Telluride Still Marches to Its Own Drummer : The 21-year-old Colorado film festival offers a freewheeling, eclectic mix of the lowbrow, the big-budget premieres and tributes galore.

TELLURIDE, Colo. —  The Telluride Film Festival may have turned 21 this year, but that doesn’t mean it has any intention of growing up--if growing up means instilling rigid schedules or kowtowing to Hollywood’s power elite.

Instead, the festival offered its freewheeling Labor Day weekend mix of eclectic foreign and independent films, a handful of well-received, big-budget premieres--including Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” and Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood”--and what is always among the highlights here, special tributes to filmmakers past and present. And for the first time, there were several programs devoted to the decidedly lowbrow end of filmmaking.

Documentarian Ken Burns, something of a local son since many of his works, including the highly praised series “The Civil War” debuted here, presented part of his forthcoming 18 1/2-hour PBS series, “Baseball,” at a tribute to him on Saturday night. The delighted audience at the New Sheridan Opera House seemed as hungry for a celebration of the game during the players’ strike as for Burns’ accomplished filmmaking.

The boyish-looking Burns, 41, one of three tributees (the others were Australian actress Judy Davis and Swedish actress Harriet Andersson), was expansive during his tribute.

“All my work, including ‘The Civil War,’ has been infused with the idea of family--of the natural family, the clan, the community and the larger national community,” Burns said, adding that “Baseball” explores the growth of local community and national identity within the scope of the game. “It’s influenced me in my work for the last 20 years--though I know I don’t look it,” he said to much laughter. “I grew this beard to look older, but somebody said to me today that now I look 18 instead of 16.”

Burns showed the fifth of “Baseball’s” nine parts, or innings, which centers on the ‘30s, including the careers of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and the rise of the Negro League, a focus that Burns said he was particularly proud of. One of the stars of the Kansas City Monarchs in those years, Buck O’Neil, is a major presence throughout all nine parts of the documentary and presented Burns with his medal in a touching speech that left the filmmaker genuinely moved by the unexpected tribute. Burns was also an organizer of a real baseball game planned for Monday afternoon in the town park.

Davis, co-star of Michael Tolkin’s forthcoming “The New Age,” which was shown as part of the Friday program honoring her, was more taciturn. After sitting through clips of her most notable films, including “My Brilliant Career,” “A Passage to India” and “Husbands and Wives,” she seemed embarrassed while accepting her medal, saying only, “Well, after sitting through that chamber of horrors . . . “ though she had a lot of kind words for “The New Age.”

Andersson, 62, is not as well-known to American film audiences, which is why the tribute to her was especially welcome. She starred in many of Ingmar Bergman’s films in the ‘50s, and her presence in those movies was one reason for the growth of his popularity beyond his native Sweden.

On Saturday and Sunday, veteran Hitchcock screenwriter John Michael Hayes (“Rear Window,” the 1955 remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “The Trouble With Harry”), now in his 70s, reminisced about working with Hitchcock and what inspired his sophisticated dialogue. He was to have been joined by Charles Bennett, 94, the writer of several early Hitchcock films like “The 39 Steps,” “Foreign Correspondent” and the original 1934 “Man Who Knew Too Much,” but ailing health kept him home in Los Angeles, though he joined the seminar by a live phone hookup, moderated by a rather bemused Errol Morris.

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Hayes and Bennett, who have never met in person, chatted warmly about each other’s work, and both had some salty things to say about Hitchcock.

“People always thought Alma (Hitchcock’s wife) contributed to scripts and so on, but in fact, she never did,” Bennett said. “I was quite fond of her, but in fact, Hitch simply wanted more money, so he put her on the payroll.” Hayes, a relaxed and entertaining storyteller, told of shaping the Grace Kelly character in “Rear Window” by drawing heavily on characteristics of his late wife. At one point, in relating a touching story about how he decided to propose a story that he altered slightly and used in “Rear Window,” his eyes welled with tears and he had to pause to regain his composure.

Not every offering was quite so serious-minded. The biggest scheduling logjam happened Saturday night, when filmgoers who weren’t scrambling to get into one of two screenings of the “Bullets Over Broadway,” a period farce about New York gangsters, were fighting it out to get into a screening of Ed Wood’s cheesy “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or a retrospective of the pornographic film industry, featuring skin star Nina Hartley. The porn program was so popular, in fact, two more showings were added Sunday.

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Another audience-pleaser was the return appearance of the Alloy Orchestra, the Cambridge, Mass.-based trio who compose and play original scores to accompany vintage silent films. This year’s discovery was the 1928 “Lonesome,” by Paul Fejos, a winsome tale of love between two lost souls in the big city, made all the more charming by the hand-painted color sequences of Coney Island and by the brilliant cacophony created by the orchestra.

The celebrities who showed up--Sydney Pollack, Peter Weller, Wallace Shawn, Matt Groening, Andre Gregory and others--seemed content to mingle with the rest of the festival-goers. Other highlights included a restored version of Pollack’s 1969 “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”; the first new Coyote and Road Runner cartoon in 30 years, “Chariots of Fur,” which was introduced by its creator, veteran Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones, 81; Cannes favorites like “Strawberry and Chocolate” and “Muriel’s Wedding”; Louis Malle’s “Vanya on 42nd Street”; and Ken Loach’s bleak “Ladybird, Ladybird.”