Seminal novelists of the genre such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour had already idealized the American Frontier in hundreds of best-selling books and stories. But Williams, a University of Denver professor for 30 years, took a darker view of U.S. expansion, one that dissected the heroic myths of archetypal cowboys, ranch hands and outlaws.

Director Gabe Polsky, who fought for more than a decade to turn “Butcher’s Crossing” into a movie, said he “never really connected with the genre.”

“Never. I tried to watch (Westerns) a little bit and just kind of disconnected because it was about searching for the Indians and bank robberies and revenge and all of that.”

In 2022, Polsky’s cinematic version, which stars Nicholas Cage, debuted on the film festival circuit, and is now in theaters.

As a novel, the coming-of-age story was arguably the first Western to subvert the genre’s morally certain, decades-old formulas. Williams preceded giants of the revisionist and anti-Western such as Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”) and Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”), although his influence is only lately appreciated by critics and readers.

Williams, who also wrote 1965’s literary masterpiece “Stoner,” invests in the emotional lives of his characters as “Butcher’s Crossing” depicts a thrilling, stomach-churning buffalo hunt. Harvard dropout — and naive Ralph Waldo Emerson devotee — William Andrews trades Boston for the Kansas frontier in an effort to expand his horizons. There he joins buffalo hunter Miller (just one name), whose epic, money-making quest involves finding and skinning a legendary herd of Colorado buffalo to secure his biggest payout yet.

Like the book, the film — which stars Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus”) as Andrews, and a fearsome Cage as Miller — is set in the early 1870s when Colorado was still a territory riven by murderous land grabs and precious-metal rushes.

“They’re hunting buffalo, but they’re also going out on this crazy sort of ‘Moby Dick’ search,” Polsky said of the movie, which was shot in the Blackfoot Nation in Northwest Montana due to the size and availability of the tribe’s buffalo herd.

In addition to Moby Dick, reviews have likened it to “Apocalypse Now” as it traces Miller’s mental unraveling on the cursed trek to claim and offload more buffalo hides than anyone actually wanted. “It’s an American tragedy, almost like ‘Death of a Salesman’ in a way,” Polsky said.

The movie hit theaters on Oct. 20, less than a week after the release of the new Ken Burns documentary, “The American Buffalo.” They cover roughly the time period in U.S. history, when the American bison population plummeted from about 60 million in 1860 to fewer than 300 in the span of just 20 years, Polsky said. The movie doesn’t shy from the horror, eschewing special effects and showing real animal skinning on screen.

“It was shot on Blackfeet land near Glacier National Park, and we promised we’d show them the movie before it came out,” said Polsky, whose team made good on the promise. “To do it with them really made a lot of sense because of their history with the animal and how important the animal is to them. We did a lot of ceremony with them before we shot, and they gave us lessons on skinning. Everything was real.”

Blackfeet representatives “loved the movie and were profusely thankful and talked a lot about it,” added Polsky, who pointed out that there are no Indigenous people on screen. “They understood right away you don’t need Native Americans to have these clichéd scenes in there with them. It says everything you need to say with what the hunters did. The (Indigenous people) are lurking. They’re watching. These hunters are self-destructive. Nature will correct you.”

Like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a historically based feature about the racist savagery and murder of Indigenous people (in this case, 1920s Osage people whose land contained oil), it’s part of a re-examination of the evil wrought by ambitious men.

Despite its Montana shooting location, Polsky said the film remains rooted in Colorado.

“Montana had better (production) incentives, but the story is based here and I wrote it here,” he said. “I rented an apartment and mainly wrote the film at the Basalt Library. It was the first draft, so I took the book and started page by page trying to mold it into something cinematic. The novel has so much detail.”

Securing Cage to star afforded it Hollywood appeal. Polsky and his brother/business partner Alan first met Cage while producing 2009’s wild “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which starred Cage as an amoral police officer with severe substance use disorders.

“I don’t know many A-list people on a first-name basis, but (Cage) was the first guy I thought of,” Polsky said. “He’s got that mysterious intensity, and believe me, on set he was even more intense. No one wanted to get near him. I don’t want to say he was a dark force, but he had electricity going through him at all times and everyone was just like ‘Ah! I don’t want to get shot.’”

Cage’s version of Method acting paid off in his performance, but he was also a consummate professional whose deep knowledge of the script and creative ideas during filming helped Polsky see it in a different way.

“He actually brought that buffalo coat he’s wearing on screen,” Polsky said. “He got it online. The glasses, the shaving-his-head thing — those were his ideas, too. He understands that the drive and ambition that created this country were also very destructive. It’s not a happy story all the time, and these real-life guys were individual forces of nature themselves.”

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Seminal novelists of the genre such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour had already idealized the American Frontier in hundreds of best-selling books and stories. But Williams, a University of Denver professor for 30 years, took a darker view of U.S. expansion, one that dissected the heroic myths of archetypal cowboys, ranch hands and outlaws.

Director Gabe Polsky, who fought for more than a decade to turn “Butcher’s Crossing” into a movie, said he “never really connected with the genre.”

“Never. I tried to watch (Westerns) a little bit and just kind of disconnected because it was about searching for the Indians and bank robberies and revenge and all of that.”

In 2022, Polsky’s cinematic version, which stars Nicholas Cage, debuted on the film festival circuit, and is now in theaters.

As a novel, the coming-of-age story was arguably the first Western to subvert the genre’s morally certain, decades-old formulas. Williams preceded giants of the revisionist and anti-Western such as Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”) and Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”), although his influence is only lately appreciated by critics and readers.

Williams, who also wrote 1965’s literary masterpiece “Stoner,” invests in the emotional lives of his characters as “Butcher’s Crossing” depicts a thrilling, stomach-churning buffalo hunt. Harvard dropout — and naive Ralph Waldo Emerson devotee — William Andrews trades Boston for the Kansas frontier in an effort to expand his horizons. There he joins buffalo hunter Miller (just one name), whose epic, money-making quest involves finding and skinning a legendary herd of Colorado buffalo to secure his biggest payout yet.

Like the book, the film — which stars Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus”) as Andrews, and a fearsome Cage as Miller — is set in the early 1870s when Colorado was still a territory riven by murderous land grabs and precious-metal rushes.

“They’re hunting buffalo, but they’re also going out on this crazy sort of ‘Moby Dick’ search,” Polsky said of the movie, which was shot in the Blackfoot Nation in Northwest Montana due to the size and availability of the tribe’s buffalo herd.

In addition to Moby Dick, reviews have likened it to “Apocalypse Now” as it traces Miller’s mental unraveling on the cursed trek to claim and offload more buffalo hides than anyone actually wanted. “It’s an American tragedy, almost like ‘Death of a Salesman’ in a way,” Polsky said.

The movie hit theaters on Oct. 20, less than a week after the release of the new Ken Burns documentary, “The American Buffalo.” They cover roughly the time period in U.S. history, when the American bison population plummeted from about 60 million in 1860 to fewer than 300 in the span of just 20 years, Polsky said. The movie doesn’t shy from the horror, eschewing special effects and showing real animal skinning on screen.

“It was shot on Blackfeet land near Glacier National Park, and we promised we’d show them the movie before it came out,” said Polsky, whose team made good on the promise. “To do it with them really made a lot of sense because of their history with the animal and how important the animal is to them. We did a lot of ceremony with them before we shot, and they gave us lessons on skinning. Everything was real.”

Blackfeet representatives “loved the movie and were profusely thankful and talked a lot about it,” added Polsky, who pointed out that there are no Indigenous people on screen. “They understood right away you don’t need Native Americans to have these clichéd scenes in there with them. It says everything you need to say with what the hunters did. The (Indigenous people) are lurking. They’re watching. These hunters are self-destructive. Nature will correct you.”

Like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a historically based feature about the racist savagery and murder of Indigenous people (in this case, 1920s Osage people whose land contained oil), it’s part of a re-examination of the evil wrought by ambitious men.

Despite its Montana shooting location, Polsky said the film remains rooted in Colorado.

“Montana had better (production) incentives, but the story is based here and I wrote it here,” he said. “I rented an apartment and mainly wrote the film at the Basalt Library. It was the first draft, so I took the book and started page by page trying to mold it into something cinematic. The novel has so much detail.”

Securing Cage to star afforded it Hollywood appeal. Polsky and his brother/business partner Alan first met Cage while producing 2009’s wild “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which starred Cage as an amoral police officer with severe substance use disorders.

“I don’t know many A-list people on a first-name basis, but (Cage) was the first guy I thought of,” Polsky said. “He’s got that mysterious intensity, and believe me, on set he was even more intense. No one wanted to get near him. I don’t want to say he was a dark force, but he had electricity going through him at all times and everyone was just like ‘Ah! I don’t want to get shot.’”

Cage’s version of Method acting paid off in his performance, but he was also a consummate professional whose deep knowledge of the script and creative ideas during filming helped Polsky see it in a different way.

“He actually brought that buffalo coat he’s wearing on screen,” Polsky said. “He got it online. The glasses, the shaving-his-head thing — those were his ideas, too. He understands that the drive and ambition that created this country were also very destructive. It’s not a happy story all the time, and these real-life guys were individual forces of nature themselves.”

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“This time of year I drink my black coffee cold so I can get it down quicker,” the 44-year-old singer-songwriter said over the phone from his Nashville porch on Monday. “I’ve spent so many years working late at night that it makes it hard for me to get on with normal life. It’s tough, you know? But I think it’s tough no matter how you do it.”

Isbell’s family and acclaimed music career test his resolve while giving him motivation to stay sober and productive. He has won a quartet of Grammy Awards since 2018 — about a decade after getting kicked out of his former alt-country band, Drive-By Truckers, for drinking and drugging — and would seem to have nothing to prove in the music industry. At least from the outside.

In the HBO Max documentary “Music Box: Jason Isbell — Running with Our Eyes Closed,” which was released on April 7, we’re afforded a close-up on his life as he records the album “Reunions” with his band, the 400 Unit. His intimate musical and romantic partnership with wife Amanda Shires (herself an acclaimed solo artist), his love of his daughter Mercy Rose, his past divorce, and the shock of the pandemic are all there in vivid cross-section.

“If you’re a recording artist or entertainer with any kind of success, you don’t want to spend too much time looking back,” said Isbell, who was born in Green Hill, Ala., to a 17-year-old mother. “It’s a self-centered way of living. But one thing I was surprised by watching the (documentary) is that I’d forgotten how hard those old days were, growing up where I did and having addiction issues. It was nice to see but painful to watch, that all of this was real and really happened to me, even if it’s long in the rearview.”

Isbell will headline Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, May 3 and 4 with the 400 Unit, on tour for their new album “Weathervanes,” to be released June 9. The lead single “Death Wish” has already been covered by Jack White and featured on “American Idol.” Isbell’s melodies channel Americana, folk, country, rock and blues. His lyrics are cutting and urgent and full of visceral metaphors. On “Death Wish,” he sings:

“I wanted action, she wanted answers / Sunrise with the dealers and the dancers / It takes a whole lot of medicine to feel like a little kid.”

It’s not all grit, but Isbell works hard on every single song, he said. In the “Music Box” documentary, he can’t get away from songwriting, but that’s not always the case. Isbell will appear in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which stars Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jesse Plemons, among others (there’s no current release date for the Apple+ production). He was cast alongside musicians White and Sturgill Simpson in the Oklahoma-based crime drama. And he won’t play music in it.

“Everybody around me had an Oscar, or more, and I was just kind of asking them, ‘What do I do here?’ ” Isbell said of the filming experience. “Luckily they were kind enough and invested enough in the project that they didn’t just say, ‘Leave me the (heck) alone!’ … It was really hard. It took everything — all my ability as a creative thinker and also a large dose of letting go of any kind of self-awareness or self-consciousness. But I appreciated the opportunity to do it, just because it wasn’t easy. In your 40s, how often do you get to be terrified?”

It helped that, prior to production, Isbell asked Lyle Lovett for acting advice, given that Lovett had averaged roughly a movie or TV series per year since 1983. Lovett shared some wisdom that director Robert Altman gave him on the set of 1992’s “The Player,” which was the first of what would become four collaborations with Altman.

” ‘Don’t act; just go out there and be,’ ” Isbell said. “He said it was the best advice anyone’s ever given him.”

Whether or not Isbell’s Hollywood career takes off, he won something in the experience: During production downtime in his trailer, he wrote a bunch of new songs.

If you go

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. With Angel Olsen, May 3 and 4 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 18300 W. Alameda Parkway in Morrison, Colorado. All ages. Tickets: $50-$100 via axs.com.

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“We’re trying to prevent rampant scalping and rampant re-selling and get these tickets into people’s hands,” said Don Strasburg, co-president and senior talent buyer at Denver-based promoter AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, whose parent company Anschutz Entertainment Group also owns AXS. “But what happened with the Skrillex show is relatively rare.”

Last week, AXS took the unusual step of “sweeping” tickets for the April 29 Red Rocks concert from dubstep artist Skrillex due to what officials said was fraudulent activity. That meant recovering passes that had already been sold, then re-selling them through the company’s lottery system.

“What Zach Bryan did at Red Rocks is a really good example of (lotteries),” Strasburg said. “He used FAIR AXS right out of the gate, and went one step further by delaying transfer of the tickets until the day of the show.” Bryan, a rising alt-country star, is one of the hottest tickets in the country right now. He will play Red Rocks on June 26.

Prices, and frustrations, are at an all-time high right now as music fans and artists decry a broken system in the wake of face-planting failures by ticketing companies.

The most notable dustup of late was when Ticketmaster wasn’t able to successfully offer pre-sale tickets for Taylor Swift’s latest tour. Ticketmaster blamed “staggering” demand for its repeated website crashes, and subsequent decision to cancel the presale after it was already launched, locking out countless fans who had waited all day for the chance to buy.

That 2022 debacle instantly caught the attention of lawmakers across the U.S., who have for years investigated companies like Ticketmaster, to little apparent effect.

Meanwhile, instant sell-outs for high-demand Denver shows from artists such as Pretty Lights and Maggie Rogers have forced some fans onto the secondary and third-party markets, where prices can balloon to many times the price set by the artist.

Fees are also causing heartbreak for music fans. In some cases, they can make up one-third of the overall price of a ticket, as fans complained when The Cure’s policy of affordable, fixed-price tickets was instantly undermined by Ticketmaster and re-sellers. Singer Robert Smith said earlier this month the band had reclaimed about 7,000 tickets obtained by apparent bots and re-sellers.

“I have been told: StubHub has pulled listings in all markets except NY, Chicago, Denver (i.e. cities in states that have laws protecting scalpers). Please don’t buy from the scalpers. There are still tickets available — it is just a very slow process,” Smith Tweeted in March.

Ticketmaster officials declined to do interviews for this story.

Still, some experts see optimism in a series of new, evolving systems that limit fees and third-party sellers — not just for concerts, but Broadway shows, sporting events and more. Promoters say a little extra research and patience is all it takes to prevail in most online buying situations.

“Situations like Skrillex are relatively uncommon,” said Strasburg, whose company books more than 100 annual shows at Red Rocks. “Maybe under 3 or 4 percent of every event we do.”

Fans remain unconvinced. “This is the new normal in live music,” wrote a Reddit user in the r/Denver subreddit. “It sucks.”

Legislators seem eager to make meaningful changes. Colorado lawmakers are now considering a bill introduced in January that sponsors say would protect ticket buyers. Senate Bill 23-060 would force ticket-sellers to list the total price at the beginning of the transaction. It further defines “deceptive trade practices” such as selling tickets that re-sellers don’t actually possess, and targets bots, third-party sellers and others that take advantage of open sales and anxious fans.

The bill has the support of Live Nation — Ticketmaster’s owner — and AEG, as well as several major local venues, Strasburg said. But consumer groups have argued it’s a bad sign and that Ticketmaster, for example, would gain greater control over the secondary market as a result of its passage, with purview over any sales that originate on the site, but that go bad during the process.

Ticketmaster is already a quiet but major player on the secondary market and critics who accused it of being a “monopoly” after the Taylor Swift situation, say it should be investigated for antitrust violations. (The company has repeatedly denied allegations of a monopoly.)

Embed from Getty Images

“Once again Ticketmaster is gaslighting its customers and government officials, this time with the Colorado bill,” said Jason Berger, board director at the Coalition for Ticket Fairness, a New York-based consumer group.

“‘It is a pro-consumer bill,’ they say. Then why is almost every consumer protection organization against it? Name another product that you purchase, that is nonrefundable, and the price you can sell it for, to whom, when and how is entirely controlled by one company?” he asked.

The Colorado bill remains under consideration and has not yet been voted on.

As the debates rage, here are a few suggestions for how to get the cheapest and least-frustrating concert tickets — keeping in mind that demand for some shows is so high that instant sell-outs are assured, regardless of the process or seller.

• Digital literacy. Learn to differentiate legit ticket-sellers from re-sellers. That can be difficult when websites use addresses such as fillmoreauditorium.org, which is not related to promoter Live Nation or Ticketmaster, or the similarly misleading theredrocksamphitheater.com (note the “the” in the URL). Don’t use the first results on Google searches, which are typically advertisements, and instead look for links to major ticketing companies — or follow links on the artist website’s tour listings. Don’t buy or use presale codes from anyone but the artist, venue or first-party seller.
• Custom alerts. Fans can get the heads-up when artists, teams or venues have upcoming events. Major ticket sellers support this because it gives artists and credit-card sponsors a chance to gauge interest and reinforce loyalty to and reliance on their systems. In some cases it may also give you the leg-up you need. Visit the account settings page on your ticketing account and tweak them to your interests. Following promoters and artists on social media also occasionally offers an advantage.
• Lotteries. Yes, the odds are inherently low. But some fans have gotten to see “Hamilton” during its Broadway tour thanks to $10 tickets they won after signing up for the random drawings. AXS FAIR’s ticketing system, which the artist can choose to use, promises unbiased selection for fans — although promoters admit its roll-out during Mission Ballroom’s opening weeks confused some, leading them to pause the practice for the most part. Sign up whenever you can.
• Devices and accounts. Use only one tab per device when you’re waiting in an online queue, and don’t refresh or navigate away from it. It’s tempting to have your phone, laptop, tablet and other hardware trained on the same on-sale page to increase your chances, but it can also confuse the software and invalidate your wait by having the same IP address (your personal digital location) attacking from all sides. Use only one account per device, and enlist other people you know to wait for the same on-sales to increase the odds.
• Membership. Most ticketing websites have a next-level option that artists can choose for their sales — with Ticketmaster it’s called Verified Fan — and the results are more favorable in terms of blocking bots and re-sellers, due in part to pre-filled forms from fans. This also forces you to update your payment options and other preferences so you’re not slowed down by them during the buying process.
• Patience. This is typically in short supply, but it could yield affordable tickets. Most shows don’t sell out, and even the ones that do may have additional tickets made available closer to the show — owing to readjusted needs from the artist and promoter, changing capacity and other factors. Set alerts to revisit the ticketing page and experiment with different price levels and seating a few days or weeks after the initial on-sale. You might be surprised at what you’re able to find, whether it’s a dirt-cheap obstructed view or last-minute front row seat that’s opened up.
• Don’t give up hope. Along those same lines, it’s understandable (and typically justified) to feel cynical about the entire process. But since some fans have found that physical tickets can materialize hours before the show, or that walk-up box office sales can sometimes yield results, it’s not all doom and gloom. With some due diligence, you’re more likely to prevail with affordable tickets and avoid buying that $350 secondary-market ticket to a show that went on sale for $70.

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Now the Pueblo-based game designer, who created his award-winning piece “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” using the AI software Midjourney, is exploiting his fame as an AI-art poster child to launch a campaign to legally protect AI works.

“The U.S. Copyright Office rejected my copyright registration (for the image), so after some back and forth, I’ve hired a lawyer and am appealing,” said the 39-year-old Allen, who this week is unveiling a coordinated online protest against the ruling. “We’re prepared to go all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Allen’s Colorado-based protest is called COVER, or Copyright Obstruction Violates Expressive Rights. He’s filing a Request for Reconsideration with the U.S. Copyright Office in an attempt to establish sole ownership of an artwork generated using AI software — the first appeal of its type, he said. It parallels international debates and legal cases about revenue and commercial rights with AI creations, but takes specific issue with the U.S. Copyright Office’s reasoning.

“We have decided that we cannot register this copyright claim because the deposit does not contain any human authorship,” Copyright Office officials wrote in their decision. “Instead, the deposit contains only material that your client solicited from an artificial intelligence art-generator.”

In response, Allen and Denver-based trademark attorney Tamara Pester argue that “the use of AI in the creation of art is a legitimate form of artistic expression,” and that such works should be afforded the same protection as “traditional” forms of art.

Allen’s public relations campaign, and his plan to repeatedly appeal any rejections, echoes others in the art and design worlds who have come to see AI as a tool rather than a threat. That’s in contrast to the backlash Allen received from artists around the globe after “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” won in Colorado last year.

Many said that his piece stole recognizable imagery from existing paintings and photographs, and that his creative process was a cheat, relegated only to a few keyboard clicks. But others disagree, or at least see AI as a groundbreaking technology that could challenge our assumptions of what art can be.

“I believe that as artists, we have the power to imbue these creations with meaning and emotion,” said Denver artist Mario Zoots, who sees endless possibilities in AI for his collage work. “As Baudrillard wrote, ‘Simulation is not a copy of the real, but the hyperreal.’”

AI imaging software uses text-based prompts to scan and synthesize information from large databases of imagery, such as Getty Images, which licenses stock images and photographs. Getty filed a lawsuit last month in London against the AI program Stable Diffusion for “brazen infringement” in what it describes as the theft of 12 million images from its collection.

Artists Kelly McKernan, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz in January filed a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco against the AI program that Allen used — Midjourney — and its peers, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp, for stealing their original, copyrighted work for “collage” purposes in AI engines. They found that users were specifically including their names (and therefore sampling their work) in the search terms and generation of AI imagery, which could then be shared or sold without credit and revenue, The New Yorker reported in February.

“(Artists) are acting like it’s this massive, end-of-the-world event,” Allen said. “But the backlash and animosity is just an outlet for them to express their frustrations about everything else, since it’s not polite to criticize other artists.”

Even as many social media debates and op-eds continue to oppose the idea of copyrighting AI-generated art, Allen remains the willing lightning-rod, doing nearly 100 interviews since his state fair win and declaring to The New York Times: “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”

But while Allen is litigating his case with the public, AI is continuing to evolve in unexpected ways.

“There are so many unanswered questions regarding the ethics, legality, and societal impact that will undoubtedly be the focus of conversation in the coming months,” said Cody Borst, who has worked on tech-forward installations as director of exhibition at Meow Wolf Denver, an immersive art company. “The speed in which the technology is advancing is quickly outpacing our understanding of the impacts it might have.”

Machine learning, or data training, as some AI processes are also called, has gone mainstream. Dalle-E 2 users have shared absurd imagery from their text-to-image experiments, while the Lensa AI app has led a wave of smartphone users to post uncanny AI portraits of themselves on social media. ChatGPT continues to generate alarmingly sophisticated yet soulless, thoughtless text ranging from business plans and homework to beer recipes and poetry.

Fundamentally, there’s no hard line between handmade and technologically aided art, said Sharifa Moore, executive director of the Denver Digerati nonprofit, which in September will hold its retooled Digerati Emergent Media Festival (formerly Supernova).

“There are so many precedents that have blurred that line throughout art history … Modern art introduced the idea of art being as, or more, important than the tangible thing,” she said. “Even photography had to fight for respect at the dawn of the 20th century.”

AI also has limitless applications for filling in blanks in the world of imagery, said David Romero, a community manager at Portland, Ore., company Luma Labs. His company is looking to “democratize 3D,” according to its website, and said AI has already helped sharpen scans of Colorado landmarks such as East High School and Empower Field for use in 3D digital environments.

“Each one of these scans would have been 100 percent impossible to create a year ago,” said Romero, a graduate of East High. “To make something remotely similar with previous technologies would have cost (more money) per scan and only have a fraction of the photorealism. Now it takes less than 10 minutes and is basically just the cost of cloud compute time.”

Colorado’s Allen will soon unveil an ambitious project that delves into the creation of his award-winning Colorado State Fair piece, he said. If people understand how current AI works, its perceived threat would fade, he said.

“It literally at this point is a calculator,” Allen said of AI image-generating software. “It’s a very complex matrix calculator running through a model that was trained on all these images. But if you were a person of capable of looking at all these images, you could do it too.”

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Senate Bill 23-171, introduced Feb. 27 by Colorado Sen. Kevin Priola and Rep. Chris deGruy Kennedy, would require venues such as Ball Arena, Coors Field, Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Empower Field at Mile High to offer 4% of their audience capacity as “substance free seating,” where alcohol, tobacco and other substances would be banned.

The bill addresses the need for families and people in addiction recovery to have substance-free spaces, Priola said Friday, and is part of a growing national movement toward such spaces.

The bill would set a national precedent as the first of its type in the country, although some sports stadiums — including Coors Field — already offer small, alcohol-free sections for families.

“There’s a growing (sober) community and segment of the market that isn’t being represented,” Priola said. “In the U.S., 9% of people at any one time are trying to recover from addiction, and if you add in families that don’t want a bunch of people partaking around them, 4% is completely reasonable.”

If passed, failure to comply with the bill would be “basis for refusal or denial of an alcohol beverage license renewal or initial license issuance and other forms of license-related discipline,” according to the bill’s text.

Priola has been working with sports teams and venues owners to build support for the bill, and has people lined up to endorse it at a hearing later this week, he said. The bill would take effect in 2026, giving teams, venues and promoters time to work with season ticket holders who might be affected, as well as other legal and logistical concerns.

Colorado’s Liquor Enforcement Division declined to comment on the proposed bill, saying that the state would weigh in only if it passes. Denver-based concert promoter AEG Presents Rocky Mountains also declined to comment on the potential effect on ticket prices and seating layouts.

Complicating the bill is the fact that most Colorado sports and concert venues maintain sponsorship deals with liquor and beer companies. In addition, beer, liquor and wine consumption is up year-over-year in Colorado as of 2020, according to data from the Beverage Information Group and Park Street Analyses. The Colorado Department of Revenue also showed a general upward trend in liquor excise taxes since 2016, according to a recent report.

The bill would have unintended negative consequences for Colorado restaurants and bars, according to Colin Larson, director of government affairs at the Colorado Restaurant Association.

“While we applaud the underlying goal of supporting people in recovery, this bill would create an unreasonable and unsustainable situation for independent food-and-beverage vendors with stadium locations, endangering their businesses and their employees’ livelihoods,” he said in a statement provided to The Denver Post.

“This bill would punish these operators for circumstances outside of their control, as they have no way to police where customers go after they purchase an alcohol beverage in a stadium setting,” Larson said. “The unintended consequences here put stadium employees and vendors at great disadvantage, opening the door for customer complaints and lost revenue.”

The bill would not affect off-premise alcohol consumption or sales, according to its language. But it would still represent a further decaying of the state’s liquor industry, said Chris Fine, executive director of the Colorado Licensed Beverage Association.

“We deal with off-premise sales and mom-and-pop liquor stores, but I know that addressing addiction is a big passion project of Senator Priola,” Fine said. “However, we did just see billions of out-of-state dollars come in trying to eradicate our industry (in relation to wine sales at grocery stores, which began March 1), so this would just be another eroding effect.”

Priola said the bill’s bar may seem high, but that public-health campaigns against cigarettes, vaping and other addictive substances have succeeded in the past, and that his bill has the same potential.

“I’ve done a lot with opioid legislation and on other substance-related committees, and what I’ve learned in that time — especially working with the CU Anschutz Medical Center — is that alcohol-use disorder is the biggest one out there. It just happens to be the most socially acceptable.”

Walking through magnetometers and undergoing other rigorous security checks at public events seemed draconian 20 years ago, Priola said, and now it’s standard. People can be re-trained. But taking his own kids to sporting events and seeing unruly, substance-driven behavior also inspired the bill, Priola said.

He acknowledged the enforcement would be complicated, and that passage is likely an uphill battle, given the lack of response from liquor-industry players. He said he’ll introduce it as many times as necessary until it passes.

“There already mechanisms at venues to report issues with rowdy attendees, and this would piggyback on that,” he said. “But I think large entertainment venues, most of which are publicly funded, could look at this as a market opportunity to serve a broader customer base.”

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That would be the bathroom scene, in which lead character Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) enters the fictional Overlook Hotel’s accursed Room 237 — and, more specifically, its color-saturated, mid-century modern bathroom. There he finds a silent, naked woman in a bathtub, who emerges dripping to embrace our hypnotized Torrance.

You won’t be shocked to hear it doesn’t end well. But it does imprint itself permanently on the gray matter, which is why Denver’s MOA Architecture relished the opportunity to re-create the set in screen-accurate detail. Now guests of the hotel’s “Shining”-related tours can step into that bathroom for themselves.

The space is part of a larger renovation of the hotel’s Caretaker Cottage that “commemorates both the hotel’s real and fictional history,” according to MOA associate Taylor Coe, the company’s strategic growth manager.

“The first floor is a time machine. Step inside to be whisked back to 1912, when the hotel’s first caretaker moved in with his family,” Coe wrote. “The design team spared no detail to achieve this effect. Look closer and even the smallest details stand up to scrutiny — from period brass air registers to the hand-carved crown molding.”

The historic restoration, completed under lead designer Tina Kivalu, is now part of “Caretaker’s Cottage/The Shining Suite,” an hour-long theatrical experience at the Stanley. The tour combines Lamborn’s Caretaker’s Cottage, as it’s called, with all kinds of “Shining” lore.
Guests can’t stay in the cottage, but they can move through it and snap photos.

“If you are bent on ignoring Dick Hallorann, proceed up the stairs,” Coe wrote, referencing the fictional head chef at the Overlook who teaches young Danny Torrance how to harness his telepathic powers (a.k.a. “the shine”), and who warns the caretaking-Torrance family of the hotel’s ghostly malevolence.

“The second floor leaves history behind and drops you into a disorienting, uneasy space, somewhere between cinema and the designers’ imaginations,” according to a press statement. That includes the movie-set bathroom but also touches like the Hick’s Hexagon pattern (the famous, red-brown-and-orange hallway carpet created by David Hicks) in one of the bedrooms. There’s also a bedroom imagined to be the “Grady twins’ bedroom,” where the creepy ghost sisters who appear to the Torrance family once lived.

“The Shining”-themed renovation adds to the Stanley’s attempt to fashion itself as the home of Rocky Mountain horror, including a recently acquired prop axe from “The Shining” production which sold at auction in May for $175,000. It was then anonymously donated for display in the Stanley Film Center, a sprawling film and music entertainment complex that’s been in development for years on the Stanley’s property.

No surprise that the hotel, which regularly hosts themed events and multi-night music performances, was named as the first of America’s Most Haunted Hotels by Trips to Discover digital magazine last month.

The hourlong Caretaker’s Cottage tour is limited to ages 8 and up and costs $30 per person. Advance reservations for parties of up to 10 people are required at thestanleyhotel.thundertix.com
Tribune News Service

Stanisic was the second youngest of Monday’s 10 shooting victims at the Boulder King Soopers.

A graduate of Alameda International Jr./Sr. High, Stanisic’s family came to the U.S. as refugees in the late 1990s, according to leaders at Saint John the Baptist Serbian Orthodox Church in Lakewood. Stanisic was born in the U.S.

“His family fled the war in the former Yugoslavia and everything they had was either left behind or destroyed,” said Rev. Radovan Petrovic of Saint John the Baptist. “They left everything to save their lives, and came here to have a new start.”

Stanisic was headed away from the King Soopers on Monday after a coffee-machine fix-it job inside the grocery store, Petrovic said, adding, “He ended up being in the parking lot, in his car, when the bullet struck him.”

“He was an amazing child,” said Ivana Petrovic, the reverend’s wife, who had close ties with the Stanisic family. “We’ve known the family ever since we became their spiritual father and mother here. He was a very good, shy, hardworking boy and one of those kiddos who listened to his parents the best.”

Stanisic’s Facebook page, which was last updated in 2016, showed him with high school classmates, smiling in a blue graduation gown and cap. The profile also contained images of hand-drawn anime characters and the Assassin’s Creed video game series.

Petrovic, who has four boys of her own, said she frequently pointed to Stanisic as an example for her own kids, given that “he was such a good behaving boy.” As Serbian refugees from Bosnia, the Stanisics only wanted another chance at building a life for their family, which included Neven’s Colorado-based parents and his younger sister.

“He was a very mild-mannered but hard-working, well-regarded young man,” Rev. Petrovic said. “(The family was) dedicated to life here, and to have his happen to him, that’s something neighbors and much of our community cannot comprehend.

“These things that happen here in this country, unfortunately, it’s a specific phenomenon. I as a priest only can note that people in charge definitely need to pay attention to people needing mental health (treatment) so that these things don’t continue to happen.”