Prepping For Cannes
God, this makes my head hurt.
I guess it would be more fun to shoot from the hip if it wasn’t so damned expensive. But I am beginning to count up the friendlies who are able to offer me suggestions. And I finally got to dig into the press package of utterly unfamiliar publicists (and a couple very familiar ones) today. So at least it feels like I am getting stabilized. Even ordered a sim card for the cracked iPhone 4. And because I’ve heard that some people like to complain, I’m bringing my own mi-fi!
After Cannes, it’s Seattle, then LAFF, then Edinburgh. Full summer.
Hoping for a joyous experience… though I have a bad feeling that I’ll hear a lot of, “We’ll get it done in L.A.”
At the risk of sounding presumptuous — or, if you prefer, condescending — find someone you trust and ask him/her to walk you through the festival for the first day or so. Seriously: That is what the late, great Sid Adilman did for me the first year I attended Cannes. The dear man literally walked me up and down La Croisette, introducing me to the publicists I absolutely needed to know, where I could get a good & cheap lunch quickly, where the market screenings were being held, how to maneuver through the main fest HQ –in short, everything. I passed this gesture on years later to a couple people — but I doubt I did it as well as Sid, a great friend I miss very much.
Also: Yes, you will get a lot of “We’ll do the interview later in the States.” (Things likely have changed during the many years since I attended, but the emphasis used to be meeting and greeting international press.) This often was very frustrating for me — and wound up being the main reason why The Houston Post stopped sending me to Cannes. (To be more precise, I was asked to choose between Cannes and Toronto — a no-brainer.) If you haven’t read them already, there are two great albeit somewhat dated books about the Cannes experience you might want to check out: Roger Ebert’s “Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook” and Henri Behar and Cari Beauchamp’s “Hollywood on the Riviera.”
Anyone else with other suggestions?