28 W E S T W O R D S u m m e r G u i d e 2 0 2 6 westword.com Reel Good Time INSIDE CO150, THE STATEWIDE FESTIVAL CELEBRATING COLORADO’S 150TH BIRTHDAY BY MIC H A E L RO BERTS Many events this summer will celebrate Colorado’s 150th birthday. But the largest and most geographically diverse could be CO150, which Denver Film, a co-creator of the event alongside marketing fi rm Switchboard Strategies, calls its fi rst-ever statewide film festival. CO150 movies will unspool at locations from the West- ern Slope to the Eastern Plains over six months, culled from a list of 150 fl icks with Colorado ties. The fest offi cially opened with a May 23 screening of 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the pic that tops the CO150, at Center, Colorado’s famed Fron- tier Drive-Inn. The run will close with 1989’s “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” at the Sunflower Theatre in Cortez on Nov. 28. Denver Film CEO Kevin Smith notes that CO150 has had a long gestation. Switchboard Strategies’ Rob DuRay and Chris Getzen “came to me early — it must have been the beginning of last year — and had a lot of ideas about what this could look like,” he says. “The primary things were, how can we make this into a program we can execute on, what are the areas of the state that we need to include, and who are the partners — independent theaters or fi lm festival organizations that can be brought in.” Just as important was coming up with 150 fi lms that represented Colorado. The fi nal criteria for inclusion was broad: Mov- ies could qualify if they were narrative in nature — Smith salutes documentaries but didn’t want to muddy the mix — and at least partly fi lmed in the state, set within its borders, or made featuring prominent folks born in or associated with the state. “Our team at Switchboard did a lot of research in building the overall list,” DuRay points out. “We did a lot of IMDB and Wiki research, and we looked at state fi les, because when people pull permits in Colorado counties, there’s a record of that.” The result was a roster of more than 600 possible candidates, and plenty of them invite debate. For instance, 1954’s “The Bridges of Toko-Ri,” an opus about the Korean War, is alleged to be set in Colorado even though the main link in- volves dialogue in which actor William Holden’s character talks about being from Denver. Similarly, 2024’s Donald Trump bio “The Apprentice” earns the set-in- Colorado label because one scene takes place in Aspen. Moreover, numerous notables are lim- ited to a single offering. Denver-born di- rector David Fincher helmed two entries on Rolling Stone’s 2025 rundown of the fi nest fi lms released in the 21st Century to date — 2007’s “Zodiac” and 2010’s “The Social Network” — but landed only 1995’s head-in-a-box thriller “S7ven” on the initial CO150 inventory. Likewise, Denver native Douglas Fairbanks Sr., a megastar of the silent era who made over fi fty movies, placed just one in the preliminary grab bag (1920’s “The Mark of Zorro”), and East High educated Hattie McDaniel, who had more than eighty credited roles and hun- dreds of others in which she wasn’t named, only pegged her 1939 Oscar winner, “Gone With the Wind.” The master list was subsequently winnowed down to 150 options through surveys fi lled out by fi lm-industry profes- sionals, festival programmers and other cinema experts, as well as members of the general public — and the fi nal results, based on a vote tally north of 500, are certainly quirky. “Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, is still regarded among the greatest American movies ever made, but it’s number 49 on the CO150, more than thirty slots below 2024’s “Elevation,” a poorly reviewed An- thony Mackie dud that currently has a 54% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And while the aforementioned Fincher efforts, including “S7ven,” missed the fi nal cut, 1989’s “The Return of Swamp Thing,” starring Denver Christian graduate Monique Gabrielle, sneaked in at number 147. Smith expects that some cineastes will criticize aspects of CO150, and he’s totally fi ne with it. “One of our primary goals is we wanted to make sure there’s as much diverse storytelling as possible — and we want to have those conversations,” he says. Take 2018’s “Black KkKlansman,” a Colorado Springs tale that director Spike Lee mainly lensed in New York. “Is being shot here more important? Should it be number four or number 25?” Smith asks. (Spoiler: It’s number four.) “But just hav- ing those conversations really adds to the excitement. Ultimately, it’s a subjective thing...and our goal at Denver Film is to build those community moments, where people can come together.” Indeed, one of CO150’s main missions is to inspire folks to leave their couches and watch movies with their friends and neighbors. “No matter how much people want to talk about, ‘Is the moviegoing experience dead,’ it isn’t,” Smith stresses. “What people ultimately want are these communal con- nections where they can come together to see these things we love, in whatever the fi lm hub of their community is.” Hence, the decision of Smith, along with the rest of the CO150 brain trust, to work mostly with independent venues embedded in the art scenes of assorted towns: “Maybe it was an art-house theater or a multi-faceted theater where they have plays or movies, as opposed to us just going Robert Redford in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the top fi lm on the Colorado 150 list. DENVER FILM
