We’re here,” says Piers Handling, standing in a somewhat deserted corridor of the nearly complete Bell Lightbox. The CEO and director of the Toronto International Film Festival, and Howard Kerbel, the festival’s vice-president, sales and marketing sponsorship, are proudly showing off the Festival’s new home–a five-story complex at the corner of King and John Streets in Toronto’s entertainment district.
But two floors below, in the building’s atrium, construction workers are feverishly hammering, sweeping and drilling. A thin layer of drywall dust covers the floor, and the side-by-side escalators leading to the second floor cinemas are blocked off. The wall on the east side, separating the entrance from the restaurant next door, is only partially painted in what can be best described as “Bell” blue. It looks far from ready to make the red carpet debut that’s barely three weeks away. When asked if the building, now seven years in the making, will be ready in time, Handling predicts a Hollywood ending: “We’ll bring in extra crew if we have to. We’ll work 24 hours a day. It’ll get done.”Designed by architect Bruce Kuwabara, the TIFF Bell Lightbox has five screening auditoriums, two galleries, a film reference library and educational facilities as well as a bistro, a restaurant, and a lounge perfect for any festival fête. (The building also includes a 46-storey residential tower). While TIFF will use 25 additional screens around the city during the 10-day festival, the new building is a permanent residence where the organization can shine its light on the arts all year round. The nearly $200 million venture also accomplishes what no other major film festival has even attempted: provide its host city with a permanent facility.
“TIFF Bell Lightbox will give us a unique opportunity to showcase the best in Canadian talent to new and diverse audiences,” says Handling. The building is a testament to the strength of a brand that has grown and evolved over the last three decades to become one of the most respected, beloved and well-known arts brands in the world. TIFF has built up its reputation not only by drawing the biggest stars and championing Canadian cinema, but by providing an appealing environment for film buffs and turning little known films into commercial and worldwide successes–movies like Chariots of Fire, The Big Chill, The Princess Bride and American Beauty.
But, like any good script should, TIFF’s story did not start out this way. The Toronto Internati onal Film Festi val has come a long way from its relatively small beginnings at the Windsor Arms Hotel in the Yorkville area, which in the late 1960s was the heart of the city’s arts scene. TIFF launched in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals, an ambitious upstart that showcased the best films from other festivals around the world.
“It was really a local brand because it said nothing about who and what we were and that was a big problem for us,” says Handling, who first joined the Festival in 1982 as a programmer. “It didn’t have film in the title and it didn’t have Toronto in the title and whenever we traveled overseas as programmers representing the festival [and] said we’re from the Festival of Festivals, they kind of looked at us as if we’d landed from Mars.” Still, the name stuck until 1994–the same year Handling was named festival director and CEO–when it was reborn as “The Toronto International Film Festival.” While the original name may have missed the mark, the ambition was there from day one. Co-founder Bill Marshall launched the Festival with a promise: a lot of films and a lot of celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Julie Christie. Neither showed that first year (though both eventually became festival regulars), and Hollywood studios were reluctant to enter over concerns Toronto audiences would be too narrow-minded for their projects.
The turning point, says Brian D. Johnson, film critic for Maclean’s magazine and author of Brave Films, Wild Nights, which chronicles the first 25 years of the Toronto International Film Festival, was when the festival put together a series of tributes to three Hollywood darlings in succession–Martin Scorsese, Robert Duvall and Warren Beatty. This not only attracted the celebrity in question, but also his/her cronies. The Beatty tribute in 1984 (hosted by famed film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert) was a watershed moment for the festival because of its grandeur and the star’s artistic pedigree, says Johnson. “It was on a scale unlike anything the festival had ever seen,” he says, adding that Beatty more or less took control of his own tribute.
While TIFF showcases international and independent film, programmers had the good sense not to alienate the Hollywood community, says Ken Wong, associate professor of business and marketing strategy at Queen’s University.
“You think about a Sundance film fest as independent film. By contrast TIFF seems to have that blend of the commercial and the independent.” The early years were also a “wild and wooly” time, when stories of stars asking festival staff to score booze and drugs in the middle of the night were common, says Johnson. They ran an almost improvised outlaw operation that helped the festival acquire a definite “Hollywood” reputation.
The qualities of a public festival with knowledgable fans was also vital in the growth of the Festival, says Barry Avrich, an accomplished filmmaker himself, and president of Endeavour Marketing, a Toronto-based agency that handled the festival advertising from 1996 to 2008.
TIFF has long promoted itself as the people’s festival. It’s one of few that are open to the public, and TIFF goers (Torontonians in particular) seem to have an insatiable appetite for all things cinema. Eventually studios viewed the festival as a friendly place to premiere movies. In the ’80s filmmakers began “insisting that they have their films premiered in Toronto because they loved the audiences. That’s the turning point.”Avrich recalls walking down Bloor Street during the 1982 festival. He noticed a long line forming in front of University Theatre (now a Pottery Barn). Curious, he joined the line not really knowing what it was for. “People in Toronto will tell you that they love waiting in lines because they get to talk about film,” he says. He eventually made his way into the theatre and in front of the Blake Edwards film That’s Life.
“This is such a film community. We love our film. We love talking about it, debating it… People meet online to talk about their picks, it’s incredible,” he says. The studios know that with TIFF comes an “astute civilian audience, a friendly audience, so it’s a relatively low risk environment compared to the likes of Cannes, which is very expensive and very fickle,” adds Johnson. “The number one thing about the Toronto film fest–and it’s become a cliché, but it actually is true–is it’s just the best audiences in the world,” Quentin Tarantino said in an interview while in Toronto in August 2009.
Today, for every movie star with a film to promote or a cause to champion, TIFF is the place to do it. Natalie Portman, Robert DeNiro, Nicole Kidman, Helen Mirren and Bruce Springsteen are among the stars expected to attend this year’s festival.
While the parade of celebrities has become a vital part of the TIFF brand, the festival was built on much more than that, says Handling. “It was built on the promise of performance, quality, the excellence of the films… and the quality of the experience itself,” he says.
Part of the brand’s strength boils down to the variety of ways in which attendees can view film, adds Kerbel. “You can experience the brand in a more cinefile style, you can be someone who wants to experience the brand from a big red carpet, big star style [or] someone who wants to see the Midnight Madness films,” he says. “We offer a level of excellence across all of our programming and all of our service that allows the customer to really experience the festival in his or her way.”
To be sure, TIFF also benefits from good timing. The Toronto International Film Festival marks an unofficial start to the fall movie season, the most important time of the year for studios hoping to generate some buzz going into awards season.
In 2009 alone, TIFF screened five of the 10 best-picture nominees, three nominees for best foreign-language film, two for best documentary feature, the films of eight acting nominees, three director nominees, three costume design nominees and two each in the film editing, cinematography and art direction categories.
And of course, with big crowds, super-star attendees and wall-towall media coverage, comes corporate sponsors–haute couture labels and magazines were drawn to the Festival as its stature rose. Today TIFF partners with big name brands like RBC, BlackBerry and Bell Canada, which has been a sponsor of the film festival since 1995 and has naming rights and preferred supplier status of the TIFF Bell Lightbox until 2018, with an option through 2023.
Wade Oosterman, president of Bell Mobility, anticipates the TIFF Bell Lightbox will become the “cultural icon” of Toronto. “So to have our name on it is particularly pleasing.” Kerbel says the Festival looks to partner with companies that share the same core values and understand that TIFF is a not-for-profit with all of its revenue directed back into its programs.
“They all know they’re here helping us towards our missions, our goals, so we’re looking for partners who have the ability to creatively leverage our properties so it helps us build our brand and helps them drive their ROI.” An international event that dominates a city like Toronto is a big draw for sponsors, adds Handling.“Most people love the movies and sponsors love the association with a successful event, a sexy event and an event with celebrities.”
Taxi CEO Rob Guenette, a big fan of the TIFF brand, says the festival’s economic impact alone is proof of a strong and viable brand. According to the Festival, out-of-town attendees spent $27 million in Ontario in 2009. TIFF employs more than 100 full-time staff and 500 parttime and seasonal staff, and relies on 2,000 volunteers year-round. “The people that come here outside all of the celebrities, all the press and entourage and assistants… The influx of people that come and experiences the festival is incredible and grows every year,” says Guenette.
Guenette gives a lot of credit to Handling himself for the success of the TIFF brand in recent years. “You look at TIFF and you look at Piers–this guy has been the face and the leader of the brand for so long that just the enduring quality of leadership to me is amazing,” says Guenette Queen’s University’s Wong says Handling understood from the start that a film festival is more than a collection of screens. He has organized numerous retrospectives and panel discussions where directors can share insights into their movies.
“It is all done very well and makes it a very appealing place for directors,” says Wong. “They can stand up and be evaluated on the quality of their work.” But growth brings new challenges and in the past few years, Handling and his team have worked hard to overcome them. “It’s a huge organization and the brand had to evolve with the organization and also take on a different characteristic of not only being a film exhibitor, but being a film marketer and a film educator and that’s a lofty exercise for a brand to accomplish,” says Avrich.
“I think in the last year and a half they’ve made great strides in being best in class and starting to educate the public in the breadth of their activities.” Handling says the organization determined the best way to tackle this was to create a “monster” brand.
“The new brand builds on the strength of the name tourists and locals are most familiar with–TIFF. Creating the TIFF monster brand creates a better understanding of all of our initiatives tied together to create one story, one voice and one identity,” he says.
TIFF unveiled the new logo and brand in 2009 to represent all of the group’s operations throughout the year. The logo is a simple lowercase “tiff” in a soft, round font and a subdued orange colour. (In previous years, the festival’s lengthy name was used in the logo.) The organization has also evolved into more than an annual film festival famous for drawing big name celebrities and launching critical and commercial success stories. It has grown to include sub-brands like TIFF Cinematheque, TIFF Industry and TIFF Next Wave, all of which run year-round and under the new logo. “We realized the most recognizable thing we had, and the most translatable element we have in our whole brand family, was the festival itself which has always been short-formed as TIFF. So we looked at instilling in that all of the attributes of the entire orgnization and offerings,” said Michele Maheux, executive director and COO.
And now, after 35 years, TIFF is ready to put down roots and start a new series of traditions in its new home. Erected on property donated by filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his family, the Lightbox will play host to a showcase of films and special guests, including Canadian filmmakers David Cronenberg, actor/ director Isabella Rossellini, cult filmmaker John Waters and director Peter Bogdanovich.
“[TIFF Bell Lightbox] is a major international landmark for the arts,” says Johnson. “I think the originality is the way that it does combine visual arts, performance, education along with a really visible sexy presence in the heart of the city… A living organic monument to what the festival does is hugely significant.” TIFF is definitely here–for good.
