Elwy Yost loved movies and hundreds of thousands loved watching him talk about them — that passion is revisited in TVO doc

Thirty or 40 years ago, you could not ask Siri or Alexa to call up “Citizen Kane” or explain the meaning of the word “Rosebud.”

You had to rely on Elwy, as in Elwy Yost.

Between 1974 and 1999 he was the pipe-smoking, mustachioed host of “Saturday Night at the Movies.” Watching uncut, uninterrupted film gems was a weekly ritual for as many as half a million TVO viewers. That was a monster-sized audience for a regional network, on a Saturday night, opposite a national obsession: “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Yost would introduce a film, share his insights with enthusiasm and then segue to an interview he had conducted with a major Hollywood filmmaker. That show and another he hosted, “Magic Shadows,” were like home film study courses, our own Turner Classic Movies dozens of years before that Atlanta-based all-movie channel first flickered.

This Saturday at 8 p.m., in Yost’s old familiar time slot, TVO presents “Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost: A Life in Movies.” The hour-long documentary features many stars Yost interviewed on the series, including a young Mike Myers and an older Henry Fonda. Also featured in the documentary, directed by Karen Shopsowitz, is film critic Leonard Maltin, well acquainted with Yost from the TVO host’s annual trips to LA to interview filmmakers.

As Maltin says in the documentary, “I always knew I was talking to a fellow movie lover.”

Yost’s passion for the movies tickled a wide variety of viewers. Fans who look back in the documentary include “Baroness von Sketch Show’s” Aurora Browne, rocker Greg Godovitz, current TVO host Steve Paikin and former Toronto Star TV columnist Rob Salem.

“The interviews were just so interesting and the enthusiasm too; it draws you in,” said executive producer Colette Vosberg, who worked two years on the project. “You didn’t see anything like that on TV (back then) where you actually got behind the scenes about filmmaking.”

Yost, who died in 2011 at 86, had fans far beyond TVO’s regional reach. Just ask Elwy’s son, Graham Yost. The showrunner behind “Justified” and “The Americans,” currently shooting new dramas in England for Apple TV Plus, took his dad’s lessons to heart and spun them into an award-winning career.

The Yost family had their own “Magic Shadows” moment in 1994 at the storied Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Proud papa Elwy, wife Lila and son Christopher (whose music can be heard in the documentary) were at the red-carpet premiere of “Speed,” the Sandra Bullock-Keanu Reeves thriller written by Graham.

“It was a real fantasyland kind of feeling that evening,” said Graham. “We go in, my dad’s sitting right next to me.” Suddenly, before the curtain went up, a hand reached out and tapped Elwy on the shoulder.

“Are you Elwy Yost?” asked an up-and-coming young filmmaker. “I just have to thank you.”

Graham instantly recognized Quentin Tarantino. Turns out that the film maverick watched every episode of Elwy’s “The Moviemakers,” a syndicated compilation of his “Saturday Night” interviews.

“It was so meaningful to see all of those people being interviewed,” said Tarantino, then fresh off his writing and directing debut with “Reservoir Dogs.”

That was a film that Elwy — who once took Graham (then nine) and his brother to see Sam Peckinpah’s extremely violent western “The Wild Bunch” — greatly admired. “What are you working on next?” asked Elwy. Tarantino replied that he had a little something in the works called “Pulp Fiction.”

“He didn’t try to stay current; he just did stay current,” said Graham. “That being said, he had a particular fondness for the films of his youth: the old Hopalong Cassidy westerns and the Charlie Chans.”

At the top of his list was “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” director John Huston’s 1948 Humphrey Bogart drama.

Yost met future bride Lila Melby in 1951 in the Toronto Star building (he was working at the time in the circulation department). He took her, of course, to the movies. A musical was a safe choice, he thought, so they went to see “Easter Parade.”

“It was OK,” she told him later, but it was no “Sierra Madre.”

“And that was it,” said Graham, “They were smitten.” Lila and Elwy enjoyed a 60-year union.

Before settling in Etobicoke, the couple lived in England where Yost managed to land a job as an extra on Huston’s 1952 musical “Moulin Rouge.” Years later, before there was freeze frame, Elwy would quickly point himself out to his sons during late-show screenings.

During the making of the film, the Canadian extra boldly engaged in conversation with the great director.

“John Huston let my mom sit in his chair,” said Graham. “I’ve been on a lot of sets now and that rarely happens. That says so much about Huston. Everyone was involved in the movie.”

Decades later, Elwy Yost and Huston resumed their conversation when the famous director sat for interviews on “Saturday Night at the Movies.”

“Moulin Rouge” was not Elwy’s only cameo. In the late ’70s, Yost — who once taught at Etobicoke’s Burnhamthorpe Collegiate — was hired to play a teacher presenting a film award to a student in a short film that sparked the long-running “Degrassi” TV franchise.

As his fame grew, so came the parodies. “I would never say it was a burden to have a famous dad on TV because he was so beloved,” said Graham, “but my nickname was ‘Son of Elwy.’”

There were those who made fun of Yost’s “Gee whiz, aw shucks” approach, said Graham. His dad, however, did not like every film, “he just didn’t talk about the films he didn’t like. We’d be watching TV with him and he could tell within 30 seconds if it was worth watching.

“What’s the approach to story? How is it being told? Does it feel real? Is it interesting? Our dad taught us a lot of that.”

The lessons certainly paid off for Graham, a Peabody Award winner for his own career in storytelling. Graham said his dad once tipped him off about a film based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa: 1985’s “Runaway Train.”

Graham saw it and had two thoughts: there should be a bomb on board and it should be a bus. Three years later, he wrote “Speed.” In 1999, that was the last film featured on “Saturday Night at the Movies.”

“Dad loved movies as an educational thing,” said Graham. “He felt there was so much to be learned from movies.”