DOC shines a light on ROM Crystal
Toronto Star, September 1, 2008
By Martin Knelman

Direct from the Toronto International Film Festival's salon des refusés comes one of the year's hottest docs.

The Museum, written and directed by Kenton Vaughan, offers a compulsively watchable insider play-by-play, stretching over six years, about the building of the Royal Ontario Museum's nervy Crystal addition.

It's a quiet revelation about what went on behind the scenes, cultural history in the making. It would have been great for Toronto arts lovers to see it in a communal festival setting, where it would have prompted lively discussions. Call it TIFF's lost opportunity.

Instead we will have to settle for a TV showing in two parts on CBC (Sept. 11 and Sept. 18), with commercial breaks, of this feature-length film, billed as "the story of a man and his ambition – for a museum, for a city and, ultimately, for himself."

The man in question is not Daniel Libeskind, the celebrity architect who sketched it on a napkin before going to the drawing boards. It's William Thorsell, a leading figure in our cultural landscape who is part lofty intellectual and part relentless cheerleader.

Vaughan, with the help of the National Film Board, got through the door early with his camera, when Thorsell's dream was unencumbered by reality checks and nasty surprises. The goal was to chart the building of the Crystal from beginning to end.

The ROM granted him astounding access. Nobody knew the trouble he'd see as surprise woes caused a two-year delay and budget overruns, while people on the street and the museum's own staff grumbled aloud.

Yet the result is not a hatchet job (as was Toronto Life's recent exposé) but an exquisitely detailed, finely balanced record of what happened and why. It will leave you rethinking your own views.

Almost everyone you know has strong opinions about the ROM's Crystal – except Vaughan, who carefully clings to neutrality.

"I've worked hard for five years making a non-judgmental film," he explained over lunch.

"Our goal was to provide a fair depiction of what happened."

Because he had a close-up look every step of the way, Vaughan can never have the simplified first impression of the opinionated passersby interviewed in his film.

But he goes way beyond those responses by talking to insiders, such as veteran curator Janet Waddington, who articulates with startling candour worries about the effect Thorsell's gospel of open, light-filled spaces might have on vulnerable treasures.

He also captures the tension of the whoops episodes: the discovery that there weren't enough beams to support Libeskind's structure; the sudden shortage and rising price of steel; and the hellish night at a public meeting when Thorsell's scheme for a condo skyscraper (to be built on the site of the defunct planetarium) was hooted down by protesters, forcing him into a $38 million retreat.

Finally, what's most memorable is the relationship between Thorsell and Libeskind.

Libeskind comes across as too intoxicated with his own creation – part bubbly promoter, like Harold Hill in The Music Man, part berserk genius like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. At times, when he and Thorsell enact their mutual admiration duet, the saga seems like a case of folie à deux.

Yet in the end, Thorsell emerges as a hero, like one of those lone gunmen in a classic western who sticks to his credo and defeats the cowardly doubters.

In a city where it's almost impossible to do anything daring, Thorsell has stared down his foes and reinvented the museum. It will take another two or three years, when his whole scheme is complete, before we'll know whether his gamble paid off or not. Meanwhile, The Museum looks at both sides now.

Diary of a Crystal gazer: Documenting the ROM reno
Globe and Mail, September 10, 2008
Kate Taylor

In a basement editing suite, documentarian Kenton Vaughan is still combing through some of the 400 hours of film footage he has shot at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum over the past five years. The ROM's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal wasn't built in a day and neither was The Museum, Vaughan's two-part TV documentary about the controversial and much-delayed construction project that premieres on CBC Television tomorrow.

"I looked at the design, and I am not an architect ... I had no illusions it was going to open in December, 2005 [as originally scheduled]," Vaughan said in an interview. "I was banking on it being at least a year over. It was 2? years over ..."

"... which is eons in filmmaking," pipes in editor Greg West, whose job has been to tame and chop the footage for both the CBC doc and a longer version that will be released to festivals and on DVD by the National Film Board.

The Crystal's "architectural" opening in June, 2007, and then the gradual opening of new galleries in 2008 came just in time for Vaughan: Another six months of delay and he would have had to refinance the project because the deadline attached to his grant money would have expired.

Luckily, he's a patient person, interested in projects that require the long haul. "The best documentaries get made over five or 10 years," he said.

He was convinced that the lengthy renovation of an important public institution such as the ROM could create such a film. Reading in the newspaper in 2001 that the ROM was about to embark on a major expansion, he said to himself: "I bet someone's making a documentary about that. ... It was like in the cartoons. The light bulb went on: Why not me?"

At the ROM, meanwhile, Vaughan came to have his own steel-toed boots, his visits to the construction site became so routine. When he first approached the museum with his idea for a documentary, ROM chief executive officer William Thorsell and his staff agreed with alacrity.

"Everybody involved felt this was an important document," he said. "... This was part of history and deserved to be recalled."

Perhaps that explains the startling candour of the ROM staffers who appear in the film: In particular, paleontologist Janet Waddington expresses her skepticism about the design by architect Daniel Libeskind, which created irregular spaces in which it is difficult to display artifacts. In the second part of the film, she appears jubilantly on opening night, delighted with the airy new dinosaur gallery, although she still calls the building "dysfunctional."

"The people in the film all bring an open-mindedness to it," Vaughan argues. "If we wanted to make a reality TV show, we could have found the really bitter ones - every organization has them. We wanted people who were open-minded about the process so there would be a journey."

Vaughan caught some remarkable behind-the-scenes moments, such as the period on the construction site when it became clear that Libeskind's design for the Crystal was not supporting its own weight and would need to be reinforced with extra steel. And he captured some decisive public ones: His images of a chastened Thorsell at the meeting where citizens tore into the plan to erect a condo tower at the southern end of the ROM site foretell of its cancellation.

However, while The Museum reveals many of the delays, disasters and criticisms the project suffered, it is by no means an indictment of the building.

"We weren't journalists coming in to do an exposé; we were witnesses," Vaughan said.

The film's protagonist is not Libeskind, whom Vaughan describes as an enigma, repeating a question raised in the film as to whether the ROM represents the star architect's best work. Rather it is the dogged Thorsell, the man who got something big and controversial built in a city that hates to commit.

"Could this have been done without a visionary leader at the top? I don't think it could have, whether you agree with that vision or not," Vaughan said. "I was interested in leadership."

In keeping with this objective stance, he makes no predictions for the ROM's future, but he does note that Thorsell may have overestimated the size of audience willing to pay $22 to visit the renovated museum, and that his decision to open fine art galleries before the family-friendly natural-science ones may have been a miscalculation.

"My line is that's still too early to tell because there are important galleries that aren't open yet," he said. "In terms of the business model, it will take two or three years. Any predictions of fiasco are premature."


ROM Crystal gets documentary treatment
Maria Cook, The Ottawa Citizen
September 10, 2008

The story of how the exuberant new Crystal addition at the Royal Ontario Museum became reality includes characters such as a star architect, a visionary director and at least two billionaires.

And, behind the scenes, skeptical and protective employees.

The Museum, a two-part Doc Zone Special on CBC Television, walks viewers through the five-year process of making the controversial, $300-million building in Toronto. Part one airs Thursday at 9 p.m. Part two airs Sept. 18 at 9 pm.

"The leap from a drawing to a building is something magic," says architect Daniel Libeskind.

The film reveals the pressures facing a contemporary museum. Because of the need to attract large numbers of people, museums must focus as much on visitor experience as on collections. They also must raise money from the private sector. We see the collision between museum director William Thorsell, as visitor advocate, and the curators and conservators, as stewards of six million objects.

"I was pissed," one technician says as she recalls learning that the display of the mineral collection would be reconfigured. There's a tense moment between Thorsell, who wants open storage, and a manager, who questions paying people to dust artifacts.

After a cliched opening about Thorsell as the savior of the ROM, and about Libeskind being inspired by the museum's crystals and scribbling a design on a napkin "with passionate intensity," the documentary gets much more interesting.

There are compromises and challenges. On the street, reaction from people to the building as it rises ranges from "narcissistic" to "absolutely spectacular."

Partway through construction it becomes clear that twice as much steel would be needed to support the structure, which features five interlocking crystalline shapes. Meanwhile, the cost of steel has gone up. Then proposal to raise money by building a 40-storey condo tower beside the ROM turns into a public relations fiasco.

The project demonstrates the importance of clarity of vision and confidence, as Libeskind and Thorsell negotiate each encounter with strength and focus.

After the Crystal opens, the public streams in. People photograph each other against the building's angles, climb into window wells and drape themselves on the slanting walls. A 32-year employee looks around and pronounces the space "phenomenal," but adds: "It's still a dysfunctional building."

Yet, attendance has doubled. "It's so miraculous," says Thorsell. "The fact that it all got built."
THE MUSEUM is produced by  Kenton Vaughan and Gordon Henderson for 90th Parallel Productions, and Silva Basmajian for The National Film Board of Canada, in association with  CBC Television.

Doc eyes museum makeover
Rick McGinnis, Metro
September 10, 2008

The new addition to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum was intermittently a lightning rod for concern and outrage during the six years it took to build, and tonight the CBC takes us along for a look back, with the debut of The Museum, a two-part documentary made with remarkable access to the backstage intrigues behind the whole drama.

There are two men at the heart of the story director Kenton Vaughan tells, and only one of them is “starchitect” Daniel Libeskind, the author of the Michael A. Lee-Chin crystal, an audacious and attention-grabbing explosion of angles that erupts from the side of the stately old ROM building like a sci-fi movie set. The other is museum director William Thorsell, the onetime editor-in-chief of the Globe & Mail, and the motivating force behind the Crystal.

The first hour of The Museum (the second half will air next Thursday) rewinds from the splashy opening of the new Crystal back to the turn of the millennium, when the ROM was a mostly moribund cultural institution, beloved but unvisited, full of tatty exhibits left over from the theme-park era of museum design.

Thorsell, the first ROM director without a museum background, is called in to revive the place, and he tells the trustees that the first and best option is a wild, attention-grabbing piece of architecture like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim — conventional wisdom that was overwhelming Toronto, as almost every one of the ROM’s institutional peers was demanding and getting a splashy renovation or redesign.

In front of Vaughan’s cameras, the two men form a mutual admiration society, though Thorsell seems to do most of the work, though Thorsell does nothing to dispel the idea — suggested by the CBC doc and most other coverage of the Crystal’s birth — that the building is really his testament, his taste and worldview made concrete (and steel and aluminum but ultimately little of the glass Torontonians were initially led to expect from early models.)

Their enthusiasm for the project sustains them through the crises they’d encounter over the years, from the discovery that the initial plan contained insufficient steel to hold itself up, to the public outcry that scuttled the condo project Thorsell was relying on to cover funding shortfalls.

Vaughan has said he tried to keep an objective tone, so your reaction to The Museum will likely hinge on how you feel about Libeskind’s building, which hasn’t attracted near the numbers the ROM was relying on since opening last year. The museum’s staff seems less than enthusiastic, complaining about the unworkable space, and Thorsell’s disregard of their counsel on the effects of light on delicate artifacts. At times, the two men come across like caricatures of aesthetes, gushing over visual sensations, complimenting each other on their clothes and generally suggesting a skit that might have been performed by Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers in their distant prime.