Part 65
Why did I decide to write a separate blog for my last visit to France? For two reasons: firstly, there wasn’t enough space on the previous blog, but more importantly, because visiting Cannes for the Film Festival was like a visit to the United States superimposed over this delightful French city. Fortunately, little pieces of the real Cannes managed to peep out from under the brassy hyper-illusional, celluloid, now mostly digital, facade of “Hollywood meets the Cote d’aAzur.”
Eric Karson, a veteran Hollywood producer/director with whom I have had a close alliance for many years attempting to finance and produce various movies and television series, invited me to join him at Cannes. The intention was to increase my knowledge and awareness of the sales, marketing and distribution side of the movie business. Eric, apart from having produced and directed seven highly successful and profitable movies, also spent some years in sales and distribution. Up until 2018, Eric would attend the festival every two years, representing the American Cinema Group (ACG), negotiating sales of films from their extensive library. Thereafter, Eric sold the entire library to MGM, freeing him up to devote more time to production matters, which includes three features and two television series I have written for the international market.
So, I flew to Nice and, as instructed by Eric, took a bus to Cannes, where it would take me to the beachfront close to the festival areas. He knew the time I would arrive and promised that he and his wife Tara would meet me and take me to a nearby restaurant for a sumptuous dinner. The bus duly meandered down to the beachfront and eventually stopped. It was the end of the line, so all the passengers got off. It was about 9:30 p.m. at night and the whole area was still buzzing.
I looked around expectantly but no sign of Eric or Tara. I took out my phone and tried calling him, but my phone was blocked. My technophobia doesn’t simply extend to computing; it encompasses all things electrical, digital and even vaguely technical. So, there I was in a strange city with no one to meet me and with very limited funds. I waited until the next bus arrived some twenty minutes later in the hope that Eric had gotten the timing wrong. Still no result. I then managed to get the attention of a friendly-looking young man who looked to be French. I explained my predicament and asked if could call Eric on his phone. He immediately agreed, so I gave him Eric’s number hoping that he would at least have his phone cleared for use in France.
The phone rang and rang. No response. I thanked the chap profusely, using a phrase “Merci mille fois” (thank you a thousand times), which probably went out of date fifty years ago. He looked bemused, noted my white hair and beard and nodded, no doubt writing me off as a relic of the past.
So, what did I do now? Fortunately, the weather was fine and still warm. I could see at least ten restaurants within easy walking distance of the bus stop. I walked over to a couple of them, hoping to see the Karsons. No such luck.
I then had another idea. Somewhere on my laptop I had the address where Eric and Tara were staying. I sat down on a nearby bench, opened up the laptop and found the address.
Arriving at the street, the cabbie made a few futile attempts to find the number of the house without success, finally gave up and left me there. Now I was half a mile from where I should have met Eric, standing on a deserted street with absolutely no idea of what to do next. After a few minutes of walking around and looking in vain for the house number I had written down, I began to wonder whether I should perhaps throw myself on the mercy of the police as I had done so many years before when hitchhiking through Europe, ending up in a Munich jail cell for the night. Not to be recommended.
For a while, no one came down the street until an attractive young woman finally wandered towards me. She spoke a little English, and that combined with the remnants of my long-forgotten French, allowed me to explain that I was looking for a house number that did not appear anywhere in the street I had as Eric’s address. She thought about it and then said that the street was actually divided into two parts. She led me up some steps and voilà (not to be confused with viola, as some Anglos do), I quickly found the number of the house. I thanked her and she went on to meet her boyfriend.
Now I had a house number and a front doorbell. There were no lights on in the house. More in hope than in anger I pressed the bell and heard it give a long and lonely peel, in a deserted establishment. My next thought was to leave a note for Eric and Tara, assuming that they would eventually return from the beachfront but then what to do with myself? So, I decided that my only option was to sit on the steps leading to the front door and wait for them to come home. I did so and, while waiting, I pulled out my phone and checked for any texts or messages. I immediately found a frantic text from my wife Hero. “Where are you? Eric says you never arrived. Call me urgently.”
Great. My phone was still blocked, and I had visions of Eric scouring the beachfront for me until all hours; so, I took out a pen and my usual examination pad and started writing. This is always my cure-all for desperation and the hope that some friendly fairy would appear, like Tinkerbell and lead me to safety – wherever that was!
The fairy duly appeared in the form of a concerned-looking lady walking her dog. She asked me if everything was alright, having established that I was English. I promptly gave her my tale of woe. She shook her head sadly and said, “I live a few houses away. Leave your friends a note and come with me. I’ll make some coffee.” Don’t know about Tinkerbell but she was certainly an angel of mercy to whom I said merci over and over.
Not only did she make some coffee but supplied a few delicious snacks and then offered me the use of her phone. I frantically phoned Hero who was enormously relieved to hear that I had not taken a plane to Spain by mistake.
From there things suddenly improved. I tried calling Eric again and finally got through. He was equally relieved and said that they would be back at the house in twenty minutes. I asked him why he had not met the bus. He replied that, after waiting a while at the bus stop, they made enquiries and found that in the delightfully French manner, the last two buses from Nice stopped at a different location a couple of hundred yards away from the one they had been told was the terminal.
I finally met them outside the house and was embarrassed by their insistence that we return to the beachfront for me to have a late dinner. By the way, a few days later I walked halfway across the city to buy a bunch of flowers for my angel of mercy. It started pouring rain on the way back, so I arrived dripping wet on her doorstep, with a wilted and sodden mush of flowers. We laughed and agreed that it was the thought that counted.
Oh yes, the festival. Interesting, but not very productive from my point of view. The spectacular razzmatazz of new movies being screened takes place in one area, but the sales and marketing takes place in offices and hotel rooms all over the place. The closest I got to a meaningful contact for my most important movie screenplay was an Australian producer who offered to finance my picture “UBUNTU: The Last Warrior,” with conditions. It is set in the African bush and involves two teenage boys lost in the veld, who are befriended by a Zulu warrior. He is suffering from a head injury which causes him to believe he is the leader of an Impi (regiment) at the time of the great king Shaka Zulu in the 1800s. He thinks the boys are the remains of his Impi after a great battle and keeps them while the families of the boys frantically try to track him down. The Aussie producer had just done a big deal with China and, providing that we recast all the Caucasians (the family of one boy, the other family’s boy is a Zulu) with Chinese actors, we would have a deal! This was absurd. The movie may have become a hit in China but would have little appeal elsewhere in the world.
Eric and Tara enjoyed the more American-oriented restaurants which provided very un-French cuisine, but I did manage to sneak up the hill once or twice for some truly French gastronomie. The logic of bringing people from all over the world to a French city for a quasi-American experience escapes me. I’d rather visit Hollywood with its own unique but fascinating madness. In the same way, I’d rather have a computing system like ExoTech to experience the real thing, with real facts and real data and none of the fantasies of fake news.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.