Rookie filmmakers got a lot of good advice during the Rogers Industry sessions at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival – even if, to be perfectly honest, it was sometimes the sort of advice that makes reporters and editors uncomfortable.

Case in point? The very first ‘news and views’ session about how to generate publicity, a necessary step of which is, naturally, how to work with, or just plain work, the media.

It was the crack of 3 p.m. on the first full day of the fest, when a roomful of budding directors, many of them still recovering from the previous night’s opening hoo-ha, squeezed into the back of a Bay Street restaurant to learn some new tricks of the trade. They had some good teachers. Lined up under the lights were New York-based publicist and marketing consultant Susan Norget; Mark Slone, VP of publicity at Odeon Films; Bonnie Voland, formerly head of the TIFF press office; and Mark Pogachefsky, the wag who so successfully hyped L.A. Confidential, Memento and Traffic.

Their message? Stay on message. Build one, all-purpose press kit with a clear synopsis of the plot (good idea), colorful backstories (oh yes, please) and high-quality stills, not too dark, of the cast, not the crew, not objects and not landscapes. (Say hallelujah! Can I get an amen?!)

‘If you send a bad synopsis you’ve killed your movie before you even got started,’ said Voland.

Shoots can save money if the DOP doubles as the unit photographer or by using film school students to shoot B-roll footage. Full-time unit publicists aren’t usually necessary, unless you need someone to keep outsiders away from the stars, not a big problem on most Canadian shoots. Use photochemical, not digital photography.

And do not, Norget stressed, try to use that hoary old ‘I maxed out my own credit cards to make this movie’ line to get attention. No one cares, and they haven’t cared since Robert Townsend made Hollywood Shuffle in 1987.

It is tempting not to repeat all of Slone’s warnings about talking to the press. He’s right that few reporters outside the trades will care about the technical minutiae of production. No stories about setting up the dolly shot, please. But feel free to ignore what he said about getting off topic during the interview. In fact, forget we even mentioned it. Relax. Loosen up. Speak your mind and get off-message. What’s that, you say? You made this movie after you cheated on your wife? Do tell. Hmm. Really? And the bodies are buried where, exactly?

‘The media has a job to do, and being your friend is not one of them,’ said Slone.

The Rogers Industry Centre and Telefilm hosted some two dozen panels and sessions this year, many of which were aimed at up-and-coming filmmakers.

Mario Van Peebles, director of How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass, talked about the early work and struggles of his dad, Melvin, the same day that local favorite Vincenzo Natali spoke about the ‘creative financing’ of his latest, Nothing. An all-star lineup of oddball directors – including Ron Mann, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and Robert Altman – also held court at the Sutton Place hotel during the Mavericks sessions.

High chief of U.S. film marketing Jeff ‘The Dude’ Dowd was also in town, and also went over the mechanics of publicity. But unlike his colleagues, Dowd stressed the importance of friendly press relations, commenting that being on good terms with the topmost American film critics – Roger Ebert, Elvis Mitchell, et al – is key to good buzz-building. Dowd also talked up the importance of publicizing a film from the conceptual stage, forward, so that it can be thoroughly tested through development, production and post.

Reporters, someone also noted, quite correctly, love trends. A movie is more likely to get written up if editors see it as somehow connected to a bigger picture, such as the recent spate of pot-related movies suddenly sprouting up in Canadian theaters.

But be careful, the room was warned, not to tailor your pitch too much to each media outlet, say, by selling your pot movie as a pot movie to the local arts weekly, and as a social-issue think piece to The Globe.

If the press gets wind that that’s what you’re doing, cautioned Voland, they will take out their frustrations on your movie.

‘There is such a thing as bad publicity,’ she says.

With files from Dustin Dinoff

-www.e.bell.ca/filmfest

-www.rogersic.com