The Circuit

Most of the industry left Toronto yesterday, with a few stragglers getting on planes today. 

For sales agents, it's a time to follow-up, to push, to hope that a bad review is forgotten and the good one isn't.

Leaning heavily on the Sutton Place bar, one tired sales agent mused today on the delicate dance they play during the fest -- keeping an available title in the news by feeding out bits of positive info, yet being careful not to say something they may have to eat later.  A distrib attends a second screening, Sundance has people in the audience, execs are circling, interest is building, the screening was hot, an offer is eminent, the filmmaker is in meetings. 

It's hard to decipher what's actually happening.  Even in the end, it takes days of collecting soundbytes to piece it together.

For filmmakers, especially those who had their film in Telluride only a week ago, Toronto is sometimes a rude awakening.  Telluride is proudly sensory deprived from the industry.  There is the financial barrier.  It's not cheap for cash-strapped press and industry to fest there.  A carton of OJ is six bucks.  And because of its shortened time frame, film reviews usually don't come out until the same pic screens in Toronto.

Yet when that review is published, the ideal of Telluride is drowned out by the business of Toronto.

Thus, part of a trade journo's job in Toronto is to hear it from angry filmmakers, whose film went cold with distribs because of their paper's pan.  Only a week ago they were talking movies and politics at a Telluride dinner or film line.  Eight days later, you're the enemy.  Doesn't matter if you're a reporter and not a reviewer.  A representative from the paper is enough.

As one filmmaker recently told us, indignantly, "But your review was factually incorrect!"  He was hoping to appeal to our journalistic sense of outrage.  We politely told him that the piece can be corrected, but it wouldn't change the reviewer's opinion. 

He just yelled at us some more.