Don’t touch that dial: TIFF is getting into TV
Festival wants to recognize television’s coming of age, its artistic director says
The Toronto International Film Festival is lowering its drawbridge to let television into its cinema kingdom.
With its new Primetime program, TIFF will squeeze TV content, up to six different stand-alone shows or series episodes, into its already packed September film schedule, which this year runs from Sept. 10 to 20. Full details are to come in the weeks and months ahead.
The announcement Wednesday seemed almost as dramatic as if barbarians had actually stormed TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival’s five-year-old palace at King and John Sts.
TIFF director Piers Handling even went so far as to call the impending TV invasion a great way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his film festival.
“What better way to celebrate our 40th anniversary than with a program that focuses on the new golden era of television that’s currently producing high-qual- ity global programming, terrific writing, and direction that rivals the best feature filmmaking,” he enthused. But is this really a good idea? Isn’t film supposed to be the superior medium, forever at odds with the lesser offerings of the “boob tube”? Won’t blending film and TV be as explosive as mixing matter with anti-matter on Star Trek?
An anti-TV bias has been the movie industry narrative since the medium’s mass inception in the 1950s. The big studios invested in such widescreen technology as Cinema Scope and Vista Vision, and gimmicks like 3D, in a vain attempt to retain its vast audience from Hollywood’s Golden Age of decades past.
Studio chiefs also tried to prevent such film talent as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart from appearing on the small screen, lest it sully the shine of their stars on the big one.
At the same time, these same studios also sought to buy into TV production and broadcasting, since everybody realized that the new medium was both inevitable and lucrative.
And many blockbuster movie franchises, Star Trek among them, began life as a TV series.
So there’s always been a certain amount of hypocrisy in the perceived divide between film and television. The double standard has seemed all the more unsustainable in recent years, with TV series such as True Detective, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall considerably upping the ante for episodic broadcast storytelling.
TIFF wants to recognize this fact by treating TV with the respect it deserves, says artistic director Cameron Bailey.
“I’m so glad to see that what I think used to be a kind of snobbery around television fall away,” he said from Los Angeles, where he’s on one of his many pre-festival scouting missions.
“And people are just saying, look, if it’s a great story and it’s well made, and if it has that kind of visual quality that we want from cinema, then it doesn’t matter what it’s called or how many pieces it comes in. Let’s just show it!”
I asked Bailey if there was an “aha!” moment that convinced him and others at TIFF that TV had finally matured to point where the film/TV divide vanished.
I wasn’t surprised by his answer: True Detective. This crime drama from the winter of 2014, a series of eight one-hour episodes, featured movie stars Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and Michelle Monaghan, in an occult-themed procedural set in Louisiana.
It was directed by Cary Fukunaga, who at that point was better known as a moviemaker. His 2011 literary drama, Jane Eyre, premiered at that year’s TIFF, and his 2009 feature debut, Sin Nombre, an immigrant refugee thriller set across the U.S.Mexico border, premiered at that year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Many movie critics watched True Detective, remarking on how filmic it seemed, such as the use of a lengthy tracking shot in one particularly memorable episode.
“When you were watching that, maybe if you were just dropped into the middle of an episode of True Detective and it was playing on a big screen, you have would have no idea if it was a feature film or a television show,” Bailey said.
“That, I think, was when it became clear that the medium of television has so many possibilities. How many of us are now watching shows in that binge way, where you’ll sit down and over the course of a week or a weekend, and watch all of a season of House of Cards, or something like that?
“The commitment that people have to watching screen stories is impressive. We felt like we want to follow our audience, we want to follow the creators who are doing this, and also we’re into it too.”
He’s not sure yet exactly how the Primetime program will switch on, but early plans are for it to have up to six different shows and/or series from around the world. Festival TV content will be projected onto the big film screens, and Q&As with directors and talent will follow, just like at traditional TIFF events.
Programmers are already looking at TV content, in addition to the thousands of films they screen for the festival, but Bailey said there are also plans to hire a dedicated TV programmer soon.
It feels like radical change, although Bailey pointed out that TIFF has been showing TV content for years, as have many other festivals. Last year’s TIFF showed part of Stefano Sollima’s Gomorrah, a 12episode Italian TV series on the Neapolitan mafia that was itself drawn from Matteo Garrone’s 2008 film of the same name.
It’s still rare, though, for film festivals to have a distinct program like TIFF’s new Primetime that is devot- ed to television. The SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, has a program called Episodic, which screens both TV and online content. And the Sundance Institute in Utah has a workshop called Episodic Storytelling, which also covers both TV and online, but it hasn’t yet migrated to the Sundance Film Festival proper as a full program.
Filmmakers are certainly embracing TV in a big way. Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Jane Campion, Lisa Cholodenko, Agnieszka Holland, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen and even longtime holdout Woody Allen are embracing the small screen with a fervour not previously seen.
Their reasons vary, but often cited are the chance to tap into a vast new audience, the relative lower costs and ease of production of TV over film and the simple desire to experiment in a different medium.
“I have a feeling that, in a few years’ time, just about every significant filmmaker will also be working in what we used to called television,” Bailey said. What does he mean by “what we used to call television?” Don’t we still call it that? Maybe not so much anymore.
“People who are working in this new kind of television are a little bit sensitive about the word, because it does have from the past these kind of pejorative connotations,” Bailey said. “But I’m happy to embrace it. I just think TV has changed, so why not just call it TV? And TV is better than it used to be. I think it’s better than it ever was.”