There aren’t a lot of documentarian tricks on offer here: this is a standard-issue chronicle of Yost’s life, from youthful movie fanatic to potential engineer to scrappy independent filmmaker to actor to high-school teacher to, finally, television producer and host. Which is where director Karen Shopsowitz’s new documentary, Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies, comes in handy.Īlthough it boasts an unwieldy title, Shopsowitz’s work is essential viewing to understand not only Yost’s life and career, but the Canadian film landscape of the past 50 years or so. Or I was a bit older, early ‘90s, bemoaning that the TV was stuck on some black-and-white movie (perhaps it was Yost’s all-time favourite, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or maybe it was one of his thousands of other beloved titles) when all I wanted to watch was something undoubtedly stupider.Īll of this is to say that I both understand the influence that Yost had on a generation of Ontarians, and bemoan my bad luck timing in just barely missing his 1974-’99 run. Sneaking downstairs as a young kid in late 1980-something to listen to whatever movie my parents might have been watching Yost expound upon, in his excitable, oh-gee-whiz tenor. I do retain fragments of memories, though. – Yost was already nearing the end of his remarkable quarter-century run as host of TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies. By the time that I was genuinely getting into film – as only a white suburban Toronto teenager can, with repeated viewings of Scorsese, Tarantino, De Palma, Lynch, etc. ET on TVO available to stream afterward on TVO.orgĬonfession: I grew up just before the heights of the Elwy Yost era of public Ontario television.

Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies.

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