Denver East High celebrates film legacies of Hattie McDaniel, Harold Lloyd and Pam Grier

It was, by all outward appearances, another wildly successful High Plains Comedy Festival, which again gathered more than 100 standups over three days at several venues along South Broadway last month.

This year’s fest also featured an expanded swath of clever comedy programming such as game shows, filmed sketches, podcast recordings and a unique riff on “Mystery Science 3000.” Most fun perhaps was a reverse comedy roast: Competing comedians were charged with killing each other with kindness. One of the matches paired a professional comedian brother against his professional comedian sister. The headlining event was a Kyle Kinane appearance at the Paramount.

All told, it was another triumphant weekend for the festival, launched in 2013 by Adam Cayton-Holland, who has been making his own inroads as an author, TV creator and, now screenwriter. (A film called “See You When I See You,” based on his searing family memoir “Tragedy Plus Time,” directed by Jay Duplass and featuring Kaitlyn Dever, David Duchovny and Hope Davis, is in post-production.)     

The importance of the High Plains Comedy Festival to neighborhood business was made all the more plain with the disquieting news from July that the Underground Music Showcase – in some ways the model upon which the otherwise unrelated High Plains festival is based – will not return to the Baker neighborhood next July for the first time in 21 years, at least in “in its current form.” That was a big blow to the Broadway Merchants Association, which represents the more than 200 largely independent and locally owned businesses in the neighborhood.

But the future of the 13-year-old festival is now nothing if not uncertain. On its closing day Sept. 21, Cayton-Holland posted a troubling message on Instagram that said  he was broken. “Is this the last year?” he wrote. “Time will tell. Interested, non-whorish larger powers that be: Let’s chat.”

Cayton-Holland is known for not wasting a single word in his comedy routines, and that post was laced with subtext probably only known to his inner circle. But he made the future of the festival clear enough: It’s unclear.

Asked to provide additional context, Cayton-Holland did not walk back his post, but he made clear he would not be further talking about the subject publicly. “Time will tell,” he reiterated.

Whatever’s really going on behind the scenes here isn’t good for anyone, from the comedians Cayton Holland and creative partner Karen Wachtel have amplified over the years, to the local comedy fans who attend in large numbers, to the aforementioned businesses that have greatly benefitted from the twin festivals that, over time, have come to largely define the vibe of the neighborhood. The area has been slowly returning to its former glory as a busy and eclectic transit corridor filled with eclectic antique shops, restaurants, music venues and hip coffee shops. The Broadway Merchants Association is now seeking to create a general improvement district surrounding Broadway from Speer Boulevard to Interstate 25. Its leader, Luke Johnson, did not respond to a request for comment on the fate of the comedy festival.

Whatever that fate is, Cayton-Holland is rightly proud of the legacy he has built.

“High Plains is good for the soul,” Cayton-Holland told The Denver Gazette. “I always come away from the fest blown away and inspired.”

Read more: Headliner Kyle Kinane faces ‘paradox of tolerance’ head-on

Denver East film legacies

The descendants of two prominent former Denver East High School students were in Denver over the weekend seeking to preserve and celebrate the legacies of Hattie McDaniel and Harold Lloyd.

Kevin John Goff, McDaniel’s great grand-nephew, has dedicated much of his life to expanding the narrative beyond McDaniel’s place in history as the first Black actor to win an Oscar. She also faced both severe discrimination and hindsight criticism by subsequent leaders of the Black civil-rights movement for a career largely playing servant roles. The quote that echoes long since her death was her assertion that “I would rather play a maid than be one.”

Goff was a guest at a unique festival celebrating the 150th anniversary of Denver East High School, located directly across the street from Denver Film’s Sie Film Center.

After a screening of John Ford’s star-studded but largely forgotten 1942 film “In this Our Life,” Goff told the gathered Sie Film Center audience that even though McDaniel left Denver for Hollywood before graduating, her family remained in Denver, and she considered Denver to be “the only home she ever had.”

In “In This Our Life,” an unsettling precursor to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” McDaniel plays a maid to a rich family whose drunk and spoiled debutante (Bette Davis) runs a woman and her daughter off the road (killing the girl) – only to falsely claim McDaniel’s son was driving.

But in this story, Davis’ sister (Olivia de Havilland) and her principled lawyer right the racial wrong. In real life, Goff said, Davis and McDaniel were good friends. “As a matter of fact, they both served on the Hollywood Victory Committee during World War II and entertained the troops together during the war,” he said in a post-screening conversation moderated by esteemed local film essayist Lisa Kennedy (herself an East grad). In fact, Davis, he added, “was one of the few White performers who would go over and entertain the Black troops.”

Kennedy said the mistake revisionists make regarding McDaniel’s considerable career “is that we tend to view every performance as a domestic as if it’s the same performance, and the same character, when it’s not.”

Goff agreed. “When she had the opportunity to show a little nuance and different layers, it showed what she could have done on an even bigger scale, had she been offered more of that type of material.”

Lloyd, who attended Denver East in 1911, was a silent film giant whose work was significant for

defining the optimistic “everyman” character and pioneering sophisticated, thrill-infused comedy. East FilmFest audiences were treated to his 1925 “The Freshman.”

Granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd says she was largely raised by Harold until his death when she was 19. She was tickled to come to Denver from L.A., where she teaches classes in silent film, to champion Lloyd’s work at this student-centered film festival because of his connection to young audiences.

“My grandfather loved showing his films at high schools and on college campuses,” she told the Denver Gazette. “You know what? It’s so healthy for people just to turn around and laugh and have a moment to get out of their space and go back to a different time. And Harold Lloyd is so American. I mean, he did not come from New York. He came from Nebraska.”

As a teenager, she said, he came with his dad to live in Denver for a short time. “He actually graduated from a high school in San Diego, where he started his film career with Thomas Edison.”

One donor to this East FilmFest was Philip C. Bailey, an East alum and lead singer of Earth Wind & Fire. A planned appearance by Pam Grier (“Jackie Brown,” class of 1967), was scuttled at the last minute.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com