A Special Pre-Fest Rant: Toronto's Ticket Lottery System

A few determined, steel-willed people would start lining up the Wednesday night before, and the line would slowly grow through the night and into the next morning. The big plus to putting in that kind of time was knowing you'd get tickets to the films you wanted to see... or, at the very least, have some idea of just how lucky you'd be based on where you were in line. The comraderie was terrific—people actually *liked* spending time sitting outside, chatting with fellow film fest fans over coffee, comparing notes on previous festivals or anticipating movies to come, trading stories about celebrity sightings and watching the sun come up over the Toronto skyline. I remember arriving just after 4:30am one year to grab a spot in line and having a blast for the next four-and-a-half hours. It was all part of the experience and, for the most part, people had fun.

But, over time as the festival became more and more popular, a few squeaky wheels began to complain. They didn't want to have to line up for hours on end. They didn't want to have to get to the box office at 5am to secure their spot. And, most ridiculously, they didn't feel "safe" sitting in line in the "dark." [This in a line at least several hundred people long on well-lit streets. No one was even close to being alone. Good lord, there would have been hundreds of witnesses to any kind of crime, for starters! Nevermind the fact that the brotherhood of film festival-ites would be more likely to come to your aid than kick you to the curb.]

So, the festival organizers decided to overhaul the process a few years ago. They ruled that, in lieu of the first-come first-served policy of the past, ticket orders would now be processed according to a random draw. Forms would be collected and placed in numbered boxes in the order in which they were received. After a predetermined "cut-off" time, the boxes would be counted and the box numbers put into a draw. Whichever box number was pulled would represent the first box that would be processed, followed then by the remaining boxes in numerical order. (e.g., if box #23 was first, #24 was second, #25 was third and so on until they reached the last box and looped back around to box #1, #2, #3, etc.)

Their questionable logic? It would eliminate the need for early morning line-ups, since everyone would be given an equal shot of having their orders processed first.

Well, faster than you can say "Quentin Tarantino on speed!" people were outraged. Furious. Petitions were signed, pleas made. And, in my opinion, rightfully so. Passes and coupons (redeemable for tickets to actual screenings) are sold in advance of this whole order-form process and are non-refundable. NON-REFUNDABLE. That's fine, unless the great equalizer known as the Random Draw leaves you in the lurch and with only a handful of the films you wanted to see. Can you get your money back? Nope. But what if you only get 12 of your 25 movies? Sorry. What kind of idiocy is that?!

Nobody buys tickets to a Madonna concert with just the *hope* they'll actually get in to see the show. Ticket = entry. Simple as that. They don't sell you Madonna tickets and then give you a Nine Inch Nails concert—or, worse, nothing—instead.

But, we go. We order our passes and fill out our forms and then say prayers or light candles or just hope as hard as our little hearts can that the planets will align in our favor and that we'll somehow fare well. This is especially important for the die-hard fans who buy passes for 50 movies. Trying to schedule 50 movies into eight days is a monumental task in and of itself. It's a hundred times harder when you have to start all over again because you had the misfortune of landing in a bad box.

This lottery policy seems woefully lame and unfair to me. I've been going to the festival for the past 13 years and (knock on Woody Allen!) I've been lucky enough to get most of my picks each year, but there has never been a festival—random draw or no random draw—where I've landed 100% of my choices. I did fare much better the old way, though, when I'd only be denied one or maybe two picks because they were ridiculously popular films. The past two festivals, on the other hand, have seen me having to revise my schedule more often than I'd like.

The only difference between the past and the present is that, during the line-up days of old, my film-going fate was in my own hands. Now it lies in a stupid draw.

And that, my friends, kind of sucks.