fistic oblivion

The trailer for the biggest movie ever to shoot in our city just hit the net. Cinderella Man is a big budget redemption story from the depression, kind of the man version of Seabiscuit, and it's being soft pedaled like the oscar bait that it is. But the trailer made me feel good anyways, mostly because of just how beautiful the shots of a fully lit and dressed Toronto are throughout. Seeing Maple Leaf Gardens cleaned and scrubbed and decked out in all its' 30's splendor gives you a small sense of how important that building was to our collective civic pride when it was built. A giant project, financed out of the worst economy in history, and completed in just eight months, it must have been the Taj Mahal to Torontonians struggling to find their next meal. A building to inspire greatness in the rest of us.

One quick story: A while back I got to know a television director, and amongst his other projects he had been one of the directors on the "Heritage Minutes" series for Patrick Watson. He pitched a Maple Leaf Gardens minute to try to show just how amazing the construction schedule on that thing had been. The centrepiece was going to recreate a working forge that had been built at centre ice to actually found the beams used in the superstructure of the building, since they couldn't get them delivered from Stelco in Hamilton fast enough. Beams were founded, cooled and then put into the rafters in one smooth series of steps, part of why the schedule was so accelerated. Apparently the remains of the forge are still under centre ice, since they were too heavy to be carted away. The series ended before he could get the green light, but holy crap, that would have been cool.