Paula Cole on stage at Lilith Fair Merri Cyr Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment When Sarah McLachlan first hatched the idea for the 1990s women-only Lilith Fair tour, concert promoters openly questioned whether female singer-songwriters could perform back to back on a traveling festival bill and sell enough tickets. Or that radio DJs could play women artists one after the other and not have listeners tune to others stations. Director Ally Pankiw's feature documentary Llilith Fair: Building a Mystery, set for a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, recounts how and why McLachlan proved the concert promoters wrong with the power and potential of her all-women summer music festival. Related Stories Movies Brian Cox Suffers Kilt Wardrobe Blunder at Toronto Premiere: "It's Hard Not to Wear Underpants" Movies 'Easy's Waltz' Review: Vince Vaughn Sings the Hits in Nic Pizzolatto's Agreeably Lo-Fi Vegas Drama Sarah McLachlan and Gabby Glaser perform during Lilith Fair on July 14, 1999, in Mountain View, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images) Lilith Fair over three summers - with headliners like McLachlan, Tracey Chapman, Paula Cole, Jewel, Patti Smith, Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot - earned the ticket sales and profitability to change forever how top-flight women artists were booked by promoters or played on rotation in radio. "Sarah always inherently understood her audiences and what they wanted," Pankiw said of McLachlan - an immensely talented, yet early on unassuming singer-songwriter - and her battle against industry-wide sexism. "And she did it from such an authentic place: I like listening to female artists. I like playing with them. I like collaborating with them. I like touring with them. I know my audiences like listening to me and other massive female artists at the same time. It just doesn't add up that they wouldn't like us to play a bill all together," the director adds of McLachlan's motivation. Lilith Fair set out to disrupt the music industry with an alternative model - all-women fronted bills - when female artists like the Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt, Liz Phair and Paula Cole were showing up on the Billboard charts. "Women aren't a fluke," says "Foolish Games" singer Jewel, who appears in the doc. But telling concert promoters in a male-dominated industry their business doesn't really run like they think it does never earns praise. Especially if you're a woman. "Lilith was no exception to a rule. It was very much in line to what happens when women sort of dare to enter into arenas and artistic endeavors that some people don't think are for them. It's a tale as old as time," Pankiw says. A recurring theme in the Lilith Fair doc, set to bow on Canada's CBC on Sept. 17 and then Hulu and Disney+ stateside from Sept. 21 via doc partner ABC News Studios, is the withering mockery and abuse the all-female concert tour earned from the media, including radio shock jocks and late night talk show hosts, and all under the guise of comedy. That's on top of skepticism shown by music industry execs preferring to sell records by women artists with sex and festival organizers relying on tours with flashy male artists. That left women artists who had taken pains with their lyrics and performances to feel trivialized and marginalized as their careers had just got off the ground. Suzanne Vega in the film recounts wanting people to see her face and the artistry of her lyrics, "but the pressure was on to be larger than life," she added after a Howard Stern Show appearance where the controversial shock jock questioned why she covered herself up with pants and a t-shirt top. Pankiw hopes her film helps Lilith Fair be appreciated outside of its 1990s culture moment. After what she calls the "misremembering" of the all-women tour, including as "Lesbopalooza" and other comedic punch lines, Pankiew aims to restore the legacy of a summer festival led by McLachlan and other now legendary female artists to create a personal and authentic experience for their audiences. "They were just incredible women who knew their worth, who wanted their art and their artistry to be given its due," she explains. That got mostly ignored. Commercial success as Lilith Fair grew new album sales and earned Grammy nominations for its individual artists on tour only fueled unrelenting industry and media scorn. Each Lilith Fair concert was preceded by a media conference where women artists, led by McLachlan, had to answer at times offensive questions. "It probably wasn't weird that they would have to answer asinine questions. The 1990s was the era of shock jocks, the era of men being able to say the most disgusting, blatantly hateful things about women and gay people on some of the biggest platforms in entertainment," Pankiw remembers. Other derision of Lilith