It soon became obvious that most of the key players knew Harry Marks. Two degrees of separation. Throughout the festival Harry sat calmly at the center of myriad personal and professional relationships quietly surveying his incredible extended family. As it continued to grow.

One of the main reasons I made the pilgrimage to Crested Butte was to see Harry again. I probably would have gone anyway, work willing, having had an incredible experience at the second annual Digital Storytelling Festival I expected no less this time. But Harry's presence was an added bonus that made the trek a mission. I've only had a handful of mentors in my life and Harry is one of them. He doesn't even know it.

I met Harry Marks in or around 1978 in Los Angeles. I was a 24-year-old media hot shot in a company of well-meaning hippie media hot shots bent on saving the world with slide projectors. Harry took an interest in some of the work Metavision had turned out and befriended Meta co-founder Peter ThenInebnit-NowInova. I tagged along for the ride.

A couple of years later I was working as a Special Effects Designer for Lawrence Deutsch Design in LA when I heard from Harry again. "I have a little job for you if you're interested," he said over the phone. Harry is a master of understatement. The gig was the board of directors' meeting of Gulf & Western's Paramount Pictures. I was to produce the slide support for the meeting and work with Barry Diller, Michael Eisner and the Rod Dyer design firm. By this time I think I was all of 26.

Barry Diller and Michael Eisner turned out to be two of the most sour, mean and nasty old women I have ever had the displeasure to work for. After slaving for a week preparing statistically-accurate bar charts for Diller's finanacial speech, he saw them and remarked , "These will all have to be re-done: I can still read the numbers. I don't want to be able to see the numbers!"

Eisner mainly busied himself with the guest list of an upcoming premiere where he devised a plan by which an executive who had recently fallen from grace was to be turned back at the door by Paramount security. Laughs all around. "I can imagine the look on his wife's face when they're told to get back into the limo . . . she'll probably have bought a new dress for the occasion!" Eisner snorted. Every once in a while he would look up at one of the movie trailers he was supposed to be approving and holler, "This is shit--take it out--this kind of crap is exactly why no one on the board GOES to the movies anymore!"

When the big day came, the white-haired Gulf & Western board members filed into the little theatre on the Paramount lot (after a brief bomb scare that morning). Diller rose to speak, "We're running a little late--we can either go through a boring finanacial presentation or take lunch . . . it's up to you." Lunch won out. The presentation was never shown, the demo reel, the special video, none of it. And Diller didn't have to explain his numbers, legible or not.

Next time I heard from Harry was in the late 80's when I got a phone call at my Santa Monica studio. "I have a little job for you." This time the gig was the New York and Los Angeles ABC Television Affiliates Meeting, announcing the new fall line-up. Harry's "little job" nearly killed me--involving my first trip to New York for three days of no sleep and cross-town cab rides to a camera service we held open 24 hours. This time I got to work elbow-to-elbow with Harry and it was great. He did things with type that I couldn't understand, but it always looked fantastic. "Put it down here? Touching the line?" I'd ask. "Of course, " Harry would answer giving me a look like I was missing some unspoken point.

I seem to remember Harry saying that he had spent some time early in his life designing insurance forms. Dues paid. The movement of eyes across a surface; the economic use of limited space, I guess it paid off. Harry's design work always feels rock solid and looks fabulous. It looks "right" somehow.

It's one thing for a 24 or 26-year-old kid to be impressed with a mature talent, but it was the asides from his clients that really got me. Eisner and Diller might have been pricks, but they didn't take much notice of the kid in the shadows taking note of their reverent comments about Harry. "He's the king of presentations." "No one better." Stuff like that. Hollywood movers and shakers speaking of Harry in hushed almost religious tones.

In New York, working with ABC television executives in the hotel suite ("Look, you can see TREES out your window!") their comments back and forth about Harry were equally respectful and awestruck. Remember, I was just a kid and as easily ignored as the hotel's maid service--it's funny how Really Important People had conversations in front of the Little People as if we were invisible. They spoke of Harry as if he was the biggest gun they had. Then Harry would shuffle into the room, head slightly bowed, dressed in black, with a voice quiet enough that you had to lean forward to hear him speak. The gentlest of giants.

When Harry worked with these guys he was soft-spoken, unassuming and almost shy. His control of the situation, the job, was from a very peaceful place--a very assured place. (Not that it kept him from having back problems and constantly fretting every single detail. Harry always seemed consumed with sweating the details during the two affiliates meetings I helped him with.)

A few years after I met Harry I found out he had co-produced the Joe Cocker concert film "Mad Dogs & Englishmen,"; a film that had changed my life. I was sixteen when it was released and needed an excuse to use my new driver's license. I decided to check out the movie more as an excursion in the car than an interest in Joe Cocker. The movie blew me out of my seat. I decided once and for all, watching that film, that my life was going to be a combination of movies and music. I didn't know how, but I knew it had to be. Years later I would ask Harry to sign my laserdisc copy of the film in his LA office. I had a band at the time and was about to begin work on the media behind Jackson Browne's 1986 world tour. A long way from that movie theater in Louisville Kentucky, but somehow it seemed like closure to have Harry put his signature on the cover.

So driving five hours up into the mountains was easier knowing I was going to be able to shake his hand again. Try to make him laugh again. As I heard more and more of the presenters reference Harry I realized just how many lives he has touched. See you next year, Harry.