On the way down to the Sutton Place Hotel, the cab driver and I talked about the various stars he had driven around town. His English wasn’t very good and it was often very difficult to understand what he was saying, but I think that he said Anthony Quinn and some actress from Moulin Rouge–the one who wasn’t Nicole Kidman. Obviously, this was pretty disappointing, and perhaps sensing that, he added Sylvester Stallone to the list.
“He is very small man, very small, but real good guy.”
“Do you think he’d be small enough to fit in a teacup?” I asked.
“Yes, I think that Mister Stallone might fit almost in the tea.”
The Sutton Place Hotel is one of the locations in the city where press conferences for the Film Festival take place. I was there at the media office trying to get press credentials for some of the conferences, and of course, I had not followed procedure at all. It was a mildly humiliating experience, with the staff managing to be perfectly polite, but still entirely unfriendly.
In the lobby, a small guy with floppy, platinum hair sat playing the piano. Self-consciously jazzy, he tossed his hair, hoping to be discovered by some Hollywood hotshot.
Last year, Viggo Mortenson sat down and fooled around on the same piano while throngs of oblivious media milled about. This didn’t’ exactly surprise me, as the media– always lost in the faux-urgency of their Blackberries– are usually more focused on themselves, and how they appear to the world, than on what’s going on around them.
Walking up Bay to Bloor, people with TIFF passes swaying from around their necks, spoke into cell phones, begging for an audience:
“Yeah, well, I’m writing a feature now with one of the writers from Gossip Girl…”
“Look, I understand that it’s your project, I understand that it’s your baby. You developed it…”
“No, her agent is being very difficult, but honestly, her career has stalled and I think she pretty much has to accept what we’re offering…”
Up the street at the busiest intersection in the city, three women came walking out of the glare of the sun. All blonde and in their mid-forties, they looked like they could have been Playmate models in Romania twenty-five years ago. Sporting unnatural tans and designer sunglasses, they wore thousands of dollars worth of bad taste on their bodies. As they hit the corner, the tallest one, the one with the largest breasts, asked her two friends, “Do you want to get some Champagne?”
As she said this, she had to step around a man who was lying on the street corner. With a full head of white hair and a bright, red face, he lay beneath a blue blanket begging. Hat in hand, his arm was outstretched on the sidewalk, while the fingers on his other hand were pressed up against his lips, as if asking us to keep a secret. So dramatic, so floridly obvious was the contrast, that it seemed like it could have been performance art.
But it wasn’t.