Bill Marshall sensed that white-bread Toronto of the seventies was about to become a riot of multiethnic variety – and he set out to to create ‘the first film event that reflects that ethnic mix.’Jason Merritt/Getty Images
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But, they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. – Soren Kierkegaard
As we stand at this crossroads, looking backward at a life that was definitely lived forwards, what do we see in the rear-view mirror?
Scottish immigrant, army officer, campaign organizer, mayor's chief of staff, film and theatre producer, entrepreneur, speechwriter, founder of the Festival of Festivals, a.k.a. the Toronto International Film Festival, now TIFF. General disruptor! Where to start?
Well, few people get to create an institution that turns out to be successful beyond their wildest dreams. Bill Marshall, who died on Jan. 1 at 77, was a natural entrepreneur, full of ideas until the end of his life (he was pitching me on a digital project three weeks before his death). And he had his fingers in many pies: the Academy of Canadian Cinema, Toronto's Film and Television Office, a festival in Niagara, another short-lived one on Marshall McLuhan. As a film producer he had a run in the late seventies/early eighties – Outrageous! is probably his best-known film – but he will undoubtedly always be remembered as the founder of the film festival.
He was a Scot (like John Grierson, who also created the other significant film institution in this country, the National Film Board), arriving in this country in the mid-1950s as a 15-year-old. He was certainly "canny," and like his compatriots had a discerning eye for detecting BS. He also had the gift of the carefully calibrated gab – who can forget his improvised comment when In Praise of Older Women opened the 1978 festival and too many people showed up? Confronted by irate turnaways who started to bang on the doors that had been shut in their face, Bill's reaction to the press was a masterpiece of spin: "We're not oversold, we're overattended!" Cheek defined Bill, and he and fellow co-founder Dusty Cohl set the tone right off the top: cowboy hats, marshal pins, Maple Leaf sweaters. He knew how to play a crowd.
He was a natural public speaker, measured but galvanizing, with a pulse for what the public wanted to hear. I saw this up close on the opening night of our 25th anniversary, when Bill took on the federal government and engaged in some Montreal-bashing, with the minister of heritage (a Quebecker) sitting in the audience. He could be a loose cannon, but more often than not he had the right shell in the breech.
At a time when Toronto was, in his words, an opera/symphony town that shut its doors at 10:30 p.m., the Marshall-led film festival set a different tone. Partying all night, with carousing lasting until the wee hours, it soon gained the reputation of being a hip, contemporary event – for the young of heart.
Bill knew he was in showbiz but he was also a deeply serious man. Just take a look at the first lineup of the festival: a large and significant selection of new German art films, a selection of films by women (ahead of his time as always), a section for Canadian films, and a classics program that he raved about to the media when asked what excited him.
Bill's Scottishness was reflected in other ways. He was an outsider who sensed, no doubt sparked by his stint in politics, that Toronto in the seventies was on the verge of a seismic demographic change. This oh-so-white city was about to become a riot of multiethnic variety. His vision, eloquently laid out in the first program book, was to create "the first film event that reflects that ethnic mix." At the same time, he wanted to put the spotlight on Toronto as a production centre, on its 8,000 highly professional film workers and, finally, on Canada as a separate market from the United States (until that moment we had always been considered a part of the U.S. domestic market).
Forty years later his vision has miraculously been realized.
Looking back, what pops out of the rear-view mirror is the simple fact that Bill saw a vacuum and filled it. He created a very important space, a place that was filled not just by the hundreds of thousands of people who attend the festival every year, but by the countless Canadian and foreign filmmakers who have propelled their films into the world from its cinemas. He sowed the seeds for the festival to become a centre of excellence and learning, a place where people gathered to explore different ways of seeing the world.
In the 1950s, the NFB moved from Ottawa to Montreal and in effect launched the modern Quebec cinema. The NFB acted as its film school and studio. Toronto lost out at that moment. But when Bill Marshall – and Henk Van der Kolk and Dusty Cohl – started the Festival of Festivals, it went a long way toward correcting the imbalance.
Piers Handling is the director and chief executive officer of TIFF.