From the beginning, Toronto International Film Festival founders William Marshall, Henk Van der Kolk and ‘accomplice’ Dusty Cohl were thinking big. After all, their festival dream, groomed on the sunny terraces of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, was to create a glamorous event that would attract worldwide attention.

Declaring that the Festival of Festivals, as it was then called, would be a non-competitive event that would provide the best of the Cannes, Venice, Berlin and New York festivals, the three friends had a lofty goal – especially considering that, in 1976, the Canadian film industry was barely on the map and the city of Toronto was quite a provincial place.

‘It’s interesting that the founders decided right away to go with a major event, rather than starting small and letting it grow,’ says Brian Johnson, film critic and senior entertainment writer at Maclean’s magazine, who wrote the recently published Brave Films Wild Nights – a look back at 25 years of the festival. ‘They tried to import Hollywood stars from the very beginning and make it a big, glamorous event.’

Still, no one expected the festival to grow this big. In its first year, there was a total of nine filmmakers and actors in attendance (compared to 416 in 1999), 145 accredited press (compared to 775 in 1999) and 13 industry delegates (2,400 in 1999). Since 1976, tiff has screened 5,790 films, has had 4,672 attending filmmakers and actors, and has had an economic impact on Toronto of approximately $30 million.

‘They would have put me in an asylum back then if I’d predicted it would ever have become this big,’ says Cohl. ‘It was pretty big when we conceived it, but we never figured it would become like this, with so much media and so many stars and directors coming from around the world.’

From the start, the founders realized that if they were going to create a festival in Toronto, they were, says Johnson, ‘essentially going into the hospitality business. Buying drinks, putting up visiting American journalists in hotel rooms, wining and dining – were all essential to putting Toronto on the map and getting people to attend the festival. And Dusty and Bill did it extremely well.’

Alongside the desire to launch a world event was the goal, especially on the part of film producer Marshall, to grow the local film industry – a concept that was met with a lot of skepticism.

‘The Canadian industry was almost non-existent in 1976,’ says current tiff director Piers Handling, who attended the festival as a guest in the early years and joined the tiff team in 1982. ‘There were the tax shelters that meant [inexperienced] producers were trying to ape American movies, using second-rate American stars. The films weren’t very good and they bombed at the box office.’

Meanwhile, by all accounts, of all the media at the time, only the Toronto Sun treated the festival with any respect in its first couple of years.

‘The media had that typical Canadian attitude of ‘These guys won’t be able to pull this off,’ ‘ remembers Cohl. ‘Only the Toronto Sun supported us.’

Wayne Clarkson, who joined the festival in 1977 and was its director from 1978 to 1985, agrees: ‘There is a certain reticence to the Canadian character that means we have to watch to see if something is successful before we embrace it. Once embraced, the festival grew exponentially.’

For the launch of the festival, Marshall and Van der Kolk raised $275,000 from government and sponsors, plus another $225,000 in goods and services. (By comparison, today’s usual annual budget is $6.5 million.)

Meanwhile, Marshall and Cohl built up their alliances with film buffs, academics, indie filmmakers and the movers and shakers they had met during trips to Cannes. The first festival included 127 feature films (with an admission price of $2 each) from 30 countries.

What made it work that first year and continues to make it work, remarks Johnson, ‘is that [the founders] set up a very strong programming team. In the first year they had Jan Dawson doing new German cinema, even though it was not the kind of film that Bill or Dusty were interested in. But they knew a serious festival had to have serious programs for cinephiles.’

Says Clarkson: ‘In the early years, we had to work hard to win people over and to get the films and to get the filmmakers on board. There was a crowded calendar with the festivals around the world. Making those contacts and getting those films was always arduous, but we had friends we called on. That fight was part of the festival’s character then. The founders had a real bravado and there was an excitement and a youthful energy.’

Handling agrees. ‘Even in the first year, you could feel the electricity and the excitement. It was well-programmed and well-promoted and you knew it was going to work.’

Hollywood had little interest in tiff in the beginning, and had a policy in place where it didn’t debut its films at North American festivals.

It was in the festival’s third year that the media – and even Hollywood – began to take more interest in the festival. One attention-grabber was the premiere of In Praise of Older Women, by then-newcomer producer Robert Lantos. The film was in the news when word got out that the Ontario Censor Board – a regular foe of the festival until the mid-’80s – had cut two minutes of sexual material for the film’s festival screening. Then, the Elgin Theatre was oversold on the night of the film’s premiere.

When some ticketholders, getting drenched in the rain, were left waiting outside, a near-riot, stirred up by anti-censorship emotion, unfolded – while inside, a raucous crowd jammed the aisles. As it turns out, the original, uncut print, surreptitiously switched for the cut version, was the one that screened.

Festival fever had begun and the Canadian media began its longstanding romance with the event.

Says Johnson: ‘The Canadian film industry as we know it didn’t exist when the festival started. The growth of the Toronto festival kind of neatly coincides with the growth of the industry itself.’

Not only that, says Johnson, in researching Brave Films Wild Nights, he was struck by how many of today’s top Canadian film professionals got their start – or are in some way irrevocably connected – with the festival.

There is Alliance founder Lantos, who learnt that there’s no such thing as bad publicity with the In Praise of Older Women scandal; Alliance Atlantis bigwigs Seaton McLean and Michael MacMillan, who were festival employees scrambling to control the angry mob that In Praise night at the Elgin Theatre; festival production manager Bill House, later an executive with Telefilm and now with Alliance Atlantis; Wayne Clarkson, who went on to launch the Ontario Film Development Corporation and now heads up the Canadian Film Centre; Linda Muir, who sold tickets at the box office and is now an award-winning costume designer; and screenwriter/director Don McKellar, who was once the festival’s theatre manager – to name only a few.

‘The festival was a cradle for the Canadian film industry from the start,’ says Johnson. ‘There was always the idea of having the glitz on the one hand and using the festival to help grow the Canadian film industry on the other.’

That vision, along with what Johnson calls ‘the diversity and rigor of the program from day one’ and the hospitality and charisma of Marshall, Van der Kolk and Cohl, combined to create something bigger and better than anyone could have imagined in 1976. *