PORT TOWNSEND – Veteran actor Elliott Gould will be the special guest at this year’s Port Townsend Film Festival, organizers announced Tuesday.
And Gould, whose career has spanned five decades, more than 70 movies, numerous TV appearances and even cartoon voices – his latest movie this year is “Ocean’s Thirteen” – will bring to the eighth annual festival a guest star of his own on a reel.
He will show a rare 35 mm print of legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s only English-language film, “The Touch” (1971), in which Gould starred with Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson.
It is the only 35 mm print in North America, said Hollywood Reporter columnist Robert Osborne, in revealing Gould as the guest star in his national column on Tuesday.
“The Touch” has never been transferred to DVD.
Also shown will be “California Split” (1974), which co-starred Gould and George Segal – a Robert Altman-directed film exploring the relationship between two gamblers.
For Peter Simpson, the Port Townsend Film Festival artistic director, finding Gould to attend the Sept. 28-30 festival was a matter of inviting him to Port Townsend through a mutual contact.
“We have been in conversation with him since the first of the year,” Simpson said Tuesday.
That conversation began after Simpson tried to lure Gould to the Port Townsend festival’s Academy Awards party in February.
Gould declined, but said he was interested in coming to the festival, according to Simpson.
