While CHUM will be doing all it can to promote this year’s nominees before and during the awards broadcast, to be emceed by SCTV alum Andrea Martin, the program will also look back on the Genies’ first 25 years.

The one person who has been there through the Genies’ entire lifespan is Maria Topalovich, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s president and CEO, who joined the organization in 1979. She remembers Genie 1 like it was yesterday.

‘The first year was extremely exciting, because it came together very quickly,’ she recalls. ‘The Academy began in the fall of 1979, and by March 20 we had the Genie Awards.’

Beachcombers actor Bruno Gerussi hosted the inaugural event at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre. The star-studded guest list included Jack Lemmon (in town to shoot the film Tribute), Donald Sutherland, Margot Kidder, Christopher Plummer, Kate Lynch and director Ivan Reitman and Bill Murray, whose comedy Meatballs took home the Golden Reel Award for the year’s biggest box office. (Look for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, an 80/20 Canadian copro with precious little Cancon, to get that trophy this year.)

And the Genies have persevered through a number of setbacks since then.

In 1989, CUPE members of then-Genie broadcaster CBC walked off the job one week before the show, leaving event producers without access to the staging and set elements and short more than 100 staff and crew. The late Bill Brodie, an art director with credits including Barry Lyndon, mobilized colleagues and fellow Academy volunteers to build a new stage and set with emergency funding from Telefilm Canada. The lean production went on as planned, with a volunteer crew and police and sniffer dogs on hand following a bomb threat.

‘It was the unbelievable goodwill and professionalism of the industry that [ensured] the show would go on,’ Topalovich says.

And then there was the 1992 show, which the late John Candy was slated to host. The popular comedian pulled out one week before, however, after CBC placed a Nov. 9 ad in Playback promoting its broadcast. The ad, with the tag ‘We got the biggest star we could find,’ went on to not-so-subtly mock the comedian’s girth, using the word ‘big’ or variations thereof no less than 15 times. Candy was incensed, and no amount of apologizing on behalf of the Ceeb could bring him back on board.

In a panic, show producers called comedian Leslie Nielsen, who had emceed the event the previous year.

‘It was horrible, because obviously we [hadn’t asked Nielsen earlier] – he was second choice,’ Topalovich recalls. ‘And he said, ‘I’m getting on the next plane.’ And he came and did it and got a standing ovation and saved the show. He was such a hero to come and do that.’