Fin

Two final reflections before I leave this blog....

I'm not sure why so many native French speakers came up to me asking for directions. perhaps it's that grey hair.... But I must admit to a certain enjoyment at being able to say: Je ne parle pas francais -- if only for the slightly surreal quality of telling someone you don't speak their language, in their language.

And a story which says more about me than I probably should be telling: midway through the event, the Producer tells me -- "We just got an email. It looks like we're in the International Thai Film Festival."

"That's great. I was hoping we'd finally get in international competition."

"Hugh," she said. "We're sitting in the south of France!"

"Yeah, but we're not in formal competition. THIS will be formal competition."

Ca va? Ca va.

Back in Chicago, I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience of Cannes. All-in-all it is a bit like a chocolate bon-bon – outside the gooey, sweet goodness of celebrity and glitz; inside, a hard nougat of global film distribution. Now for a few things we learned the hard way:

-- Many thanks to the Producer for a great deal on a hotel up the coast. It would be a hard decision whether to do that again or try to scoop up an apartment or alternate, probably more costly housing situation closer in Cannes. The trade-off is significant since buses stop at 10 and trains stop around 1 AM.

-- The 200 bus is marginally more reliable but it takes three times as long and chances are good you’ll be standing. Trains are sporadic at best but get you there much quick… though you can end up standing on a platform for an hour waiting for a “retard” (that’s shorthand for “delayed”) train while the bus is wending its way without you.

-- I’ve covered the Short Film Corner in an earlier post and would only add that I found the “cocktail hour networking” pretty much a waste of time. Pick up a list of the on-site distributors, make up some personal packets with information on your film and drop it in the on-site mailbox – and then talk to ever random person from your flight in to the people at the next table in the café.

-- For quality networking, buy an access pass to the U.S. Pavilion – they’ve got daily events, like the Francis Ford Copolla talk on film that are worth the price of admission and the networking there is better than the in Short Film area. If you can register for the Kodak pavilion pass, do – but here you get a lot more hardcore dealmaking going on and it’s generally closed to special invitation breakfasts and the like. I learned a good bit about what festivals to enter and next steps for a short film here.

-- Check out the rest of the International Village too; the Brits are always fun to talk to and the Irish had some quality materials. The filmmaker I spoke to from Wales was able to set up a meeting with the filmboard of Wales for potential matching funds on his feature. As one would expect, the Swiss booth was the tidiest.

-- Underneath the escalators in the pavilion are two flat screen TVs; at first blush, you think, they are both broadcasting the same live feed of whatever is happening on the red carpet or in the press conference – except on is in English and one is in French. Bloggers and journalists who may have been denied access to the briefings congregate here to get the latest and greatest.

-- It’s worth strolling through the upper pavilion where studios are hawking their films for distribution. Don’t expect a lot of conversation when they learn you are NOT a distributor – but in general, you can get in to some of the screenings of their films if they’ve got enough seats available.

-- One of the most comic moments came the first day we were there – on the lower level…. Exhibitors and other hoi polloi were streaming in to the pavilion around 9:30 or so. A magazine stand was set up and each day is filled with the daily Variety. That particular morning, the delivery person had just finished dropping off stacks of magazines. We passed by the rack and noticed a few people hurrying over to grab – and I mean grab in the sort of way manic early morning Christmas shoppers grab – the magazines. A feeding frenzy began as the new people in the pavilion saw a flurry of arms and magazine covers. “What the hell is going on?” I asked the Producer. “I thought they were just Variety magazines.” Curious and trooper that she is the Producer dove into the melee. For a moment, she disappeared completely and I thought I’d have to go in after her. But she reappeared unscathed, hair slightly disheveled, holding a copy Variety magazine. “Does it contain the secret to eternal life?” I asked. She flipped through a few pages and outside of some reviews of the previous days films, it gives a fairly comprehensive schedule of ALL of the films being screened during the day…. But what I’ve learned since is that in front of the big glitzy hotel across the street from the Pavilion, every morning two attractive young women, impeccably dressed, stand handing out the very same magazine. You can find it in a half dozen other places too! General word of advice: avoid the feeding frenzies and look for the women on the Croisette.

Rereading some of this and it can souns rather banal and trivial. I’m sure there are greater lessons learned that I’ll come remember later or have internalized in some way -- whether it's finding out how to get access to the badge that will get you access sorts of insights or just where to get off the bus. The experience was well worth it though – and I’d like to think of it as a preliminary run for the next time.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Short Film Corner

Arc of a Bird was not in formal competition but, as I mentioned a couple posts back, was playing in what is called the “Short Film Corner”. The Corner is almost literally that – a corner of the massive basement of the Grand Palais, below the larger tradeshow of cinema. It isn’t exactly a “shadow market” since there’s really no market – or at least, pretty slim one, but like every corner of Cannes takes some navigating to figure out.

Two days into the festival, it is clear that if you get in early enough and pay the fee, you too have a shot at getting in this corner! (I watched a one-minute film of a bird building a nest on a river which, given the shaky camera work, sounds more interesting than it was.) More than a thousand films are loaded onto what turns out to be a pretty cool database. Viewers are then allowed to sit at private booths and call up any film by number of search by a keyword in the title. (I’ll spare you the story of the larger “screening room” which proved as disorganized as the French transit system.)

Now, the folks at Cannes promote all of this as a great networking opportunity to meet distributors of short films. This is sort of like saying you can have a great opportunity to meet film distributors from the fairy kingdom. They may exist but good luck spotting one.

It takes the Producer and me a couple critical days to figure out the whole “distributor” thing and figure out a way to get them to watch the films. With a list of 30 distributors in hand, we spend time in a café putting handmade packages together that contain a DVD of our film and a handwritten card. (The young guy at the counter said it was pointless to include a DVD in the personalized package since all of the films are in the database, but I figured it was far more likely that one of the distributors would pickup our package than pick up our package AND sit down to review the film in one of the viewing booths there.)

Because nature abhors a vacuum and human beings are the creative folks they are, what happens is that you have a system of short filmmakers getting other short filmmakers to watch THEIR film. Each morning in the café area dozens of filmmakers start pasting up posters, postcards, handbills, just about anything to grab attention. One guy who looked like Harpo Marx on a bender bravely stood at the center of the hallway handing his “screening” card to everyone who walked by – and so ended up approaching me at least three times.

Contrary to that example, it more or less works, if you’re interested in the short film form and what’s being done in different countries. At one point, while standing in line to get my seat in one of the screening booths, a twenty-something from the UK walked along the line and handed out 3” x 5” photocopied fliers promoting his short (which was a literal hommage to the films of George Méliès – a five minute, black and white silent with various rudimentary special effects of people disappearing and reappearing in different places.) But, heck, I checked out his film.

My favorite was a short by a Welsh writer/director Hefin Rees; it’s a beautifully shot and smartly written love story. Another film, about circus troupe that has its bus break down in the desert, features a continuous 360 pan which has the story unfold in the space of six minutes until one of the trapeze artists rides the the bus down the road as part of the closing pan. I felt like I could have used a Dramamine when it was done, but the choreography of the storytelling with no dialog was impressive.

As I write this, Cannes is just half over. We’ll have to see if the phone rings and any of those distributors call… but, as it turned out, I found myself scheduling an hour a day to sit down and watch other people’s short film and that in and of itself made it a bit of an education as well.

Bet Brad Pitt Never Did THIS In a Tux...

Read most of the background stuff on Cannes and you’ll see a fair number of references to the need for what is often upper-cased as FORMAL ATTIRE at evening events at Cannes. In truth, while you can probably get by wearing the U.S.-style invention – business casual – when the sun goes down you see a pretty high percentage of tuxedos and knockout ballgowns (even a casually draped scarf or shawl can look awfully sexy under these conditions). And while the Producer and I have not been asked on to any of the boats docked along the Croisette, if we had, a tux would definitely be de rigueur.

I do not wear a tuxedo often but I must admit that as experiences go, I have never worn a tuxedo on a bus. And looking about the 200 bus on Saturday night, it did not appear to be the preferred mode of transportation for most tuxedoed folks heading into Cannes.

We ended up on a bus in the evening because Saturday morning we learned there was a rail strike and trying to figure out when a train MIGHT show up is a risky business. (More on the inanity of French strikes and mass transit on the Côte d’Azur in another post.)

I would like to say that that reason I am unself-conscious being a Yank in a tuxedo on a bus on a Saturday night anywhere in the world is not because of my great confidence and self-possession. The real reason is that I’ve got a bigger concern… I’ve got bigger poisson to fry… My tuxedo shoes are falling apart. Literally.

As mentioned above, I don’t wear my tux to often and in grabbing it – and its matching shoes – out of the closet, I did the most cursory examination. I now them to be fairly cheap patent-leather jobs but with a brief dusting, the old patent leather shine came back and I never bothered to check that the glue holding both shoes together had cracked and that the leather upper-shoe is coming apart from the rubber sole.

This is not some trivial point in one spot on a shoe; the right shoe is the worst and the entire left side near the arch is now – standing there on the bus – a gaping hole. At any moment, my foot threatens to pop out of the shoe to make me look like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. Or a character from the Flintstones.

I shift my weigh to my left foot, but I can feel that one getting a little more ventilated.

Let me pause here to relate a brief conversation the Producer and I had about Happiness. Turns out that a great deal of research has been done on Happiness in the last ten years (which is sort of strange when you think about it, since we’ve been pursuing at least as long Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence.) Turns out that the Law of the Slowest Check-Out Line (you know the Law: the one that says the minute you happen to get in a check-out line in a grocery store, something annoying happens – the old lady checking out decides she’s got a stack of coupons dating from the Pleistocene Era and they’ve got to go through each one to check expiration dates or someone has lugged 20 items into the 10 item line (don’t get me started – if you can’t count past 10, you shouldn’t be allowed to shop….))… turns out this is actually the Slowest Check-Out Line Fallacy. What happens is that we humans tend to only remember those noteworthy, annoying moments. When everything is going according to plan, when the line is moving with the efficiency of a well-oiled escalator, we DON’T NOTICE. And in studies on Happiness, because most people tend to dwell on what disrupts the day rather than the fact it unfolds rather miraculously and un-traumatically most of us not only don’t stop to smell the roses, we aren’t even aware there ARE roses.

What does this have to do with our story?

Leaving the hotel, on the way to the bus stop, I ask the Producer if we might stop in the magazine shop on the corner. I have told her nothing about my shoes, feeling rather sheepish about the fact that at any moment I might begin trailing bits of patent leather behind me like an eighteen-wheeler leaving strips of blown tire on the Interstate.

There, behind the counter, behind the woman who looks like she has been there since the invention of newsstands is a small plastic tray with exactly two remaining tubes of SUPER GLUE in a small red plastic tray. The shelf is so high and dusty she has to use a ballpoint pen to coax it off the shelf.

When we leave the store, the Producer – being the kind of person described in an earlier post – does not ask me why this tuxedoed jamoke is purchasing a tube of Super Glue on his way to Saturday night festivities in Cannes. So, of course, like a kid whose just shoplifted the damn glue, I spill my guts.

As we stand at the bus stop, she looks at my shoes and says: “Do you realize how lucky you are to have just walked into the first magazine shop you saw on a Saturday night and found one of the last two tubes of Super Glue on the shelf?”

Duly noted. I am happy: I am in a tux on my way to the Cannes Film Festival with a fresh tube of Super Glue in my pocket and a big toe that threatens at any moment pop out of my shoe and scare the hell out of the kid whose been looking me up and down for the last ten minutes. “Maman! Le Hulk Incroyable!!”

Life is good.

I’m doing what most folks around Cannes are doing early on this Saturday night: taking a table at a café, ordering a glass of wine as the last rays of days sunlight are fading from the sky, takin off my shoes and trying to reconstruct them with a tube of Super Glue. Bet Brad Pitt never did this in a tux.

It’s a little harder than it sounds actually and I’m beginning to lose hope with the more problematic right shoe where the leather, lining and two other layers I can’t identify by name are coming apart like filo dough. But in the end, I’m more of less successful and both shoes are ringed with that silvery thread of still-drying glue. I ask the Producer if I’m giving off any weird petrochemical odors from this operation and she shakes her head. Now I’m worried she’s just being nice. I consider picking up bottle of cologne from one of the gift shops but am concerned the Producer will think me even more neurotic than she already must.

Some observations from the evening:

 Out on the beach, across from Harvey’s, they’ve set out two hundred beach chairs where folks can watch the evening’s public presentation. Each evening there is another film featuring music. Saturday night it was a documentary on the music of the civil rights movement.

 We stop by the U.S. pavilion and talk with several groups of other filmmakers. Like all of the discussions, I find one or two kernels of wisdom so that collectively, as the days go by, I’m beginning to develop a sort of database on festivals and distribution of short films.

 We spend time trying to board the boats but security is tight and I don’t really have any names to drop.

 Outside the Grand Lumiere theater, crowds are gathering and they’re playing Jimi Hendrix music. The cast from “Taking Woodstock” must be on their way and sure enough cops begin cordoning off the streets and we watch a phalanx of limos passing by as you get glimpses of the various actors in the window. It all seems a slightly silly affair and given that they did a news conference earlier in the day is a bit of a show for flashing cameras under the night sky. (We managed to score tickets to an earlier showing of the film and I was disappointed. It was one of those films that never seemed to decide what it wanted to be and while aspects of the set design and scenes of psychedelia were visually interesting the story is just a collection of odd moments in the life of a character played by Demetri Martin from the Daily Show – who, for having to carry the entire film as lead and center around which the chaos swirls – seems a bit out of his depth. And the more I think of tangential characters, there were just so many Types: the wacky-but-ultimately-loveable Vietnam vet, the chill-curly-haired-Pan character who ultimately rides off (I kid you not) on a white horse, the lovable older Jewish parents who you just know are going to get stoned sometime in the film… and surprise, they do. The stand out performance is Liev Schrieber who plays the worldly-wise transvestite bodyguard which seemed an hommage to John Lithgow in “The World According to Garp”… which, if that’s the remarkable performance, may be ‘nuff said.)

 There’s a slim chance we’ll have an opportunity to speak to a journalist sometime after a screening ends at 10:30, so we stake out a table at a decent yet crowded café where we battle for the open seat until 11 or so when we surrender it to a couple of distributors from Barcelona who give us a tip or two on the Spanish festival circuit.

 Finally, just after midnight, after challenging each other to stay out to see real craziness unfold on the streets of Cannes, we see a fairly large contingent of people moving towards the train station. As it turns out the rail strike has miraculously been lifted (or perhaps the train crew has simply finished watching the soccer match) and we grab the last train heading east out of Cannes. I feel like I’m wimping out on some intangible experience of just being OUT in Cannes in the pre-dawn hours, but ultimately the days themselves have been draining. I definitely have underdeveloped schmooze muscles and haven’t carried on this many random conversations with total strangers in the last year.

Harvey and the Producer

You may have been wondering just who the person I’ve referred to as The Producer. After hearing me blather on about my own experiences, let’s take a moment to find out about Stacey Evenson, the producer on Arc of a Bird.

Stacey is not an easy person to categorize, not in the kind of she-was-a-quiet-girl-who-kept-to-herself-before-the-Incident kind of way, but more in the way she is uniquely her own type. She worked tirelessly during the production phase of the film and has been a tireless promoter of it, spending her own money to travel here and try to network with distributors and studios.

The best way to describe her is to present two stories that kind of bookend the experience here in Cannes. [IMPORTANT NOTE: I’ve been given The Producer’s permission to use these stories.]

On the first day Stacey arrived in Cannes, I pointed out the penthouse suite of the Weinstein Brothers (mentioned in an earlier post) and said: “Maybe our goal for networking should be to meet Harvey Weinstein.”

She knew it was a joke, but Stacey is also the kind of person who shrugs and thinks: “Well, why not?”

For the next couple of days, we would see a limo with tinted windows and she would say: “Do you see Harvey?” On Saturday night, dressed in formalwear, on the Croisette across from the Weinstein penthouse, we joked about the idea of just standing on the street and yelling “Harvey! Harvey!!” until somebody made us stop.

Since the building is terraced in the understated manner of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I had the idea of scaling the building one terrace at a time. “All we need,” I proposed. “Is a good sized step ladder.” We’d jump from the top step and use a rope to pull the ladder up after us.

Then there was my idea of a slingshot…. What if we were to take our DVDs of Arc of a Bird, put them in a slingshot and shoot them to the penthouse balcony. The DVD has a roughly Frisbee shape that might make it aerodynamically easier to hit the top of the building. The downside, of course, is at that velocity the DVD could become a lethal weapon. In addition to potentially ripping the patio umbrella to shreds, there was a chance we might hit someone in the neck, sever a carotid artery, and kill her or him (or Harvey!) I could see the headlines: FILM MOGUL DECAPITATED BY INDEPENDENT FILM. (I’ve heard there are some in the film industry who might like to see that headline, but we’ve got no beef with the man. Then again, we don’t have a slingshot either.)

And so on the last day of our five day stay in Juan de Pins (two train stops east of Cannes), Stacey announces at breakfast she is going to get that DVD to Harvey. “Okay, sure” I say with the same noncommittal tone you might affect if your mother said she was going to take up salsa dancing. If you say so….

Cannes-ily we decide that the back entrance of the building (north of the entrance facing the Croisette) may be the best bet in terms of security. She heads in. I hide behind a palm tree. (I would do this if my mother was taking salsa dancing too, except there are no palm trees in Michigan.)

She comes out a few minutes, grinning. “They said it’s a couple doors up.”

“You just asked the person in there where Harvey was at and they said ‘a couple doors up’?”

“Yup.” And she is off to the next entrance halfway up the block.

She disappears in this second entrance and reappears. “They said ‘One more door,’” she says with the same optimistic tone she had before.

“Who is this ‘they’ you keep talking about?” But she’s gone. “Hey! I don’t know if I’ve got Jeff’s cell number on me,”

I call after her. Jeff is her husband – and I’m sure he knows better than to have ever said: “Let’s go meet Harvey Weinstein.”

She disappears through the door and I keep on walking past the door.

She reappears a few minutes later smiling. “Got it to him.”

I laugh. Sure you did – but here, in her words, is what happened:

“It was a good thing those two people were going in in front of me because it’s a locked door and a security guard is there. I was able to walk in behind the couple and go to the elevators. I took the elevator up and when you reach the top floor, there’s a narrow hallway and then suddenly you are in the open area, all white, that says ‘Weinstein’. There’s a woman on a phone sitting at something like a hostess station. Two people walk by and the hostess waves them in as she’s talking on the phone. And then after a minute, Harvey comes around the corner, talking to three assistants – all taking notes on their Blackberries.

“The woman gets off the phone and I give her the package. I tell her it’s for Harvey and she says she’ll make sure he gets it. Meanwhile Harvey’s talking to the assistants and one of them, a woman, begins to explain about some deal that has obviously been a problem.

“Harvey stops her and says: ‘Wait. You don’t know who might be behind you.’ And I’m the person standing there right behind her.

“I say ‘Hello’ and they look at me. They motion for me to take the elevator down as they continue talking, but they aren’t talking business when I get on. And that was it.”

While the act itself was fascinating for me, what struck me the most that morning is the way The Producer told the story so matter-of-factly when she came out of the building. I kept asking her questions, driving her for details and she seemed so nonchalant.

That is… until an hour later, when spontaneously she began talking about it with the kind of animation and emotion you hear happens with trauma victims. “It was so amazing just walking up and handing them the DVD. I can’t believe that really happened.” Clearly she was coming to appreciate her own audacity, the Audacity of Holy Cow!

If it had been me however (which it could not be since I don’t lack that kind of chutzpah), I would actually be embellishing the story an hour later: “And then, then Harvey said: ‘You look like our lost brother, the Third Weinstein.’ And we began discussing making a film called ‘The Third Weinstein.’”

The second story is shorter and, as I say, has been sanctioned by The Producer….

On Friday evening, we attended the Short Film Corner Networking Happy Hour. By the time we made it through the mob to the bar where beer and wine was being served, all that was left were bottles of Rose. A Frenchman behind me kept repeating: “I am French. We do not drink Rose.” a remark that sounds appropriately bourgeois the first time its spoken, but by the third time is sort of international behavior for “asshole”. (Of course, when the peristaltic action of the crowd brought him belly to belly with the bar, he shut up and drank the dreaded Rose.)

By the time I had fought my way back to open air, Stacey was standing with a man in his mid-forties who was regaling her with tales of Cannes’ gone by. He was a Brit who worked in the film industry and had returned to Cannes. As we pressed him for some details, his stories didn’t always seem to jibe and he mentioned he was going to a premiere party that night for Mariah Carey’s new movie.

A very hot ticket, he assured us. He was given a ticket by her bodyguard. We didn’t ask for any more details.

But before parting, he asked for our cards and handed his to The Producer.

Stacey took one look at the card and announced brightly. “Oh, so you do stand up too!?!”

“Pardon?” he said.

“You’re a comedian!” she pressed with a brief waving of hands that said ‘audiences?’ ‘microphones?’ Then repeated: “Comedian.” Seeing the blank look on his face, she added: “On your business card, it says--

“Oh!” he said drawing that out in a way only the British can. “Oh, no. You see ‘comédien’ is the French word for actor. You see? This is my business card for work here in France.”

I’m not quite sure what either story has to do with the other, but there you have it: the Producer.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The title of Jane Campion’s latest film is taken from what some thought to be Keats’ last sonnet (though there’s disagreements about that). Midway through the film, Fanny Brawne, the heroine of this film wonders aloud if the poet is referring to her as the one who is in-constant and changeable. This question of “constancy” – what we twenty-first centurists might call “focus” or “stick-to-it-iveness” – is at the heart of Bright Star.

Charles Brown, the third player in this ménage-a-crois (and note the echo of ‘Brawne’), is never as constant as Keats – neither in love nor poetry.

As much as this film is about Fanny’s constancy, these two men also represent what might be called the “ideal” romantic male and the “actual” (all-too-human) male that women idolize/idealize – then often settle for. Because Keats is so elusive as a romantic presence for Fanny, you are left wondering whether she is indeed deluding herself or if she, like Keats, has taken the highest road.

As visual treat, this may be one of the most beautiful and cinematic (if by cinematic we mean worthy of a whole freaking movie theater, not just a tv screen) films I’ve seen in a while. Whether it is a room filled with butterflies or a spring morning in a field of lilacs, the scenes are composed with a painter’s care. One scene, a third of the way through, seems to be lifted directly from a Vermeer painting.

Which brings me to the experience of the Lumiere theater… Any theater named after the two brothers who helped invent cinema ought to be great, but not having seen an Edison theater in the States, I’m not quite sure what to compare this huge, cavernous space where the curtains are slowly drawn back with a cautious care that is breathtaking as you wait for light to fill the entire wall.

Although I was up in the upper balcony, I was immersed in the film by the cinematography, the acting and the space itself….

In the end, I want to see Bright Star again; in part to see if my disappointment is because I expected something more out of a John Keats’ movie – or if Campion has achieved something astonishing in this twittered, IM’d Age – a quiet, and Romantic (with a capital “R”) film that takes it time in revealing itself as a poem.

What the hell am I doing here?

It is high time I got around to this question which has appeared in different forms in other posts. It is also a question that I was asking myself every hour or so the first day I arrived (Thursday) – and by Friday evening, when I started jotting down these thoughts, had diminished to every four waking hours.

Arc of a Bird is not in formal competition here in Cannes as it has been at other festivals. Instead what we’ve been offered is participation in: The Short Films Corner, a collection of more than 1,200 films from around the world and what is advertised as access to marketing channels for short films.

As I’ve mentioned to some folks already, I don’t imagine we’ll make a dime off of this film. But as The Producer reminds me, I didn’t think we had won the IFP award either after our presentation.

Truth is: I’m here for three reasons: a) to find ways to make MORE films (I’m hoping to shoot my second short film before Spring and have had some good response to my feature length script as well); b) to find more outlets for Arc of a Bird, we’ve had a few direct inquiries about showing at other festivals based upon folks seeing the film (the woman in Charleston who saw the film in Houston and asked us to participate in her competition.)

The third reason is a little more bassackwards, that is, it isn’t so much what the film can do at Cannes but what Cannes can do for us (and that means all of you who have been involved in this lovely enterprise and might participate in the next). The film opened the door to Cannes as an experience itself. Part of that challenge is to open the other doors I’ve found beyond this one: in random conversations at the U.S. Pavilion, in conversations at the Short Films Corner, the dinner conversation with the buyers from Barcelona who gave us specific contact information and advice for a competition in Spain, or the young filmmaker from Wales whose short film may be one of the smartest I’ve seen in the festivals we’ve attended since we’ve been entered.

To return to the opening question: I’m dogged by doubt about the whole idea, the whole endeavor, the whole freakin’ investment most especially when I take a step back and survey the immensity of the complex here. But isn’t that the case with most of the things in life? I’m fairly cautious about any delusions of grandeur here but also know that there are going to be threads of conversations that thicken and become more solid connections in a week or a month.

For now, I’m making it a point to check out the OTHER short films in the short films corner; I’m still learning how I might have improved “Arc” and how I might reshape or refashion this second script which has a completely different look and feel and story. I’ve found there’s learning the doing and learning in seeing what you’ve done too.

Enough with the late night rationalizations now, let’s talk about Jane Campion’s unabashedly Romantic vision.

Making sausage

You will, no doubt, want to hear about the Francis Ford Coppola sighting at the U.S. pavilion, or maybe find out how the new film from Jane Campion played…. perhaps even the blow-by-blow commentary about the ramp up to the red carpet. All in due time, my friend, all in due time.

But before moving on, we should dwell on an issue that is at the heart of this cinematic beast. With generosity, we might call it Canne’s artificial, economic heart: the marche du film: the marketing tradeshow that takes up a majority of the main pavilion.

Think of it as a Turkish bazaar with flatscreen TVs, DVD players, plastic swag and slick posters. Row after row of booths from different countries: Hong Kong, Turkey, Korea (at least that’s how South Korea was positioning itself), several Japan distributors, and the list goes on; Michael Phillips has a more serious treatment of the marche than what you’re about to read here – with an added bonus that he talks to one of Chicago’s cinematic treasures, Milos Stehlik, http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0517-milos-stehlik-cannesmay17,0,6122775.story.


My initial thought – looking at the dozens, nay, hundreds of films that are completed, “in the can” and simply looking for distribution to pay back investors – is: You don’t EVER want to direct a feature length film.

There is an old saw that seeing how sausage is made will cure you of ever eating sausages, I have to say that seeing what completed films go through to get foreign distribution (i.e. seen!) I felt a queasiness in my stomach as I passed the fifth booth that had a choreographed Kung Fun fight scene on it. I thought: Here they’re selling Quarter Pounders, Royales with cheese, not those artsy-fartsy, character-driven investigations into existential questions of being. And even these are tough to move…. Oh, wait a sec… there’s StudioCanal! They’re pretty artsy-fartsy. Everyone is selling.

Just when you think your head is going to explode from all the backlit translates of movies I’ll probably never see, the writer in me takes a moment to peruse the copy:

A GUN FOR JENNIFER. The tagline on this poster was: “Dead Mean Don’t Rape.” At first, given some badly reversed type, I missed the “e” on the end of the last word and thought it a statement about music. Jennifer, a classical music scholar, has had it with cars booming bass beats on her quiet suburban street and takes out a vendetta on Rap music. But it turns out this movie is up to something else….

“A Gun For Jennifer combines ultraviolence and explicit feminism.”

Thank God it doesn’t combine explicit violence and ultrafeminism – I can’t watch that shit.

But the description goes on (as these descriptions often do) to work redundancy like a sticky wad of gum: “It is merciless action from a very feminist point of view….” Um: didn’t the earlier use of “ultrafeminism” cover it? Now you’ve got me worried.

And because someone heard you had to be able to summarize a film with one sentence that positions it among other films, it concludes: “It is Thelma and Louise crossed with Taxi Driver!.” (Yes, the exclamation point AND period are in the actual materials.)

Just imagine the dialog:

“You talkin’ to me?”

“Thelma! Of course, I’m talking to—“

“You talkin’ to me?”

“Yes! God! Thelma! Put the gun down.”

“Well, I’m the only one here and you must be talkin’ to me…” u.s.w.

If you thought that closing bit was just a wiseass German flourish… it’s actually a sneaky segway to the next feature we’ll be covering:

FINNISH TANGO. Don’t let the title fool you; this film was made in Germany. The film, in fact, is a “warm-hearted tragicomedy [which] unfolds without false melodramatic moments and pathos.”

The minute someone tells me there is not a single false, melodramatic moment OR pathos – I’m pretty certain there’s at least one.

This film is featured next to:

CALL GIRL.

I don’t know why – maybe it’s the capitalization – but the tagline is one of my favorites: “She is a Killer, so beautiful!” Almost haiku it is.

TANDOORI LOVE contained one of the most frustrating descriptions I’ve seen: “Tandoori Love is a spicy comedy with romance and a [sic] homage to Bollywood and Indian cuisine.” [For those of you with a weak stomach, brace yourselves….] “Slapstick and subtly caricatured figures are combined with profoundly human characters and the agonizingly existential and emotional decisions challenging them.”

a) If you lost the subject of that last sentence, you’re not alone; apparently these “figures are combined with” the “characters” and “the decisions challenging them.” (And those decisions are both “existential” and “emotional”, dammit.)
b) How in the hell, do you have “slapstick” and “subtlety” as two descriptors for the same strange word: Figures? Isn’t slapstick the very antithesis of subtlety? How does one DO subtle slapstick?
c) Any sentence with three or more adverbs should be pulled over and given a breathalyzer test. Immediately.

I will close our look at the Selections du Jour with two observations followed by my final, favorite selection:

a) ALL of the aforementioned films are from one flyer for one film company. Honest. Imagine this multiplied over dozens of booths where the hard work of entire film crews are reduced to these astonishingly bad pitches.
b) Any one of these films might actually be damn good, but the egregious descriptions would never let you know that.

Now, on to the winner…. I must admit to a completely juvenile fascination with both the title of the movie and the title’s relation to its description which is taken verbatim from the sell sheet. (Note to filmmakers: since this isn’t a comedy (or zombie movie), you guys may have a hard time marketing this in the U.S.)

COXLESS PAIR

Tagline: “Friends in Trouble!” (Enough with the Capitalizations and Exclamations!)

Description: “Jobst Oetzmann’s COXLESS PAIR is an intense drama about a very special and excessive friendship between two young rowers. They fanatically want to reach a level of being like twins to have the same rhythm in the boat, but at the same time they lose control about their friendship and their lives.”

I was just going to let this one go, but I have to ask:
a) “intense drama” as opposed to “lukewarm drama”?
b) For a moment, you might have been fooled that the existential reference to “a level of being” meant that this would be a French film – but when you add in a friendship that is both “excessive” and “fanatical” you know darn well, it’s gotta be German.
c) By the way, I don’t know what “very special” friendship means in Germany but I don’t think that means what you think it means in English….

Certainly the blood, sweat and tears of the cast and crew deserves some better copy, doesn’t it?

We're in!

A prevailing belief is that there has been some conspiracy on Wall Street to bilk people out of their money. If there was a conspiracy, it was an extremely broad, disorganized, decentralized, and, in some measure, inadvertent one. In other words, there was no conspiracy, unless that’s what you call the establishment of an oligarchy, over several generations and with the assistance of a blinkered populace.
The Death of Kings
Nick Paumgarten
New Yorker, 18 May 2009

Reading the major story in this week’s New Yorker was a sobering exercise on the flight from Chicago to Frankfurt. What exactly am I doing on a plane to Cannes in the midst of this economic ebbtide? Is there a bit of self delusion in this act?

Exactly one year ago, from the day I am on this flight, we were wrapping the shoot on Arc of a Bird. It had taken five days and gone surprisingly well – no tortuous 16 hours days as some had feared. And – at that time – no one was talking about banks melting like gelato dropped on the sidewalk of the Cote d’Azur, the number of foreclosures hadn’t reached critical mass in the collective social consciousness.

In some way, the trip I’m making is based on the work done a year ago… but I’m also telling myself this as a bit of self-delusion too.

On the connecting flight from Frankfurt from to Nice, I’m seated beside a man who has a grin from ear-to-ear. When he arrives at the row, he looks me straight in the face as if to say: “Don’t you recognize me?” then takes his seat, dons his iPod earphones and looks out the window. (Several times throughout the flight he will exit the aisle, apologizing with that broad grin and stopping by some friends two rows back.)

Fight attendants come down the aisle and ask everyone to turn off their electronic devices and my row companion complies. But as we begin to taxi down the runway, he begins singing.

Not loud, operatic singing, not even guy-who-doesn’t-realize-he’s-on-headphones singing (even those he is NOT on headphones now) – just a kind of heartfelt memory of a tune he doesn’t want to lose. I can’t place the language.

Arriving in Nice, I get my first glimpse of my first sign of excess…. The moment the doors to customs open and I wheel my suitcase out, I’m confronted by more handheld signs than I can recall. Here at the aeronautic nexus of Cannes, the drivers have arrived for the celebrities…. “Your sedan awaits, monsieur.” The global economic crisis is outside somewhere but we’re moving in air-conditioned vehicles to the festivities. (Me too.)

And as I pause to take it all in… my grinning flight companion crosses in front of me and walks up to the young woman holding the sign: Bahman Ghobadi.

You’ve guessed the punchline to this vignette but I’ll tell you anyway: Bahman Ghobadi is the world famous (to everyone but me) director whose film “No One Knows About The Persian Cats” is in the major festival competition. The film centers around the underground music scene in Teheran. No wonder he was listening constantly to music and singing a bit too.

I’m sure I could have asked SOME question of my row companion, I think, as I turn and head to the bus stop. (For anyone doing this in the future, it’s the 200 Bus, not the 99 Bus – that’s another story.)

So I arrive in Juan des Pins, 12 kilometers (they tell me, but I’m thinkin’ further) outside Cannes. The Producer has found a nice hotel for an incredible rate, so I have no problem paying the 1 Euro bus fare to take me down there after a quick shower.

My quick notes as I stumble my way around the complex of the Croisette….

1. Why doesn’t someone come up with a guidebook to this loopy system? Does it change every year so it’s impossible to keep up?

2. You may have a badge – but you probably don’t have THE badge to get through THAT door. I am rebuffed at a half dozen entrances, before I can even find the right one to get to my badge. And after you get to your badge? Bienvenue, monsier!

3. I don’t think that is a topless beach; I just think the 80-year old woman laying out in the sun has stopped caring what anyone thinks.

4. And there above the Croisette looms the penthouse suite of The Weinstein Company. You can tell coz they have a big sign that says: The Weinstein Company. (Isn’t it cooler if you have a penthouse and DON’T advertise it?)

5. Between the hours of 5 and 6 o’clock you notice a definite up-tick in tuxedos. Contrary to all the talk of fine dress, it is a phenomenon that happens when Dracula awakes – the cummerbund, the bowtie – Ah, night has fallen and I’m realizing I haven’t been to bed in almost two days.

No resentimiento

In spite of what this blog may imply, I haven’t been trying to overhype this trip – and I certainly never intended to tell the cab driver about it.

After asking me which airlines, I told him “Lufthansa”.

“Going to Europe?” I said I was.

“Business or pleasure.” A little of both, I said.

“Where too?” Once you mention Cannes, there’s no turning back….

Turns out the guy knows a guy who has been talking to him about turning his life into a movie. And for the next 30 minutes (at a speed that seemed to hover between 50 and 55 mph), he related the details of his life.

I won’t go into too much detail about his life – in deference to you the reader, but also in deference to him – just in case this story is real and the poor guy might be appalled to see it posted here before his screenwriter-director-friend gets to it.

But as the story goes, his father was the vice president of Argentina under Peron. (I know, I know… it’s one of those verifiable details I’ve been looking into.) Late one night, at the age of seven, he was awoken and with the rest of his family and forty-nine suitcases (his details are brilliant) was driven to the airport. After an eleven hour flight with multiple stops in countries, he and his family arrive in Miami.

And there in the airport, his father leaves his mother with the family and twenty dollars – and boards another plane to Bolivia. No, neither the seven-year old, his older brother nor the mother spoke English. The family stayed at the Miami airport for four days as customs officials tried to figure out what to do with them.

I will spare you the rest of the story – and protect any future script that may come of it – save to say that at one point in the story (remember we’re at sub-55 mph speeds on the Kennedy Expressway, so we’ve got time.), he talked about one of his mother’s final wishes is that if his father ever tries to get in contact with him, he should agree to talk to him. “No hard feelings,” she said.

She does, sadly, pass and former dad (the cab driver no longer considers himself the man’s son) does indeed call. (There’s a subplot here with the older brother, private investigators and a sum of money the man refuses, but you’ll have to wait for the movie for that.) Turns out that dad is now dying and wants to see his son.

Honoring his mother’s word, he agrees to visit the father – but insists that all payments are his own. He doesn’t even tell his father that he is coming and hires a tour guide who lives outside the South American town to take him where he needs to go.

In the course of their subsequent conversation, his father makes the same request of him: “No hard feelings.” He tells his former father that he can “forgive but never forget” which apparently is some solace for all involved because he ends up staying at the house for three days. (More of an estate than a house really, for in addition to whatever money the man absconded with before he left his wife and children at the Miami airport, he had, according to the driver, been involved in some “bad business” and tried to leave $150,000 to his son.)

When the story was done, as we pulled up to the Lufthansa terminal, I was intrigued by that turn of phrase: “no hard feelings.”

How would you say that in Spanish? I asked him.

“No resentimiento,” he said. “No hard feelings.”

As I sat in line waiting to remove my shoes and pass my belongings through airport security, I thought about that half hour story and the storyteller: is that story something he’s told any number of other fares? Or does the idea of “making a movie” cause him to dim the lights and start describing his own movie?

Getting Started

For the next few days, I’ll be posting blogs on my trip to Cannes where my film “Arc of a Bird” is in the Short Film Pavilion. (For those who don’t know, “Arc” is an 11-minute film that received a Production Fund Grant from the Independent Film Producers in Chicago. Since its premiere in November 2008, we’ve been in roughly ten film festivals and won four awards.) This is my starter entry (of the blog) before I hope on a plane, so some preliminary thoughts/reflections may be in order; and if they’re not, check back on Thursday after I land….

For most folks, I suppose it’s not all that important to know that Chicago is the Algonquin word for “stinky onion” or that “Detroit” means “a strait or river” as in le détroit du Lac Érie – but I’ve been curious about Cannes for a couple of reasons, probably the most pressing being I’m still not sure how to pronounce it. Good friends who’ve had enough French to know tell me it’s “Kahn” but inogolo.com which specializes in such things tells me (I mean, literally tells me) it’s “can” – as does the “Festival Virgin’s Guide” at www.cannesguide.com/festival/. So, if anyone has irrefutable proof beyond these, let me know.

The only reason this seems like a big deal to me is that I’ve been saying it with the more pretentious “ahhhhh” for years now and pronouncing it with the nasal Midwestern “can” feels like I’m intentionally mis-pronouncing it!

In terms of history it seems that before they began the film festival, Cannes was your basic sleepy little Mediterranean fishing village – the most excitement coming in the Dark Ages, around the 10^th century, when Saracens decided to invade. Right around that time the city became known as Canua which, according to uncomfirmed sources, is derived from canna, the Latin word for “reed”. Monks who were under attack fled island monasteries; they constructed a castle for protection in what by then was called “Cannes”. Fast forward 10 centuries… (I’m cribbing most of this from Wikipedia, so feel free to jump ahead to “So what”…)

Turns out the British and Americans were big supporters of starting a film festival in the south of France. Filmmakers had been complaining for years about the influence exerted by the Fascist Italian and German governments over what was THEN the biggest international festival in Venice (in 1932). But plans for a Cannes Festival were put on hold in 1939 when the Germans decided to try the Saracen approach of world domination and invaded Poland on September 1 of that year.

Flash forward to 1946 where the first Canne Film Festival was held in the old Casino. The venue was moved to the Palais des Festivals in 1947; unfortunately, the roof was unfinished and blew away in a storm. The 1948 and 1950 festivals were cancelled due to financial problems.

So what? So who cares about some Frenchie film festival which doesn’t get aired on any major network and has never had Johnny Carson, Whoopi Goldberg or Jon Stewart host it – much less Wolverine sing and dance at it? Isn’t this just artsy-fartsy nonsense?

I don’t know if I knew Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver had won the Palme D’Or back in 1976. The first film that definitely sticks in my mind as being awarded this international prize was Wim Wenders’ and Sam Shepard’s Paris, Texas in 1984. Everything about that film – the soundtrack, Shepard’s dialog and story, the cinematography, and performances by Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell and Nastassja Kinski – knocked me out. It was really the first time I recall associating the golden palms in the movie poster with the kind of film it was. Although I’ve probably seen it a half dozen times since then, I wonder if the film would have ever gotten the distribution it did, if I ever would have seen it at all in a theater (I has seen Wenders’ films on college campus but not in a mainstream movie theater.)

Knowing that The Mission, Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, Barton Fink, Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Pulp Fiction have all won awards there (but none for Best Picture at the Academy Awards) I’m not sure what to say about any common thread among them, anymore than you can really make sweeping generalizations about the Academy Awards.

Arc of a Bird may not be in the formal competition, but since it IS in the Short Films Pavilion (more on this later), and since The Producer and I have an opportunity to be there in a year where Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar and others are premiering their films I’m excited to be going. I cashed in all my membership reward points to get the ticket to Nice and will be leaving at 3 PM today. More later.