The Tim Burton Story

So the Tim Burton story goes like this. In years past my family we would go to Toronto at least twice a year. One of my personal traditions on those trips was  to drag my children to a foreign language movie. My hope was that I would expose them to different aspects of other cultures. What I really wanted to do was to give them a larger world view.

20 years ago there used to be a four plex just north of the corner of Bloor and Avenue Roads in Toronto. We saw quite a few Indian and Argentinian films there. A favorite was, “The Year my Parents Went on Vacation. “ I think I got this habit from my brother John.  He used to drag me to Fellini films when I was in my teens. I owe him a great debt of gratitude for opening my eyes to non-mainstream cinema.

Alas, that theater closed. In conjunction with the Toronto International Film Festival a new theater was built on King Street. It was called the Bell TIFF Lightbox. If you want to see a foreign film in downtown TO this is pretty much where you have to go these days.

Well, one evening in late November all those years ago I found myself at the Lightbox family in tow. I had walked in to see what was on the schedule for the weekend.  When we walked in we found out that they were mounting an exhibition of artwork from various Tim Burton films over the past two decades. There were giant models of characters from the Nightmare before Christmas, Beetlejuice props and similar.

They were also running a Tim Burton movie marathon. For 40 bucks ahead you could buy a ticket and sit through every Tim Burton movie ever made. As would be expected one of my children dropped into the ‘daddy please’ mode. Loren started whining about buying tickets. He really got into a froth over this.

The only people in the lobby of the Lightbox at that time were the people behind the ticket counter and some docents for the upcoming exhibition which was to open the next morning. As is often the case in Toronto  there was this one homeless guy wearing a very hairy herringbone overcoat just standing around.

To shut Loren down I began emphasizing that while Beetlejuice was one of my favorite films and Big Fish was the among he best films I’ve ever seen, that Tim Burton owed the world an apology for the second Batman movie. I want on at length of what I perceived the defects in that movie to be and stated that I would never pay to see a batch of films that included the second Batman movie.

The docents and ticket takers we’re losing it. I couldn’t quite tell what the joke was. They looked at me and looked at the floor and cracked up. Loren looking downcast was led from the theater.

Later that night we got back to the hotel room and we had on the 11 PM local CBC news feed. About 12 minutes into the broadcast one of the talking heads indicated that a major exhibition of Tim Burton's works was being staged at the Lightbox. Loren would not let me change the channel so we stayed watching the TV waiting for the interview with Tim Burton.

Yeah, you got it right. The camera crew filmed at the Lightbox. Yeah the homeless guy standing about 5 foot away from me was none other than Tim Burton. Do not think that my family has ever let me forget this. No. Mr. Burton I apologize.