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Jane Clark - Cannes JournalDay Two This is what makes Cannes a wholly unique film market. You can be anyone, at any stage of the game and there is a place on the Cannes chessboard for you. Yesterday afternoon I met a film student, Tyler, working at the American Pavillion. The place is staffed by kids who pay about $3000 to serve the members food and drink. Tyler is the coffee guy – a good position to have. Who doesn’t need loads of coffee at a film festival? He wants to produce, and maybe also write about film. He introduced himself and I gave him some suggestions that might help him find a project to produce. Then I introduced him to my friend James Rocchi, who is a film critic for CBS 5 and who was more than happy to espouse on the films he had seen. Then my husband joined us and discussed writing about film. In 15 minutes Tyler had gotten a little more knowledge and hopefully some helpful advice. Tyler was in the game. After leaving Tyler we hit a party for a small film company based in Paris – an example of the next level – producer’s with projects trying to get their (in many cases, first) film made. An hour into that we extracted ourselves and ran for a party thrown by Odd Lot Productions - another step up the food chain. They were celebrating a deal with Lionsgate, to produce a film based on a Frank Miller (Sin City) comic book to be directed by Frank. We arrived in time for an executive’s speech and the room was HOT! As was the white wine. To make matters worse, after the executive, Frank Miller got up to talk and talk and talk and talk about things like his desire to use color as a weapon and how inspired he was by Robert Rodriquez. No offense Frank, but no one cares about your use of color in the movie you haven’t made yet. Save it for the finished film. There was little time to spare as we ran up to the Olympia for a private screening of “11th Hour” - the new Leo DiCaprio documentary. No it’s not a film about Leo, he just narrates it. It’s on Global warming and the destruction of our environment through over fishing, over logging, over population, over etc. After hammering you with the dire future, they unfortunately don’t spend much time telling you how to do your part to fix it. The music is heavy-handed, manipulative and annoying. It is very US centric, meaning US bad culprit of global environmental annihilation, rest of the world barely mentioned (I mean come on. Can anyone say China?) And lastly, they show a man clubbing a seal. I for one don’t need to see that. We opted to keep the night low key and headed for a sushi joint we found earlier in the evening. We dined on terrible French sushi, and were paying the check when Jeff Gilmore, supreme leader of the Sundance Film Festival Universe came in. We stopped and chatted briefly – well Bob chatted, I grinned and nodded for the most part. And so it goes, from the smallest player on the chess board to a man capable of making an indie filmmaker’s dreams come true, everyone is here. In the same town, doing basically the same thing. It’s a beautiful thing. Jane Clark 323/654-0115 W
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