When you’re putting on a film festival, it’s imperative that things run like clockwork. Otherwise, one film starts late and that impacts the next screening in that theater, and then you’ve got a crowd building up in the lobby at the wrong time, and before you know it the whole thing’s a mess.
Toronto certainly learned that lesson Saturday afternoon, when what seems to be a recurring problem with digital subtitles wreaked havoc on a couple of films.
Already, Movie City News’ David Poland had tweeted that two of Friday’s foreign films, both looking for distribution, had subtitles that didn’t work during their TIFF screenings. (Needless to say, deals were not forthcoming.)
Then Saturday afternoon’s gala premiere of the French film “Little White Lies,” one of the festival’s marquee presentations, ran into the same problem with equipment at TIFF’s premiere venue, Roy Thomson Hall. The screening, which was attended by cast and crew, including Marion Cotillard (left), was hastily moved to the Scotiabank Theatre complex a mile or so away – but since the hall seats more than 2,000 and the biggest screen at Scotiabank is less than 600, they had to take over two screens that had been allocated to other films, including a press and industry screening of Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours.”
So Boyle’s film was moved from theater 1 (557 seats) to theater 13 (320 seats), which pretty much killed the chances of the dozens of hopeful viewers standing in the rush line downstairs.
But that’s not all it did. “Because they wanted our theater, they moved the digital projector that we’d set up for our film,” Boyle told theWrap later in the afternoon. “And of course the digital projector didn’t like being moved.”
After hours of technical delays, the 2:45 screening finally began at 5:45, which of course completely threw off the schedules of most of the people in line.
In the process, it also turned an enthusiastic crowd into a demanding one.
“It’d better be good,” said one person in line as the wait stretched to two hours.
“It’d better be gripping,” said a second.
“I want to see every emotion on that screen,” added a third. “I’d better laugh, and cry … ”
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While the “Little White Lies” gala audience was taking its new seats and the “127 Hours” fans were wondering if they’d ever get to see their movie, the festival’s Filmmakers Lounge played host to a offbeat competition: “Roger Ebert’s Great TIFF Tweet-off,” in which the veteran film critic and inveterate Twitter user assembled a batch of pundits and had them tweet on topics of his choosing.
Ebert would make a statement, whereupon the contestants had two minutes to tweet a response (which the official rules said could “take any form, however tangential”). The audience voted on the best response, and in the end a champion was crowned.
