Mountainfilm screens Dean Potter biopic “The Dark Wizard”

My name’s Jim Hurst. I’ve lived in Telluride and the region for, I don’t know, 30 years, close to. I work in film. I work mostly on documentary films, outdoor-oriented type pieces, and I’ve been a regular contributor to Mountainfilm for a very long time. Mountainfilm this year is showing “The Dark Wizard,” which is an HBO series about Dean Potter. Dean was a very good friend of mine, and I got into filmmaking partially due to Dean because he was doing such incredible things that I felt I needed to document them. Dean Potter was one of the best climbers of the 1990s. He was doing things and coming up with new ideas, things that nobody had done before. And also soloing rock climbs that had never been soloed before. Yeah, Dean was called the ‘Dark Wizard’ because he had this incredible ability to take things that most people would consider kinda dark, like fear or anxiety or whatever, and craft it into superhuman energy and ability. For me, working on something like “The Dark Wizard” was really fun because I got to not only record audio, shot a lot of the film, but also was one of the subjects in it, and that’s something very different for me. This story’s an interesting one in that, you know, it’s a cautionary tale. And it’s a cautionary tale about what we do to survive in our economy. You know, there’s an argument that says it’s just as dangerous to sit behind a desk and suffer all of the health consequences as it is to be out free-soloing and climbing things. They both lead to the same place, degradation, what are you willing to trade in your life, you know, to get by, to make a living in our society. It’s an interesting question. I think beyond that, I think it’s a bit of a wake-up call about mental health, especially in the action sports or with, you know, old white dudes like us, to really check yourself and take care of yourself and deal with problems. Beyond that, it’s just good storytelling. I think Dean would be psyched on this piece, and he loved the Mountainfilm community and they loved him right back, and I think this does a great honor to Dean and his legacy. And the reason you wanna go see it at Mountainfilm is community, to see the film on the big screen with a community of people that loved and cared about Dean.