A single scrap of paper illuminates TIFF’s roots
Piers Handling came to this week’s TIFF press conference with a very special piece of paper, one bearing 40 years’ worth of hopes and dreams.
The TIFF CEO and director had with him his personal copy of the inaugural program, marked with his own “must see” picks, for what we now call the Toronto International Film Festival.
At its birth in 1976 and for years after it was called the Festival of Festivals, with the humble mandate of celebrating movies that had premiered elsewhere. Studying the original festival program today is like seeing a fortune teller’s incredibly accurate prediction of the TIFF to come.
“I think the roots of this festival right now are all here, actually,” Handling said, holding up the paper for all to see, in a press conference at TIFF Bell Lightbox to announce the first of this year’s selections.
Printed in red ink on a single side of a sheet of paper for that inaugural edition was info on how to see 150 films, about 80 of them features, that were to screen at six festival venues from Oct. 18-24: Ontario Place’s majestic Cinesphere and smaller Theatre II; the Uptown Backstage I and II; and the New Yorker and Toronto-Dominion Centre Theatres. These cinemas are all now gone, or operating in a different capacity.
Ticket prices ranged from a $6 pass (which got you into three daytime movies) up to a $150 “All Everything VIP Membership” pass that got you into every movie, party and seminar.
(Compare this to the 350-plus features and shorts expected at the 2015 TIFF from Sept. 10-20, where the adult prices for films range from $25 to $48 apiece.)
“A Lot of Film,” wrote George Anthony, then the Toronto Sun’s entertainment editor, in the headline to his accompanying news story, also part of that first program. He observed that so much shoe leather would be expended by film buffs running between screenings, “Adidas should make a fortune.”
The newly hatched festival also promised “Six Big Parties,” one each night celebrating film festivals in other cities.
There were seminars and panels devoted to films made by women, a spotlight needed then and now.
There was a series called New German Cinema, devoted to films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and others, with the Wenders retro- spective being a first for North America. Another series was devoted to Italian films, although no titles are listed.
There were screenings of documentaries that are today acknowledged as classics of the genre, among them David Maysles’ Grey Gardens and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A.
A retrospective of silent movies called “See It Again, Sam” had the lure of presound classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Mark of Zorro and Buster Keaton’s The General, not only restored but in hand-painted colour.
There was something intriguingly called “New Films — New Directors,” promising “a unique preview of tomorrow’s big names in filmdom,” and what sounds like the birth of the festival’s popular audience question-and-answer sessions.
I haven’t been able to ascertain who these “big names” were, or even if this series actually happened — the festival back then was a lot more spontaneous than today’s highly scripted affair. (TIFF records indicate there was a series called “New Directors — New Directions” at the 1979 fest, but there may be no link between this and the planned 1976 series.)
There was also a producers’ conference, featuring “some of the world’s best-known producers” talking about making film, with the expressed hope that an upcoming blockbuster remake might be teased: “Maybe Dino de Laurentiis will show us some footage of King Kong,” the program reads. Again, no details on who showed up or if this conference even happened.
What’s incredible about this program, aside from the fact it squeezed all this onto just one side of a piece of paper slightly larger than legal size, is how it points to many of the programs that TIFF puts on today, the only major difference being that the festival now premieres many films rather than simply repeating selections from other fests.
“The festival in those days was really extraordinary because of what actually was contained in it,” Handling said at the press conference, where he and TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey unveiled 49 of the films coming to September’s fest, with many more selections to be announced shortly.
He reminisced how he drove to Toronto from Ottawa, where he’d been working at the Canadian Film Institute, the lure for him being that New German Cinema program.
Handling pointed out two men in the front row who made it happen, along with the late Dusty Cohl. They were Bill Marshall and Henk van der Kolk, who along with Dusty had been to festivals in Cannes and elsewhere and decide that movieloving Toronto needed something similar.
“There were no other film festivals in Canada at that point in time,” Handling said. “There had been a film festival in Montreal in the ’60s; it didn’t exist at this point in time. So the people who founded this made a big, big, leap of faith.”
A similar leap of faith was made in 2010, when TIFF opened the Bell Lightbox, which screens films 365 days of the year, not just during the 11 days of the festival.
There are only two other film festivals in the world with similar infrastructure and daily programming, Handling noted, in London and Pusan, South Korea.
And you can see the seeds of TIFF’s success in that single sheet of paper from 1976, which also has the distinction of being the most convenient of festival information sources, even in today’s digital era.
The current printed program book is a weighty document exceeding 450 pages of film descriptions and advertisements. Some bright ideas get bigger, others get heavier. @peterhowellfilm