"In the fall of 1976, a mysterious mass illness suddenly struck the city of Los Angeles-or at least that was the only plausible reason in the mind of Canada's secretary of state. How else to explain why not a single Hollywood studio distributor had sent a film to Toronto's first international film festival, with executives telegramming him directly to say they would not be in attendance? Studios cited arcane distribution rules as the excuse for their non-participation, but Canadians-reliably among Hollywood's biggest customers-felt deliberately snubbed."
"The glitz refracted, appeared to multiply. In 1982, the Toronto International Film Festival convinced critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to host a gala tribute to Martin Scorsese, who invited Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. A former communications director for the festival told the Globe and Mail, "Those people were as hot as you could get. . . . It was through the tribute to Scorsese, then Robert Duvall and Warren Beatty, that the celebrity era took over.""
Toronto's festival began amid a 1976 boycott by Hollywood distributors that left the inaugural international edition without studio submissions. The Festival of Festivals continued despite trade tensions and the unfulfilled threat of a box-office levy on imported films. During the early 1980s, American celebrity attendance rose, exemplified by a 1982 Scorsese tribute hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert featuring Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. By 1985 the festival ranked alongside Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. TIFF maintains dual goals of showcasing world cinema in Toronto and promoting Canadian films globally, but recent programming has contracted and shifted toward Hollywood projects.
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