Festival de Cannes DIARY : Day Eight

Tuesday May 17, 2005

I woke late the next morning to the ringing of my EP’s cell phone. After a few rings I dragged myself out of bed and realized I was alone in the apartment. Where the fuck was he without his phone?

Again?!

By the time I got back to the phone it had long gone to voicemail, and I debated whether or not to listen to it. It wasn’t my phone, and as a rule nobody answers anyone else’s mobile. But what if it was about the show? He was the Executive Producer after all. I needed to know what that message said. I pushed the little envelope button and waited. Relief! It was his sister wanting to know how everything was going. I sat on the couch and took a minute to think. It was beyond obvious this was on purpose. He was telling everyone [even his family] to leave him alone!

This worried me to no end – with so much on the line with this production, why on earth would he want to miss anything? I instinctively understood what kind of “producer” he was. In fact, he didn’t want to produce anything at all, he was more than happy to simply come up with ideas for shows and put together deals for those shows, but he was not at all interested in, or most importantly, he was not capable of seeing a production through to fruition. At best he was an agent, and we needed more. We deserved more.

I sat frozen in thought and could hear that jazz band playing live music down on the Croisette. It echoed loudly in the empty apartment. How the fuck was I supposed to remedy this situation? Everyone above me continued to exert the power their position granted them whether or not it ended up being good for the show. What should I do? The jazz band somehow got louder, and they were killing the song they were playing. Killing it…

The apartment phone rang. It was one of those old phones with a horrible clangy ring – you would jump to answer it just to stop that awful sound because it sounded like a hangover. It was one of my producers, who decided it was time for us to finally have drinks. Though many people on the production didn’t understand how he was actually useful, he really had an ability to feel energy and it would be the first time we would hang alone since I met him. Thank god, because I needed to talk to him.

The phone rang again, this time with questions from our director. He had already given up trying our EP after days of not getting him. Ouch. And YIKES. We basically had the next four days free without an event for our host (except an inconsequential one) and he needed parameters. He wanted to shoot some B-roll of the festival and what was going on in the city and also wanted to get fantastic location shots of the Riviera in general. I tried to think of how I could get in contact with the EP to ask him if this was OK, but I literally had his mobile in my hand and the clock was ticking – the crew needed to get going NOW, there was only so much available light in each day. I took a deep breath and gave him the OK to give our camera operators some much-deserved freedom to shoot some b-roll as long as they got what he needed first. What else were they supposed to do, sit on their thumbs? He was thankful for the freedom and I was thankful that he trusted me enough to listen to me.

I talked to my producer guardedly about what was going on, and neither of us had a solution. Was there a solution? It’s not like we could get our EP on the phone even if we had to. The best we could do was pick-up our EP’s slack without freaking out our crew, but this could only go so far.

As the producer and I walked down the Croisette, he stopped in front of a sunglass store and said to me “Now let’s get you some new sunglasses.” I just looked at him, dumbfounded. Worst of all, I really could have cried – it was that important to me. We looked and looked [Bless that man for his patience. Unfortunately for him, he will make an amazing husband for some woman sometime]. After many pairs, I finally found an amazing pair of YSL’s that I loved, but I still felt like I was cheating on my old pair. Oh well. The best thing about the new glasses was that they were much more in tune with the energy of the festival. They were flashier, yes, but they were also more elegant. I had changed in the previous month. I was much more aware and more ready to act on that awareness even when it was difficult. I even grew up a lot in the previous week. I had to.

We continued our pub crawl and ended up at a little out of the way bar and grill [what is this, 1988?] off the Croisette. We heard the music from outside and they were playing house music. At a bar and grill… It was past time for dinner so we went in and found out that this place might have been THE secret place in Cannes. A place where anyone could go and it’d be cool. Some people were in shorts while others were in black tie and gowns, yet it felt right. After a couple of rounds, the producer and I began to work the room. It sounds so cheesy, but sometimes there really isn’t a better description than that. We met a couple of women who worked in distribution and they bought us shots. Now, that’s game!

I had been thinking a lot about what we were doing in Cannes shooting a show in hopes to be purchased as a television show. I knew that our show was good and deserved to be on television, but I had recently admitted to myself that I had never heard of a show like ours that had shot it’s own pilot independently and gotten picked up as a series. Never. I was beginning to think we very well might need much more exposure than we had received to sell our show. I took a leap and decided to tell the shot-buying women my nascent idea. I gave them the background info and told them that we were there shooting our show as an idea for television. But then I asked them; what if we used all the footage we had gotten so far to make a feature documentary? Because the doc we were were shooting would be undeniably good, and would definitely be picked up by festivals. Then we could market the show as something that started from “That Hit Documentary That Was Incredibly Inspiring/Fun/Appropriately Trashy.” That idea was something that had not been done before, and our audience would pick up on that fact immediately without any judgmental baggage. The two ladies were dumbfounded. I asked them what they thought about this idea and they immediately said it was genius – the way it was innovative would command attention and money and best of all, it had not been done before. They thought it was the surest bet they had seen in Cannes so far and then they both handed me their cards and told me to contact them!

Now, I understand very well that they were drunk [they bought us shots, remember] and I didn’t expect them to ever get back to me or even remember me once I emailed them but I did know three things: these women were good at their jobs [so good, they got to go to Cannes] and because of the drinks, they would not lie about their opinions. A lot of people would assume that they would just be accommodating or even lie, but what I have learned is when people are drunk they rarely make up things, most likely they overreact to the truth.

And now, I bet you want to know if we took them home. Now don’t you...?

Go straight to DAY NINE

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