John H. Foote

John Howard Foote is a Canadian based film critic and Director of the Toronto Film School. He was born in Oshawa Ontario, Canada on May 21, 1959 to John and Dianne Foote. The eldest of four children his family relocated to Seagrave when Foote was four, and he was raised in the Port Perry area. At an early age his father introduced him to films and he was forever addicted. He recalls being put to bed at seven o'clock in the evening only to be roused at 11:25, shortly before the start of Fright Night Theatre on WKBW TV out of Buffalo in the sixties. He states that he became hooked forever on film while watching the Red Sea open in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments which he saw during a re-release in the early seventies. From that moment on "film became my heroin" he states.

He would attend Port Perry High School and after graduation study film and theatre at Humber College where he became the first student to be permitted to direct Mainstage Theatre Productions. Though he directed over forty plays in the years spanning 1980-1996, his first love remained cinema. He was artistic director of Theatre One for three years and in 1990 won a THEA Award for his direction of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, one of the many American post-war dramas he would direct in the years spanning 1988-1993.

In 1990 he married Sherri Todd; they have been together for more than twenty years, and have two children together, Aurora, 15, and Ariana, 7.

In 1992, he was invited to be part of a new television program entitled Reel to Real, which he joined as co-host and co-producer. For nine years he and partner Christopher Heard were seen on the Rogers Network as the program gained an enormous following. Foote left the program in 1999 after a falling out with producers to pursue print criticism which is what he does to this day.

During his time on Reel to Real he was contacted to teach film history at the Trebas Institute, a Toronto based career college offering programs in film and television. Education agreed with him and within three years he was running the Film Department as Director. After a violent car accident in 2000, and long extended hospital stay he was removed from his position at Trebas by the owner and replaced while in the hospital. His massive injuries twice nearly claimed his life, but he recovered to deal with daily chronic pain.

At this time the Toronto Film School contacted him and offered him a job upon getting out of the hospital.In 2001 he became Coordinator of the Film and Television Program and two years later was promoted to Director of the Toronto Film School, a position he holds to this day (www.torontofilmschool.ca).In 2007 he was contracted by Greenwood Publishers in the United States to write a biography of director Clint Eastwood, due for publication in 2008. This will be followed by a second on Steven Spielberg due in 2009, both part of the Filmmaker Series being created by Greenwood. It is important to recognize that neither book is a biography but rather a study of their directing careers and the films they have directed. After writing those two books he will write his long cherished project about the great films of the eighties, a decade of terrible films making money while the great ones failed one after another to be re-discovered on video and DVD. Plans for this book are well underway and the publisher will likely be Greenwood.In addition he joined the staff of the website www.incontention.com as their Toronto International Film Festival critic. His work as a critic continues as he writes syndicated for the Metroland Organization, Toronto Life and Fashion and has his own website, (www.footeonfilm.com.) In addition he has written a biography of actor Robert Duvall which is awaiting publication.In late 2007 Foote was contracted by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to write a blog on their website about Canadian films vying for the 2007 Genie Awards to be given in early 2008. His writings appear on the Academy site at www.academy.ca. It was the hope of the Academy to build greater interest and promotion of Canadian cinema. Writing with Foote is a film student selected by him from the Toronto Film School. He formally joined the staff of contributors to the popular American site www.incontention.com on which he comment throughout the year on the Oscar race, past and present. His wife Sherri was diagnosed recently with cancer of the brain and after the removal of a tumour, is being treated for such.