| Director | Juan Pablo Buscarini, Kristi Jacobson |
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The film identifies what were the markers of Toots' career as a celebrity restaurateur: Prohibition, the growth of the Mafia, the golden age of baseball, and the death of the saloon scene in the "serious" atmosphere created by the tumult of the 60s. Throughout the film, there is a feel of romantic nostalgia as all those who are interviewed recall Toots fondly as a lover of New York, at a moment when the city was awash in wealth and celebrity as never before, and that the city's sizzle was once embodied by a sports bar in Midtown: a place of glamour and egalitarianism, where Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway rubbed elbows with working stiffs.
After deciding to pursue the project, she sent a fax to Walter Cronkite requesting an interview. Two days later Jacobson got a message: "Kristi, it's Walter Cronkite. I knew and loved Toots. What can I do to help you?"
Soon more friends and admirers of Shor were sitting in front of Jacobson's camera, recounting tales of boozy bonhomie: journalists (Gay Talese), broadcasters (Mike Wallace), athletes (Whitey Ford, Joe Garagiola). Tom Brokaw signed on as a consulting producer.
It turned out that the most difficult interviewee to nail down was her own mother, Kerry Jacobson, one of Shor's four children with his wife, the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer Marion Shor, known as Baby. In fact, her daughter's was the first interview Kerry Jacobson ever consented to oblige. "[Toots'] children were raised to keep their lives private, not to brag. It just wasn't [my mother's] instinct to talk about, you know, how her dad had turned up at her confirmation with John Wayne."