Covering TIFF: Am I Insane or do I Just Need Sleep/Water/Real Food
It’s officially TIFF time. 2023 will be my seventh (in person) festival, and it’s one of my favorite things to do all year. An entire week spent doing nothing but watching movies, talking and writing about movies, and gossiping while standing in line while waiting for movies. The dream! But it also requires a lot of strategizing, as it is impossible to see every movie, and then there is the whole website of it all, with publishing schedules and embargos and whatnot.
One thing I appreciate more since becoming the deputy editor of LaineyGossip is the sheer effort that goes into publishing fresh stories every day. It’s a lot of writing, yes, but it’s also a lot of work for our site manager, Emily, who puts together all the photos and tags everything and posts everything. Between me reviewing a dozen-plus films and Lainey covering red carpets and parties, TIFF is a normal week of LG business on steroids, with an all-out effort made by everyone at LG.
Planning for the festival this year, in particular, is a little different because of the strikes. Usually, we pin the posting day and order of my reviews to the premieres of the films at the festival, so that we have fresh photos to go with every review. This year, photos will be more scattershot, since a lot of celebrities are not expected to attend. I do still have to consider embargos, which means not publishing a review until the film has completed its first public screening at the festival, but that comes a little bit later in the planning process.
A note on gossiping in line: Standing in line, sometimes for an hour or more, waiting for a screening is a GREAT time for gossip. I particularly love talking to studio/distributor reps–these should be some really interesting conversations this year–and programmers for movie theaters and regional/independent film fests (great indication of what audiences are actually watching beyond the box office Top 10). I also love talking to publicists, because they know all the dirt and know the value of well-placed gossip.
The first thing I do when planning for TIFF is make a long list of every film that sounds remotely interesting that is screening at the festival. Once the actual screening schedule is released, I start making a calendar. The festival is ten days, but I am only staying for five and a half (the general wisdom is that the less-good films premiere after the festival’s first weekend, I have found this to be mostly true). Anything that is screening after I leave is immediately knocked off the list, like, unfortunately, The Movie Emperor. Then, I look at what is left and start blocking conflicts.
This year is TERRIBLE for conflicts. For example, Hit Man, co-written by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell, is one of my top films to see at the festival, but it is the one most resistant to my schedule. There is only one press screening, and it is scheduled directly against Chris Pine’s Poolman on Monday morning. Since I am leaving Tuesday afternoon, I only have this one chance to see Poolman, which means skipping Hit Man, unless I can beg, borrow, or steal a ticket to the premiere Monday night from someone.
Anyway, this year’s schedule is a nightmare of conflicts, but after prioritizing with Lainey and working through all available options, here is where my schedule stands now:
You will notice the “embargo lift” column is blank. That’s because figuring that out involves math, so I put it off till later.
A note on food and water: Things that are invaluable at TIFF: a good bag that comfortably holds a lot of crap, water bottle, reasonably healthy snacks that are easily consumed while standing in line and/or inside a quiet movie theater. Eating like a normal adult human is hard when most “meals” are snacks consumed between screenings. TIFF always makes me feel like a deranged raccoon, scavenging whatever I can that’s fast and easy.
I try with my schedule to have a mix of films–international and domestic, Hollywood and independent, as intersectional as possible. One disappointing thing about this year and all the scheduling conflicts is that I was unable to fit in Cody Lightning’s Hey, Viktor!, a mockumentary about Lightning trying to get a sequel to groundbreaking Indigenous film Smoke Signals off the ground, or Frybread Face and Me, Billy Luther’s directorial debut about a kid sent to live on the Navajo Nation. I hope I can catch up with these films later, but these are two examples of nightmare scheduling.
But the upside of this year is the number of films directed by women, including new films from Alice Rohrwacher, Thea Sharrock, and Jessica Yu, as well as Kristin Scott Thomas and Anna Kendrick making their directorial debuts. I am super curious about Anna Kendrick’s film, Woman of the Hour, about serial killer Rodney Alcala’s appearance on The Dating Game while he was mid-murder spree. I like Anna Kendrick a lot, and can’t wait to see how she acquits herself as a director. (Also, are we gossip genie’ing Anna Kendrick and Glen Powell yet? They both appear to be true crime girlies!)
A note on bathroom breaks: These are planned! If I have 60+ minutes between screenings, I take a bathroom break even if I don’t really have to go (road trip rules), then I go again once I have my seat inside the theater secured. If I have less than an hour between screenings, I go straight into the next line and wait to make a pit stop until I have my seat. I learned during my first TIFF you have to know your schedule cold so you know when you have time to hit the head, so I always know when my bathroom breaks are.
Once I have a workable schedule in place, I start doing the math on embargoes. A lot of the time, it really doesn’t matter, because the film premieres at night and we won’t be posting the review till the next day anyway, but I outline it just in case there’s a daytime premiere, or multiple films premiering on the same day–which happens a lot, there are dozens of films premiering at the fest–so we can strategize when and in which order to post stuff. Again, this will be a little different because the red carpet photo situation is such a huge question mark this year. Who will show up? I even added a column to my schedule to keep track of anyone who might make an appearance for their film. (Technically, the actor-directors could come as directors, but it would look bad. Bradley Cooper already set the precedent for his peers.)
I look at this schedule and know there is at least one film I am going to miss. I always set up an ambitious schedule and then get tired and end up skipping stuff. It doesn’t sound taxing, just sitting there watching movies, but there’s rushing between venues to factor in, standing in long ass lines for a long time, staying up inadvisably late the night before to catch up with someone I only get to see at the festival, and/or staying up late to write, write, write. It’s not brain surgery and it’s not coal mining, but I am always totally wiped out by the time I leave Toronto.
I also feel like the later in the fest it gets, the more unhinged my reviews get, but that might just be the inevitable exhaustion talking. I really would love the feedback, though, if you can tell how early or late I’ve written a review this year. We haven’t set the publication schedule as of writing this, and with the red carpet situation being so in flux, posting times might be more divorced from screening times than usual. I would love to hear if you can detect my relative level of tiredness in my writing. If nothing else, it will give me something to think about while I’m standing in another endless screening line.
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The pee schedule at TIFF is a real thing. If you're covering the red carpet, you're often asked to show up at least an hour before arrivals. So that's an hour of waiting, and it's hot, so you have to hydrate, and then with the fucked up traffic in Toronto and just all-round celebrity time management, they're often late. So all told you're on that carpet for two hours minimum and for some people with small bladders, ahem, this is a major concern.
Please stay hydrated, Sarah. We need you at least partially alive for the unhinged part (the best part).