Karl Leschinsky
Contributor
It’s a superficial thrill, sighting celebrities without really getting to know them, but there’s a sentimental side to it that can’t be overlooked: the awesomeness in having a picture of yourself with your favourite actor or filmmaker.
It may only be a picture, true, but is any picture ever really “only a picture?”
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) always provides the amateur paparazzi plenty of opportunities for adventures. Some of my friends, for example, got autographs, took pictures and exchanged friendly words with Harvey Keitel (there for A Beginner’s Guide to Endings), Michael C. Hall (TV’s Dexter), Ryan Gosling (on site for Blue Valentine) and many more simply by standing outside near the red carpet.
From these TIFF encounters, my friends told me that Gosling is a sweetheart, Hall was generously leisurely on his way into the premiere of Peep World and Keitel – well, he’s the great Harvey Keitel.
One of my friends went to a screening just to see another great, Bill Murray, of whom she has always been a fan. To her luck, he sat right beside her during the movie! Okay, so they were separated by an aisle, but it was still close enough to get a funny-awkward photo of her smiling while Murray doesn’t even notice the picture being taken.
Then there were Murray’s antics during the screening; he frequently fell asleep and woke up for his scenes alone. (The movie, if you’re wondering, was the campy Passion Play, which Excalibur gave one star out of four last week.)
Also of note: Murray was the only one of the film’s three stars (the others being Mickey Rourke and Megan Fox) who stayed for the screening instead of ditching it for a party elsewhere.
Kudos to you, Mr. Murray. I caught another break when we had to switch theatres at the Little White Lies screening because the film’s subtitles weren’t working. My friend and I, who had balcony seats originally, booted it to the Scotiabank Theatre where we were nearly first in line and ended up in the front row. They were a decent for-free upgrade and infinitely better seats for viewing the famous Marion Cotillard, whom you may remember as Mal from this year’s acclaimed blockbuster Inception. She unexpectedly strolled past us to enter the changed venue, and was forced to walk up the steep entrance festival-goers had dubbed the “The Escalator of Terror.”
Later that night, I wrote about this daunting, vertigo-inducing climb, the theatre-swap adventure and how well it ended up (the audience loved the movie) and compared it to another subtitle-less French film screening that ended disastrously (Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, which saw audience members walking out about every two seconds) and then left my rant as a comment on Roger Ebert’s blog. Ebert himself charitably reposted it as a featured entry in his website’s TIFF journal.
Apparently you can walk into TIFF a filmgoer and walk out a jour- nalist. Make that photo-journalist, if you bring a camera.
