Minister Husnu Yusuf Gokalp was asked about slashing wheat subsidies, he took a dig at Mr. Dervis. “You should pose that question to those having breakfast at the Hilton [with foreign bankers],” he said.

The political fallout collapsed Ecevit’s government in 2002, but the changes spearheaded by Mr. Dervis widely stayed in place and were credited with underpinning the growth that lasted until the global economic crisis in 2008. (Turkey’s central bank introduced a “new lira” in 2005 that lopped off six zeros, making the former 1 million lira a new 1 lira.)

Mr. Dervis was elected to the Turkish parliament in the 2002 elections. He had always deeply embraced the secularist values of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Mr. Dervis often said he preferred to be called a “pro-secular figure” instead of a politician.

Yet Mr. Dervis and his political allies were increasingly challenged by the rising Islamist-style populism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014. Mr. Dervis left parliament in 2005 to head the U.N. Development Program, which oversees anti-poverty and community-building projects.

Mr. Dervis saw an advantage in his perspectives from Turkey, growing up during military coups and political upheavals and later confronting corruption and mismanagement of the economy. Previous heads of the UNDP were American or European.

“Crisis, lack of security, failure in government mechanisms breed disease, breed terror, breed environmental degradation,” he told a Yale University forum in 2005. “Increasingly, the citizens of the world realize — I think the young people more than the others perhaps — that their future is interlinked.”

Kemal Dervis was born on Jan. 10, 1949, in Istanbul and spent part of his boyhood on Buyukada Island near the city. He father was involved in business and his mother fled Europe during the Nazi rise to teach English in Turkey.

He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1968 and stayed to earn a master’s degree in economics in 1970. Mr. Dervis received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1973.

At the World Bank from 1977 to 2001, he served in roles including vice president for the Middle East and North Africa and vice president for poverty reduction and economic management.

After leaving the United Nations, Mr. Dervis joined the Brookings Institution, leading the global economy and development program from April 2009 to November 2017.

Throughout his career, he remained steadfast in his support of international institutions and globalization. He noted, however, that there can be an image problem with groups such as the IMF or World Bank, which can be seen as arms of the global powers and their policies.

“Whether it’s in Turkey or in Brazil or in Argentina or in Indonesia or in India, there’s no real trust,” Mr. Dervis said. “And for these institutions — which have resources, which have staff, which have technical knowledge — to really be useful, fully, and to do what they could do, I think we have to make them more legitimate.”

Mr. Dervis’s marriage to Neslihan Borali ended in divorce. He married Catherine Stachniak in 1997. In addition to his wife, survivors include two sons from his first marriage.

When Mr. Dervis dove into the Turkish economic crisis, he shared a family story about another attempt to straighten out the books. An ancestor with a flair for economics was asked by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I to help turn around a sagging economy in the late 18th century. The sultan then felt that plots were brewing to topple him. Mr. Dervis’s forebear was beheaded.

UCLA broadcaster Chris Roberts, who called the football and men’s basketball play-by-play for 23 seasons before retiring, died May 12 at his Glendora, Calif., home at age 74. He had complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to the university.

Born Robert LaPeer on March 23, 1949, in Alhambra, CA, Roberts played baseball at Cal Poly Pomona and began his career in broadcasting at KCIN in Victorville. He spent time on the air at KREO in Indio and KWOW in Pomona, where he announced high school and junior college sports.

Roberts began calling games in the fall of 1992 through the spring of 2015, in the process setting a local record for calling NCAA Division I games on Los Angeles radio. His final season with the Bruins was in 2014-15, when Roberts equaled Fred Hessler’s record for the longest tenured play-by-play broadcaster in UCLA history.
 
Roberts called 16 bowl games, including the Bruins’ Rose Bowl appearances on January 1, 1994 and January 1, 1999. Roberts also broadcast the men’s basketball team for 19 trips to the NCAA Tournament. That included the 1995 NCAA Tournament Championship.
 
The author of two books, Stadium Stories: UCLA Bruins and UCLA Football Vault, which he co-wrote with Bill Bennett, Roberts was an eight-time nominee for the SCSBA’s Play-by-Play Broadcaster of the Year Award and a voter for both the Heisman Trophy and the John R. Wooden Award. He was a four-time Golden Mike Award winner and a Hall of Fame member in the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association (SCSBA).

Roberts was at KFXM in San Bernardino in 1970 when the program director at the station asked him to change his name. He later moved to Los Angeles and worked at KUTE-FM, KFI and sister station KOST, and later at KMPC. He served as the play-by-play voice at Long Beach State for 10 years before UCLA.
 
During his 23-year tenure as UCLA’s play-by-play broadcaster, Roberts worked alongside former quarterbacks David Norrie, Matt Stevens and Wayne Cook. With the men’s basketball team, Roberts’ radio analysts over the years had included Marques Johnson, Mike Warren, Bob Myers, Don MacLean and Tracy Murray.

Roberts is survived by his wife Ann LaPeer, son David LaPeer and daughter-in-law Yvette LaPeer, daughter Nichole Hijon-LaPeer, son-in-law Octavio Hijon and grandchildren Andrés, Santiago and Carmen.

Pat Torpey, drummer of Mr Big has passed away at the age of 64. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

I live on a different continent, so sadly I won’t be there. From 2009-11, I was the bass technician on tour for Mr Big. Pat was my friend in that time and I’ll miss him. This is hard to write but I’d really like to do him tribute.

Pat was born in Cleveland, Ohio but moved to Phoenix, Arizona as a teenager. A love of his music and the lure of the bright lights brought him to LA in the early 1980s, where he picked up session, TV and touring work for a million artists including Ted Nugent, John Parr, Bob Geldorf, Belinda Carlisle, Robert Plant, Chris Impelliteri and even former WHAM! star Andrew Ridgley.

It was while playing with The Knack, of ‘My Sharona’ fame, that Billy Sheehan and Paul Gilbert first saw Pat in action and asked him to audition for the new band they were forming together with vocalist Eric Martin. This of course, became Mr Big.

Pat’s role in Mr Big was often overlooked. While Billy and Paul stole the limelight with their fretboard antics and Eric Martin stole the little girls’ hearts, Pat was doing the hard work in the background.

I truly believe that in many ways Pat saved Mr Big. You see, Pat had all his drum chops down, double kick techniques, stick spinning etc etc but he also had this amazing groove…

All drummers who can basically play in time have some kind of groove. Some have it different or better than others. Essentially, a good groove makes the listener tap their foot along at first listen. Pat had a truly awesome groove.

Quite often this separates a good band from an outstanding band. Mr Big would have been a good band without Pat’s groove, a very good band actually, but with him they were truly outstanding.

Try listening to this and unconsciously you’ll find yourself tapping your foot along. That’s Pat’s groove.

His contribution to the band didn’t end there though. Mr Big is a band that’s founded not only on excellent rhythmic musicianship but also on melody and harmony. Pat was a singing drummer. Thus all the members of Mr Big sing, giving them a three part harmony underlying Eric’s lead on hits such as ‘Green Tinted Sixties Mind’, ‘Just Take My Heart’ and of course their biggest worldwide single, ‘To Be With You’.

In fact, Pat’s vocals were in big demand on the LA session scene. Did you know that it’s Pat Torpey that you hear singing the chorus of ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ on the Mötley Crüe album of the same name?

Check out these backing vocals; this is Mr Big’s live cover of ‘It’s for You’ by Three Dog Night.

The first show I worked for Mr Big as a band (I’d worked for Billy Sheehan previously on other projects), was in Tallinn, Estonia in 2009. I had loved Mr Big as a teenager but seeing them gel onstage as a band from close up on the side of stage that first time was insane.

I don’t compliment the artists that I work for every night as a matter of habit. That gets dull – I see a lot of gigs per week when I’m on tour. I only ever comment if I witness something really outstanding. That night was one such event.

As they came offstage, I said to Pat something like: “Wow, great show!”

“Don’t blow smoke,” he said and walked past. If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, it’s a rather crude Americanism for “don’t flatter me”.

I was a bit put aback. But the more I got to know of saw of him, the more I saw how in character that was. He was a very self effacing guy in many respects and didn’t like a fuss.

I remember at one Mr Big gig Pat’s floor tom fell over. His drum tech, Jason Kocis, couldn’t see it as he was on the other side of stage. I went over to pick it back up but Pat shooed me away.

After the gig he said: “Don’t worry about things like that. I can deal with it.”

“You can’t pick up a floor tom while playing a song. I am kind of doing a job here”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever met another drummer that laid back onstage. No fuss.

Mr Big would often have an instrument swapping jam at the end of a show; yes, Pat was a passable guitarist and bass player too. On these occasions, he’d borrow a random plectrum from my toolkit. Then at the end of the song, he’d bring me back the pick.

“No,” I’d say, “you’re supposed to throw it out into the crowd!”

One night in Brazil he did this and I prompted him back to the front of the stage and got him to throw the pick out. Of course the fans went crazy trying to grab for it but Pat would have preferred no fuss.

I will always remember long chats with Pat over dinner on politics, on which he was very well read, American history, another favourite of his was the Lincoln Presidency, and most of all, music. I quizzed him over his playing on the Chris Impelliteri album with Graham Bonnet singing and his time touring with Robert Plant, which being a big Zeppelin fan, he’d loved every minute of. Throughout our conversations he was always wise, witty and humble.

After a show in Osaka, as we started the 2011 tour, he told me he thought that he hadn’t played so well. At the time I assumed this was simply more modesty from him. I told him honestly that he sounded great to me, though I now knew better than to press the point.

But he said that he could feel something was wrong. He had a numbness in his hands and one leg that wasn’t quite responding the way it should.

He said, he’d been for some tests back home but that nothing was conclusively diagnosed at that point. I brushed it off at the time but looking back now I see that this was the start of it all.

As far as I was concerned he played great every night of that tour. We went across Asia, Europe and South America and he and the band ripped each and every night, I thought. We finished the world tour in Istanbul, Turkey and went our ways.

Then I saw the press release in 2014. Pat had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I’d heard of it before but read up more online to check my facts and find it’s a long term degenerative neurone disease. Not good for a drummer. Not just something to brush off with no fuss.

I worried for him and sent a supportive email but heard nothing back.

Full credit to Mr Big as a band. They rallied around their fallen comrade. In his physical state, clearly he couldn’t play his former glories such as ‘Colorado Bulldog’ any more but he was still an essential part of the band. He was very much the vibemeister and often the voice of reason between healthy differences of opinion in band politics, as I saw them.

So the lovable Matt Starr, also of Ace Frehley’s band, was hired in as the drummer for the bulk of the gigs while Pat still played a few songs and added percussion and his trademark vocal harmonies to others.

I went to see them at Koko in London on that tour. On the way in, I bumped into Pat at the stage door. We hugged and he held me tight but I could feel the muscle wastage on his back. He was always so healthy and well toned before.

He sat me down and told me how it had all hit him. He apologised for not replying to my email but said that he had an initial period of depression after the diagnosis. Then with the support of friends and family, through determination and strength of character he had resolved to carry on, make the most of life and he began to make jokes with his son about his tremors rather than try hide them.

Oh boy, was it good to see Pat.

Three months ago, I caught up with Mr Big again at a couple of UK shows, London and Wolverhampton. Pat was now just playing one song in the set, ‘Just Take My Heart’. He told me he couldn’t tour with the band after this any more. It was just exhausting him.

I hugged him goodbye at Birmingham airport. I knew I’d probably never see him again but I didn’t think he would leave us this soon.

Pat leaves behind his wife Karen and son Patrick Jnr. Pat and I went shopping together for our kids in the Tokyo toyshops. We both missed our boys on tour. My thoughts are with them at this time.

Tributes poured in from his bandmates, fans and peers. Graham Bonnet, Richie Kotzen, Carmine Appice, Matt Sorum, Derek Sherinian, Mike Portnoy, Phil Soussan, Steve Lukather, Paul Stanley and Joe Lynn Turner all said what a great drummer and much loved friend Pat was.

Billy Sheehan led with: “Pat Torpey has been my closest friend in music for over thirty years. Pat was one of the finest human beings I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, and the honor of working with, surely one of the finest rock drummers the world has ever known.”

Perhaps the most touching tribute I read online was an open letter to Pat written by a Korean fan, Sujin Lee.

“Dear Pat,

“It’s me, Sujin. How are you doing up there?

“It’s been only a few days but I do hope everything is much better than here. Cause, like many others, I’m still having awfully hard times to take it as real that you’re not here anymore.

“I know, to you, I’m just one of millions of fans around the world but to this forever-16 fan, you were not just one amazing, talented musician/drummer. You ARE much much more than that. Just like the other BIG guys.

“I still remember when I first met you in person in freezing Seoul, 22 years ago. You were shining so brightly with that big beautiful smile and unbelievably nice to this crazy little kid who took a four hour train ride and waited all day long at the airport only to say hello to her favourite band. I wish I could go back then just once again.

“Since then, we’ve had such a great time. What a ride it has been! There were some downs for sure but you were always right there, in control. You never let me down. You were always cool and made me feel everything is/will be ok.

“Do you remember that you wrote me an email when there was a huge earthquake in Japan while I was living there all by myself? I was scared to death, I really thought I was going to die at that moment. I was terrified and couldn’t calm down… and then I got this mail from you.

“You asked me if I was ok and said you worried about me. You’ll never know how it helped me go through those hard times. You might think it was just a mail. But I never expected something like that cause you’re a big rock star and I’m just a little fan.

“But that was only one of all the things you’ve done to me.

“Pat, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for your amazing music, passion and courage. Thank you for all those memories, love, kindness, smiles and hugs. Thank you for inspiring me to want to be a better person. You taught me never giving up and I’m trying to, not to let you down.

“And thank you for being you, my wonderful hero Pat Torpey.

“Big Love Always, Sujin”

We’re all missing you, Pat.

Published in Music Times

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!”