Elwy Yost, the late, great television film historian, was born 100 years ago on July 10. TVO aired its 2021 original documentary, Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies in his honour. It’s a hour-long celebration of a life well lived that includes interviews, film clips and cherished family memories from his sons, Christopher and Graham.
This column will also honour the life and legacy of “Elwy,” a man who Canadians invited into their homes each week to help them learn, understand and appreciate movie-making as a true art form.
Born and raised in Toronto, Yost graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in sociology. He served in the military during the Second World War, worked at Avro Canada and in the Toronto Star’s circulation department. He had a small role in Moulin Rouge (1952), and briefly taught English and History at Etobicoke’s Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute.
His life’s passion was the movies. That’s what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to be. In the preface of Magic Moments From the Movies (1978), Yost wrote that his book was created as a “result of a lifetime love affair with the movies.” He also included this charming analogy. “Like the ‘grab bags’ I used to buy for a penny at the little candy store next door to the theater I attended in the early thirties…this book is a grab bag of memories of the scenes and shots, the sequences, the movie moments that most impressed me down through the years.”
This is largely what he taught television audiences about the world of film.
Yost’s first hosting role was for CBC TV’s Passport to Adventure (1965-1967). It was a half-hour program that presented U.S. and British films produced between the 1930s to the 1960s in a serial format. Passport to Adventure was a novel concept that served as the starting point to the two TVO shows of classic movie serials he hosted that still endure today, Magic Shadows (1974-1987) and Saturday Night at the Movies (1974-1999).
While both programs were educational and enjoyable, I was always most enamoured with Magic Shadows. It was among my earliest exposure to old black-and-white films and the Golden Age of Hollywood. I remember watching some of these 30-minute episodes with my father, and others on my own. A week’s worth of Yost’s intros to the 1952 film The Snows of Kilimanjaro was put together by Retrontario. It will give you a small taste of what many Canadians enjoyed watching before the advent of VHS and Betamax.
The other part of Magic Shadows that I enjoyed? The opening animation and haunting theme song. It sounds as magnificent today as it did then. Any time that I hear it, I’m instantly transported to my childhood and the glory and mastery of early cinema.
The funny thing about this? While I knew that the music had been written and composed by Harry Forbes, I didn’t have the foggiest idea about the animator’s identity. The Internet revealed no clues. In the spirit of great Silver Screen detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, I wasn’t going to let this mystery get the better of me!
I wrote about this quest in my March 20, 2018 syndicated column for Troy Media. I initially contacted Steve Paikin, my friend and longtime host of TVO’s The Agenda. He wasn’t sure and reached out to production manager Marilyn McGinn. The animator’s name “escapes me,” she wrote, and put me in touch with Risa Shuman, a retired researcher/producer who had worked with Yost for 25 years and on both programs. She had the answer at her fingertips. “The animation was done in LA by a couple of people including Herbert Klynn, but not as a favour to Elwy, but to our writer Ken Sobol who had worked with a group of animators on the series ‘George of the Jungle.’”
Shuman had a wealth of stories about Yost. I included a small handful in my Troy Media column, including this gem. “Elwy was the one who named TVOntario, TVOntario. The actual legal name of the organization is The Ontario Educational Communications Authority – OECA – which was on letterhead and on our copyright info on air. Up until the mid-70s, we broadcast on Channel 19 on the UHF dial and so it was called Channel 19 on air. When transmitters started to be built around the province, we became a network…There was an internal contest for all employees…and Elwy was the winner for which he received a book on the films of Marilyn Monroe!”
Here are two others that have long deserved to see the light peeking through those dark, magical shadows.
“Elwy’s big disappointment was never interviewing his idol, Orson Welles,” Shuman wrote. “He wanted $5000 and we never paid for interviews. Elwy was going to cash in his own insurance policy to pay for it, but in the end, it didn’t happen. I was always glad and relieved – at the time, Orson Welles was not the man from ‘Citizen Kane,’ Elwy’s all-time favourite film. He hadn’t made a movie in years and was basically in commercials selling wine. Any interviews he gave were condescending and frivolous. Elwy never would have coped.”
This one was rather illuminating, too. “In 1974, movies were only 79 years old. It was just entertainment to some, but Elwy believed in the McLuhan edict: ‘that which please teaches.’ We looked at movies from either a historical perspective, creative, sociological, spiritual and just tried to show how movies have fit into the cultural fabric of one’s life. That was the philosophy.”
Yost passed away on July 21, 2011. Many Canadians still fondly remember and appreciate what he taught us about the philosophy of movies and entertainment. Let’s hope the pure enjoyment he felt from the magic of celluloid continues to permeate in society for another century – and then some.
Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
