Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Ray Pride
Notes From A Festival Junkie ...
FridayAny reasonable person leading a well ordered life would not enter into the fray of a festival the size and scope of Toronto unless they were calm, cool and collected. But somehow the time got away from me.
The one wise precaution I took was attempting to see a number of films screening in Toronto prior to boarding the red eye in Los Angeles. However, I spent the previous 48 hours feverishly attempting to complete other deadlines and oozed off the plane like The Blob and not some game festival warrior.
The good news was that there were no glitches at the press office and I maintained a silent snicker as others around me attempted to talk their way into credentials they had filed late or not at all. However, the first shock of reality was confronting the screening schedule. Already word of sell out screenings and juggled schedules were swirling in the office and the sight of an immediate conflict only made me want to crawl into a hole and escape having to make any sort of decision.
Though my perceptions were blurred, there seemed an unmistakable sense that the organization had become rootless. The press office had moved from a hotel and into a shopping plaza and guest relations were in a storefront across the street. The Industry Centre was still at Sutton Place (the base hotel back in the 1980s) but there was no focal hotel for the festival office. The organizers were miles away at TFF's permanent office and the feeling that communication lines were frayed permeated the air like some discordant static.
I'd missed the past two Toronto outings but Sid Adilman brought me up to speed on the first evening. The festival organization made quite a splash a year ago when it acquired land for a new permanent and significantly expanded site. A massive fundraising drive was also announced and groundbreaking was to occur this month on an ambitious venture that would not be completed until 2007. However, recently fest director Piers Handling admitted they had been overly optimistic about financial resources and support wasn't happening as vigorously as anticipated. So, the groundbreaking has been postponed until … later.
Meanwhile, its two most nettlesome fest related problems continued to be nettlesome. They still have endless problems with accommodating both the public and industry in respect to screenings and the dilemma over centralizing the event seems to worsen annually.
The 2003 edition had headquartered at the Delta, a convention hotel/center and word was that a multi-year pact had been forged. Whether a contract existed or not, the Delta decided once was enough and the scuttlebutt included nightmares involving elevators and the hotel's dismay that fest participants didn't appear to be spending any money at the shops and restaurants in the complex.
The Toronto fest has at one time or another commissioned economic impact studies that have rendered impressive conclusions about immediate and residual spending in the city that can be directly tied to the event. And while the findings aren't in dispute, it would appear that they've been disproportionately negative for the hotels that have signed on as hosts. In the early years, The Sutton Place aggressively lobbied for host status but once it became a major entertainment industry destination opted out.
The no hotel option might be no option or a one-time experiment. There's tremendous support for the festival both from government and corporate sponsors but there remains the daunting challenge of finding sufficient screens in some sort of reasonable physical proximity.
For years much of the focus has been in the city's Bay-Bloor area with screenings running at the 4-screen Cumberland, 5-screen Uptown and at least 8-screens at the Varsity. This year the Uptown was closed and the festival had to dig to find single screens at the Royal Ontario Museum and Ryerson University. There's also a strong rumor that a real estate sale will result in the closing of the Cumberland next year.
In any event, festival organizers have to be seriously considering moving out of the Bloor-Bay area and relocating to another area of Toronto's downtown. The problem is that no other central area presently offers a sufficient number of screens and subsequent editions will almost unquestionably require a stepped up subway/taxi budget.
And then there were the movies …