You know the party is over when even a B-list Guelph-born actress has decided not to show for one of her movie's galas. That's right, Neve Campbell whose last major movie appearances were Scream 3 and When Will I be Loved, has better things to do than hang out in Toronto. My task for today was to write a homegrown homage of the beloved Neve, but when the camera call came down, she wasn't on the list. By mid-day, my tiffed-out blackberry sputtered and refused to transmit.
Changing gears, I traversed the three hotels of Yorkville, passing a trio of Hare Krishnas on Cumberland, seeking the celebrity swag lounges--only to find that they had been packed up and cleared out yesterday. Only a handful of publicists are left, finishing the last of the sponsored ice cream and Red Bull and, I suspect, huddling in corners when nobody's watching.
Fewer than a dozen people were left standing at the Intercontinental, none of them teenage girls. Patrick, from Ohio, who related the fact that he advertised his timeshare with the Globe but received no calls, had been waiting for an autograph for about four hours. He travelled here for the festival, was wearing a jacket with a red and white maple-leaf collar and carrying a clipboard containing the glossy photos of Christopher Plummer and Kevin Bacon. The names of stars had been written in blue ink, numbered and circled.
Patrick had seen no one.
The weather has turned in Yorkville. There's one more star to see and another stunt to try but the end of Tiff is nigh and soon it will be time for this blog to make like a Chinese toy executive and end itself before the government clues in.
As the lobbies of the hotel were sans celebrity, I went to the only other place I could think of to bump into the stars: The third floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. Every year, publicity firms rent all of the rooms on the floor, cordoning it off for a seemingly endless series of 20-minute celebrity profile interviews. Ever wonder why every picture of a celebrity looks like it could have been taken anywhere? It's because they've all been shot inside a suite in the Four Seasons or the Park Hyatt. It's an effective method of marketing a personality across a variety of markets: much like the way a Big Mac is the same, benign hamburger no matter where in the world you eat it.
After spending about an hour on the third floor, all I saw were the remnants of boxes of food and publicity posters. There was one half-empty bottle of beer left on the table in front of the elevators.
No stars to flirt with.
It was getting late and there was only one option left. It was time to take my shtick to the Red Carpet. I was going to have to be brief and pushy. I was aiming high. I was going for Ethan Hawke.
8 p.m. at the Elgin theatre. I met Jamey Ordolis and Amanda York, a TV host and camerawoman who work for the Slice network. Enthralled by my task, they asked me what I would do if my plan to flirt with Hawke proved successful.
"You could be Jen Hawke," Ordolis said.
I told them that getting married to Ethan Hawke might put a crimp in my desire to be a serious journalist.
I also met Korby Banner, a make up artist and photographer who transforms ordinary people into pretty ones on the TV show Style By Jury. Here, I thought, I could get an objective appraisal of my chances.
"Does a girl like me have any hope at all?"
"With Ethan Hawke," Banner asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Absolutely, you're a knock out," he said, without even hesitating.
"Really?"
"Good complexion. Gorgeous blond hair. Good features. Lovely smile." he said.
"But how am I going to compete with the Slice girls over here?" I asked.
"Red Carpet, it's all about the lashes," he said, suggesting that I put on more eye shadow, which I did. Shoulders back, phone number in hand, I was ready for Hawke.
He made things easy for me.
"What is that around your neck? Is that a bear claw," he asked, referring to my necklace.
"Actually its an onyx claw next to a dragon pendant," I said.
"Very cool," he said.
"Thank you.
"You're going to have to forgive me, I've been given a crazy task today. My crazy task is to flirt with you. I don't know if I'm very good at it," I said.
"You're doing it already. We're talking about your necklace. It's very exciting," he said.
"I'm doing my best," I said. Encouraged, I moved to some eyelash action. Bat bat.
"How were you going to flirt?" he asked.
"Well, I was going to start with telling you about my task and then I was going to move on to 'You must be fairly used to the female attention,'" I said.
"It's never enough. It's never enough," he said.
Then a woman with long dark hair and a pink scarf swooped in, crushing my dreams of ever becoming Mrs. Ethan Hawke. A working gal it is then.
Onward ho.
Where's Roy Dupuis when you need him?
It's harder to find movie stars than it is to flirt with them, so I bought a new lipstick, brought out the good shoes and picked up a guest/press directory. These handy booklets spell out who is coming and which publicist is representing him -- so you know the name of the person who's not returning your phone calls.
Ewan McGregor, actor, Sept. 10-12
Woody Allen, dir, Sept. 11-12
Rafael Ouellet, dir, Sept. 7-10 etc. etc.
The directory says it was last updated on Sept. 12. My Blackberry says it's Sept. 14. Wait a minute, what day is this? How long have I been doing this crazy s---? One week? Two?
How long have I been sitting in hotel lobbies, looking for movie stars and justifying my presence with a press pass and a stream of $7 lattes, renewed on the half hour. Am I staring down the post-Seventh Day Ennui?
The hotels are clearing out, the celebrities are going home and even the lines in front of the Intercontinental have lost their irrational zealotry. This may be tricky.
My date arrived at five minutes past 3 p.m. at a coffee shop with wide chairs and high windows on Bloor St. Mathieu Denis, 30, was described to me as a gentle soul. His second film, the first to premiere at the Toronto film festival, is a 16-minute long flick called Code 13.
Denis arrived appropriately unkempt. He wore wide-rimmed brown glasses, a black and grey sweater over a striped white and black collared shirt. He had a black jacket, black pants and black running shoes. He is from Montreal.
As a day job, Denis edits videos and directs commercials.
"Nobody really makes a living by doing short films," he informs me.
"Naw?"
He's wanted to make movies since he was in his teens and is working on his first feature-length film.
"I want to make films that have meaning, that I feel need to be made and say something about the world in which we live," he said.
"So you're going to be an unnamed, unknown independent Canadian filmmaker," I said.
"No, I don't think so. I know there's a public for these films. Maybe not in Canada. Maybe not in English Canada. In Quebec there is," he said.
"So you're going to be an unnamed, unknown independent French-Canadian filmmaker," I clarified.
Code 13 is about a cab driver who beats up an innocent. It's in French, which I don't know, so I promised I would smile and nod politely when I watch it.
I was going to take Denis for a round of mini-golf, or perhaps bowling. We decided against it after realizing that our mutual lack of co-ordination could only lead in personal injury. Instead, though it was stereotypical, I took him to a movie. Eager to escape the usual art-house fare, we went downtown to see Balls Of Fury, the tale of a prodigy ping pong champion who flamed out in the '88 Olympics. Balls follows Randy as he regains his confidence, wins the love of a beautiful woman and defeats a villainous, panda-killing ping pong fiend named Feng, played by Christopher Walken.
I paid for the tickets. Denis opened doors and got the snacks. He eats his popcorn plain. I like mine covered in salt and vinegar seasoning, the stuff that makes the air smoky when you pour it on and causes sneezing fits.
After the film, we went to a coffee shop for a post-movie discussion. He ordered a small latte. I got an iced medium vanilla Americano. I was eager to hear thoughts from a film maker's point of view.
"What can I say about this film? One thing I think is that when you go and see a film you should take it for what it is. I have to admit, my expectations were low. Because, it's..."
"It's Balls of Fury," I interjected.
"Because it's Balls of Fury, exactly. I must say, that even though my expectations were very low, they were not met, because it was supposed to be a comedy, but it's really not that funny. It's the same joke over and over again about the blind guy walking into a lamp post."
"And balls," I cut in again.
"And balls. Exactly. Apart from that. There were no other jokes. The actors were actually pretty bad. I guess the main guy didn't have a lot of material to work with. Christoper Walken, I feel sorry for him. I guess he needed money," Denis said.
"To sum this all up: Funny bad or bad bad?" I asked.
"Bad bad. If it had been really really really bad then it could have been funny. But it's not even bad. It's just not funny."
"I personally liked the juxtaposition of xenophobia and ping pong."
"Yeah, uh. You like that?"
"No, I was being totally sarcastic," I said, running a hand in front of my face. "Deadpan humour."
He laughed.
"Yeah, well, I guess, I don't know what I can add to that. I just feel like it was really a waste of of an hour and a half. I kinda feel empty inside."
I like gentle Denis, but I'm not sure it will work out. He's from Montreal. I'm from Toronto. True love, it seems, has yet to find me.
Those who frequent Bloor Street on the off season tend to hate walking by the Intercontinental Hotel during the festival. Dozens of high school girls skipping class, college guys avoiding science lectures and middle-aged women throng at the doors with camera phones and digital point and shoots held at the ready. It makes a mess of foot traffic.
"Why are you here?" I asked a University of Toronto student holding a pink razr cell phone.
"I don't' know," she said and it was true.
They had seen Ryan Gosling leave a half an hour before I got there and had deduced by the presence of an unmarked SUV the size of a semi and a photographer with a conspicuous telephoto lens, that another celebrity sighting was imminent.
"Why don't you just go inside the hotel?" I asked, from behind a plant. After all, the bouncers weren't checking for passes. Stanchions are easily over come. Anyone with tall shoulders and a long stride should be able to get through the door. It was, after all, just a hotel.
"I don't know," she said again, shrugging and then continuing to look for famous people.
No one else came out, so I went to see my Chinese New Wave film.
Russ Fischer, a cinephile with Chud.com expounded on the difference between Chinese new and old wave.
New Wave is "More politically and sexually open," he said.
"So it's sluttier?" I asked.
"Not necessarily sluttier, just more graphic," he responded.
I asked him if I could use this explanation in my blog.
"Yeah, but I may be talking out of my ass," he said.
"All the better."
If The Sun Also Rises is any indication, Chinese New Wave is like a movie that doesn't entirely make sense, and yet is still funny. This one begins with a woman buying a pair of fish shoes which get stolen by a talking parrot. She then climbs up a tree, starts screaming prophesies, falls out of the tree and spends the rest of the movie slapping her son around, breaking dishes and digging up rocks. There's also a promiscuous nurse. I'll confess, it's a bit beyond me.
A quiet has settled over Yorkville. The un-credentialed public, with whom I should be hanging out, seem to have more profitable ways to spend a Tuesday morning. The line ups have been short and filled only with the kind of wide-eyed movie fiends who wear black, know the synopses of all 300 movies playing and buy their tickets in packs of 10.
For $40, I was granted two tickets to The Sun Also Rises, which may or may not have anything to do with Hemingway but definitely is being produced by Jiang Wen. Wen is described on the TIFF website as being at the helm of Chinese New Wave. I'll be happy to give you my thoughts on the movement once I learn to distinguish it from Chinese Old Wave.
I then went to spend some time waiting for celebrities to walk in and out of the Four Seasons while sitting on concrete plant holders. To my right, a lovely woman named Anne who wore an angel pin on the left side of her blue sweater. This was her first festival and she was waiting with an old film Pentax point and shoot that she said had never taken a bad picture. To my left were about six teenage girls wearing sweatshirts. Two wore black sunglasses with D&G printed on the side.
No one had seen any celebrities yet, but a girl named Amanda was pulled out her cybershot to show off the pics she snapped at premieres. In the shadow at the corner of one picture, she said, were Brangelina. She got a good one of George Clooney close up, a little blurry though. Now she's waiting for Ewan McGregor.
I respect that.
"I've been in love with Ewan McGregor since I was 15," I said.
"Hmm. Moulin Rouge," she said.
"No man. Star Wars."
At least it wasn't Trainspotting.
He looked too attractive not to be famous but I'll admit to a fatal flaw: I'm terrible at recognizing faces. I'm reasonably sure that I have that face disorder where the brain can't register the width of cheekbones or the arch of eyebrows. This is a considerable handicap for a journalist to have, especially one whose job it is to track down a celebrity. It's led to a few hilarious blunders involving bosses that still get tossed around as cautionary tales for journo interns.
I make up for it by not being ashamed to ask obvious questions, and by acting charming and flustered.
A few feet and a stanchion away, Elizabeth Mortimer is chatting on a cell phone, Callum Keith Rennie and Lisa Ray are smoking like fiends.
At the table next to mine, on a sun-lit patio on which I dare not wonder how much this mediocre coffee is costing me, there is a strikingly symmetrical middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair, unkept beard and wide blue-green eyes. He's wearing a t-shirt, a stressed leather jacket and has spent the last hour switching between French and English and chain smoking. So, not attractive in the least.
When he's alone, I catch him:
"Have a light?" I ask.
"Of course."
He lights my cigarette.
"You know, I have a terrible mind for faces, but you look terribly familiar," I said.
"Well, I'm an actor so you've probably seen me in films," he said.
A ha, Actor-Dar is active.
"What's your name?"
"Roy Dupuis," he said.
"What movies have you been in?"
"The Legend of Rocket Richard," he said.
"Oh. Yes. I've seen that. I totally recognize you."
Completely lying.
Dupuis is in town for tonight's screening of Shake Hands With the Devil, an adaptation of Gen. Romeo Dallaire and his account of the Rwandan genocide. For some reason I had no problem recognizing Gen. Dallaire when he walked in. Dupuis, Dallaire and a few others are sitting next to me, chatting in French and drinking coffee.
You may not want to take my word for it, but the actor and his subject look nothing alike.
Today's task began with a trip to the convenience store for a pack of Belmonts and some orange tic tacs. there are several ways to go about this. I could corner a celebrity smoking and ask for a light, persuade a publicist to point me in the right direction, or catch one at an after-party, which would require getting invited to an after-party.
My first stop was to the Starbucks beside the Four Seasons. I received two caffeinated drinks for free and meeting up with a driver who gave me a tip on the imminent locations of two celebrities. But, alas, I saw none of the famous actually smoking. Where is Sean Penn when you need him.
(Find me Penn! Curse and spit!)
Next stop: The patio at the restaurant of the Hotel Intercontinental. Because of Ontario law, this is the only place within the hotel that a celebrity could smoke. I believe that I am staring at Mena Suvari. wearing a cream blouse with a Victorian ruffle and a golden locket. Few people are that attractive, or could pull off hair that high in real life.
Unfortunately, the celebrities, their publicists and handlers are quite literally blocked from me by two brass poles and a length of black velvet rope. I'm stuck with the hoi polloi on the other side, eating a $30 lunch during which it's taken 20 minutes to get a glass of mineral water.
It's the first drizzly, cold day in fall and my task is to sit on a street corner and beg for change. I'll assume I'm paying back some karmic debt for missing my mother's birthday.
I went to Tim Horton's and asked for my usual -- a medium steeped tea double double with milk, double-cupped please. I pulled on my torn jeans, inkk-stained green hoodie, favourite hat and dark eye make up and hit the streets with a folded cardboard sign and a thin black felt pen. On the northeast corner of Bay and Bloor, the nexus of wealth and fame during fest, I met Gordon Lackey, 56. Armed with a Grade 10 education and a heart problem that had thrown him out of manual labour, Lackey now hits Yorkville on the weekend. His usual haunt near King and Bay is deserted on Sunday.
"And people have money up here," he said.
I hit him up for tips.
"You just have to be respectful," he advised. He knows some panhandlers who steal wheelchairs and canes from the hospital and he hates that. Just be polite.
"I know you're not going to do this forever," he said and offered to help me out if a nearby aggressive panhandler in a red hat gave me any trouble.
"I know him," he said.
So I took my piece of cardboard and sat under the eave of David's shoes, on the same side of the street as Holt Renfrew. On my sign I wrote: "Out of Job. Running Short. Will write for change. $.25 per word. (Cheap!)" Which isn't entirely untrue. I took Lackey's advice, was polite, smiled and didn't harass anyone. Within a few moments, people were dropping change into my cup: A man wearing a wooden cross with a heart punched out of the middle; a celebrity-stalking journalist in an orange shawl; a former colleague whose son gave me a loonie.
I expected to be ignored as a panhandler. I was wrong. People look, they just look away when you make eye contact. But the position offers a great vantage for people watching. It's hard not to notice the celebrity stalkers. Well-coiffed and usually women, they walk around the block, collecting a Starbucks cup, or a bag from Holts along the way.
Liv Tyler and Danny Glover walked past. They didn't give me any money.
A clean-cut man wearing glasses walked up to me. He had a blue collared sweater over a collared shirt. He was carrying a full-length umbrella, and a black leather clipboard holding a perfect, folded newspaper.
"You want a job?" he asked.
"Sure. I charge a quarter a word. I'm a burgeoning literary talent. What can I write for you?"
"You want to work?" he asked again.
"Absolutely."
"There's a Tim Horton's down the street. I'm sure if you approach them, they'll take you on the spot."
Before I could explain to him that I actually had a job, and could I please have the spelling of his first and last name, he spun around and strode away, his gait just an inch or two taller than it was before.
Apparently, all the money in the world can't buy you a pair.
A security guard who witnessed the incident offered me a cigarette and a loonie. I thanked him.
Another man in a dark suit approached me a few minutes afterward. He pulled out a silver clip with a thwack of folded American twenties.
"What are you short on?" he asked.
"Actually, I'm a writer. I charge $.25 a word. Cheap."
"I'm a writer too," he said and handed me a twenty.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Jen."
"I'm Paul Haggis."
"Nice to meet you."
Which means that the Canadian and Oscar-winning director is either a genuinely kind person, or that he has a damn astute publicist.
After about two hours on the street, I took my twenty and my $12 in change and gave it to Lackey. He emptied the cup into his hand and said that I'd done not too bad. He paid for two coffees at the Timmy's under the Bloor cinema, where most of the films for the fest are playing. He said on a good day, he can make approximately $50, and told me about the time he ran into Ringo Starr.
"I know you, I said. He gave me a $50 bill and he looked like a street person. He had a shirt out to here. He stayed and talked with me for about ten minutes," Lackey said.
Sometimes you get lucky. Life is like that. One minute you're getting told off by a random person on the street, the next, Paul Haggis is paying for lunch.
Lackey's joints are swelling up again and he says he doesn't expect to make it to Christmas. He's okay with it. He offered two more pieces of advice to me. The first was to be kind to my mother: "The day she dies will be the saddest day of your life. She's your best friend."
The other: "Stay young."
Follow Globe blogger Jen Gerson as she navigates the festival completing a series of TIFF-related tasks
© Copyright 2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
