Aspen moving to March? Not a chance!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on February 25th, 2005

Tommy James hipped us to an an item in the Aspen Times saying that resort owners in the mountaintop Denver town are a little miffed that HBO descends, Baby Huey-like, upon the berg for their annual wingding, filling the hotels, buying plenty of pricey bottles of wine and ringing up giant meal tabs on studio accounts, but they don’t do any skiing.

“As it is now, they displace people who want to come to ski,” Perry said. “We want to talk to HBO and see if we can convince them to do that. I don’t know how successful we’ll be.”

This year, the Feb. 9-13 festival overlapped with Mardi Gras – a popular travel time for guests from South America and Latin America, he said. It will bump up against Mardi Gras again next year if the festival takes place at the start of March, Perry noted.

Tommy says that, since the Fest is scheduled to coincide with pilot season, the powers that be are loath to change the date. James opines that they’d sooner change it to another resort. (We brought to your attention last week an item that said the folks at HBO are contemplating a second Fest, in Las Vegas, in November, maybe. Hmmm… could it be that the whole idea of a change got garbled and that HBO doesn’t plan a second fest at all– just a change of venue to… drumroll, please…LAS VEGAS, BABY!

Ooooh! Would that be spectacular, or what? Makes perfect sense, really. They could have asked us and we would have told them to do it.