A movie set during late Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s time in office will make its world premiere at the Texas-based South by Southwest Film Festival in March, the festival has announced.
“Run This Town” features “Homeland” star Damian Lewis as the former mayor, though there is no mention of Ford or the city itself in the official movie summary on the SXSW website.
Directed by Toronto filmmaker Ricky Tollman, the movie was unofficially dubbed “the Rob Ford movie” last year, but the director has stressed that it is not a biopic.
The film follows Bram, a struggling rookie journalist played by Broadway actor Ben Platt as he navigates a changing newspaper industry. “In his mind he’s the next Woodward (but he’s probably more of a Bernstein),” the description reads. “A year in, he realizes that maybe the paper business is no longer what he’d seen in the movies.”
But then he comes across a “potentially explosive story involving the city’s controversial mayor,” it continues. “This could be Bram’s big break — if he had any idea how to be a real journalist.”
News of the movie went viral last spring when Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle, who covered the Ford crack-smoking scandal for the Toronto Star, tweeted about the film “rewriting” her as a male reporter. Director Tollman has since said the movie is not based on any real journalists involved in the Ford saga and is actually more about millennials struggling in the post-recession economy. Ford is reportedly a minor character in the film.
"It was a surprise to me (that) people took three words out of the description of the film and spun it into something that it's not, without having read the script," Tollman told the Canadian Press.
