TIFF 2024: This Time I Might Not Wear The Shoes

My TIFF 2024 schedule, what I'll wear, and if heels make it in

(Photo: Rick Clifford)

Dear Squawkers,

Yesterday Sarah shared her schedule at the Toronto International Film Festival and what she’ll be balancing between screenings and writing reviews but also keeping up with posts at LaineyGossip for stories outside of TIFF. I’m in the same position so today it’s my turn to give you some insight into what the next few days looks like for me. Except I’m not as organised with the spreadsheets, LOL. In my defence, part of that has to do with the fact that I don’t control my entire schedule. I do have control over my work at LaineyGossip and The Squawk but in my other job as a television reporter for Canada’s longest running entertainment show, ETALK, I follow the assignments handed to me by my producers – so my schedule keeps changing.

What I’m sharing in this post is not 100% confirmed. Things are fluid during TIFF – it may be that I’m assigned to two carpets on a given day, but I’ll have to drop the second because the first carpet is running long and I can’t make the lock time for the second. TIFF requires reporters to be on the carpet at least an hour before the talent is scheduled to arrive. So when I say that a carpet is “locked”, it means that if you show up after the lock time, you don’t get access to your spot.

There are also last-minute changes on the festival side all the time. It’s not unusual for us to get word on the day of a carpet that the talent will be posing only for photos and not stopping for red carpet interviews. (Adam Driver does this often but in his case, in my experience at least, he doesn’t tell anybody in advance that that’s what he’s doing so we’ll go, wait for an hour an a half, only to watch him blow by us and waste our goddamn time.) If that’s the case, we’ll reassign our resources. And of course, the opposite can happen – there are several junket interviews that we are chasing but we haven’t yet heard back and we might not get a confirmed slot until the day of or the day before, in which case our producers have to do schedule math again to figure out which of our hosts are available.

For me, in addition to everything you’re about to see below, there are my LaineyGossip responsibilities. I’ll be writing around the ETALK schedule, and this means overnight, or very early in the morning, or in between screenings and carpets. I tell you this so that when you’re reading site content, and this applies to both me and Sarah, and we sound delirious… it’s probably because we are!

Here then is my very lo-fi, non-spreadsheet TIFF schedule for the next four days. Beyond that, honestly? I don’t want to look. I can’t actually emotionally process too far in advance. Also, you’ll see that for some of our ETALK and junket interviews, there are times when I don’t specify who I’m interviewing. I can share that information later but right now, just to be safe in case of sensitivities, I’ll just speak in general terms, and I’ll report back with you later.