By Roger Ebert
Nobody ever seemed to know what Dusty Cohl did for a living. He was a lawyer, and it was said he was "in real estate," but in over 30 years I never heard him say one word about business. His full-time occupation was being a friend, and he was one of the best I've ever made.

Yes, he was "co-founder of the Toronto Film Festival." That's how he was always identified in the Toronto newspapers. And he founded and ran the Floating Film Festival, one of the great boondoggles, on which Dusty and 250 friends cruised for 10 days while premiering films and paying tributes to actors and directors. There was no reason for the floater except that if you were Dusty's friend, you floated.

But beyond those titles, from which he made not a dollar, he was,simply, a phenomenon of friendship. He didn't want anything from you. He lived to be a friend, and he wanted his friends to know each other, and he liked to put people together so good things would happen. He considered himself at one degree of separation. "When he was young, he was a social director at a resort in the Canadian Catskills," his wife Joan told me once."I don't think he ever really left the job."

Dusty died about 3 p.m. Friday, Jan. 11 at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, of liver cancer. He was surrounded at the end by family and friends. He left Joan, his wife of 56 years; his children Karen, Steve and Robert; five grandchildren, and uncounted happy memories.

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