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.