Flogging "Mel" at Cannes (The adventures of a first-time screenwriter at the French film festival)
PLUS: Cannes Do’s and Don’ts
By Nina Galen

Each time I’d tell folks I was going to the Cannes Film Festival, their faces would light up and they’d say, "You must be thrilled." And each time I’d plumb my depths to see if any thrill was there. It wasn’t. Writing the screenplay had been the greatest high, but trying to sell something one has written seemed to me the greatest humiliation an author could face. "Get an agent," you say? ICM? William Morris? Sure.

Of course, it would be neat to return to Southern France. I used to live about a half hour’s drive from Cannes and still had friends in the countryside. In fact, the only reason I was able to attend the Festival at all was because two of these friends were lending me their pied-à-terre in Nice for the duration, with only a 40-minute train ride door to door. There would also be a car at my disposal – a tiny, very lively Fiat Panda – small enough to need only one normally-configured windshield wiper.

But on the day of my arrival, Saturday, May 12, after I’d been introduced to the keys, the building security systems, the weird, labyrinthine garage, etc., etc., and was lunching with them in the flat, my friends suddenly decided not to give me the Nice apartment. No, they would give me instead the one they were just now buying in Cannes. So we downloaded my bags, drove to Cannes, and a short time later I was installed in their small, furnished, pied-à-terre-to-be, just a couple hundred meters from the Palais des Festivals itself!

About four o’clock that afternoon I found myself on the crowded Croisette – Cannes’ seaside promenade – knowing that despite my gaudy sandwich boards (just joking – almost) I was as invisible – as unremarkable – as any one of the thousands of curious tourists thronging the sidewalk. Obviously only the Very Smug – those people striding by with badges hanging around their necks and the "right" shoulder bag on their shoulders – had a right to feel they "belonged."

Flashback.

I had finished my screenplay, "The Gospel* According to Mel," on January 1, 2001. After sending in my copyright application, and registering it with WGAE, my webmaster friend and I built a website – www.melsgospel.com – through which I hoped to attract money and talent. We put the entire script, plus a treatment, on the "Melsite" for anyone to read or download. To bring attention to the site I put classified ads in Variety. I got a lot of hits, but since Variety had mistakenly run the ad as a casting call, most of the email I got was from actors, not studio heads or billionaires. (See the Melsite.) I also put a script synopsis and bio on the website www.scripteaser.com.

After I’d purchased my non-refundable JFK/Nice air ticket, it began to sink in that I was actually going to the Festival. I spent days haunting Gap and Banana Republic. My intention wasn’t to try to compete with the famous and aspiring in their mini-skirts and spike heels; I wanted just enough clothes to last through the festival without needing to wash any. (My memory of French laundromats was not a happy one.) So I bought stretch jeans, jeans jackets, assorted tops, Old Navy flip-flops, and a pair of very comfortable black leather sandals. Little did I know that this wardrobe – minus any E-cup-size bras – would turn out to be the Cannes "uniform." (See the Melsite for pictures of all the wonders mentioned in this article.)

How did I plan to let the Cannes-ites know about "Mel"? Well, next we designed some "Mel" cards – business cards double the usual size, meant to be folded over and sit up like place-set cards. (There are a few hundred left over and some day, when "Mel" is produced and wins its Golden Globes and Oscars, I plan to sell them on eBay for five bucks each.) On the outside of the card, front and rear, we put the "Mel" logo and contact information; on the inside was a brief pitch. I also had the logo screened onto the backs of two jeans jackets and the fronts of two tops. For good measure, in case it rained (it had been raining pretty steadily in Cannes the weeks before the event), I had the logo screened onto an umbrella. (See the Melsite.)

Luckily, the weather was perfect throughout the Festival, but I did get to use the umbrella the day after when the sky opened and rain fell. I spent the last two days of the festival, and a couple more, gunning the Panda around winding country roads, visiting old friends and my former French farmhouses where tiny trees I’d planted years ago now brushed the clouds.

One noon I ate at the gliding airfield at Fayence, where I’d learn to fly. The old canteen, which once rang with the voices of young French glider pilots and old former Luftwaffe pilots still stands, but is closed and shabby-looking today. Now I ate yummy lamb stew and drank a carafe of red, sitting on a pleasant restaurant terrace with extreme gliders parked on the grass nearby.

Later, while visiting our former airclub secretary (ret.), her sister and brother-in-law stopped by. Sporting Festival badges, they were off to Cannes to see some films. Huh? They had nothing to do with the film industry. No matter. Seems they knew someone who knew the mayor of their village (!) Hearing them gloat, I had the impression that any villager in the south of France who’d wanted one, had easily obtained a Festival badge through local connections. (d’Oh!)

Back to the Croisette.

So there I was, feeling as noticeable as a deer in the headlights, i.e. unaccredited, badgeless, and wearing the "wrong" shoulder bag. Sans badge I couldn’t get in anywhere, especially not the Palais des Festivals. I was so "out" I went around for two days asking locals, gendarmes, and Festival goers in vain where the "Riviera Hotel" was. According to the literature, a lot of production companies were to be found in the Riviera. Finally I learned, to my chagrin, that the Riviera was what they called the rabbit warren of tiny offices inside the Palais. Fuggum.

On that first Saturday afternoon, plunged in despair – drowning in a veritable sea of anonymity – I decided to go to the Carlton Hotel and see whom I could see in the offices set up there. A young guard outside seemed intent on not letting anyone into the Carlton who wore the wrong shoulder bag, but, being fluent and somewhat invincible in French, I sowed seeds of doubt and fear in his mind and was passed from him to another to another, until finally another person was busy on the telephone and I walked right by him to the elevators.

There were a lot of big production companies located in the Carlton. Armed with "Mel" cards and wearing my pale blue jeans jacket with understated white logo, I visited as many as I could find. Surprise! Flogging "Mel" wasn’t the humiliation I’d feared. For one thing, I discovered I loved telling people about the screenplay, and they made like they were deeply absorbed in the plot I was pitching: "Mel," the un-"Gladiator" movie – everything "Gladiator" wasn’t, and much, much more! The story was about Mel, an orphan-teenage-Jewish (but in denial) arena-cleaner in ancient Rome, and the wounded African crocodile with whom he bonds – and names "Crocchus." (The part of Crocchus is a non-speaking but challenging role played [in my dreams] by Eddie Murphy or Wesley Snipes wearing a slim, green, body costume.) Mel enrolls his new friend in gladiator school and soon Crocchus becomes the greatest of them all – the darling of Rome. (Eat your heart out, Russell Crowe.)

At first I was a tad nervous about bad-mouthing "Gladiator," which after all a lot of these people must have liked. It was interesting to find that of two nearly identical young women in one office, one had loved "Gladiator," the other had hated it. Predictably, one liked my "Mel" story, took a "Mel" card, creased it on the fold rather defiantly, and set it on her desk. The other looked at her strangely, probably wondering why she hadn’t known earlier that her associate had hated "Gladiator." I tip-toed out.

Inside one door, instead of being greeted by someone’s assistant or a few young, starry-eyed studio executives, I found a man seated rather formidably in an armchair. This intense American, thirty-nine-ish, dressed in a dark suit and exuding Y chromosomes from every pore, asked me what I wanted. I told him I was flogging a screenplay. He asked what it was about. I pitched the story to him. He gave me his card and told me to send him the script. I said I would, and went out.

In the hall I read the card. Seems he was the chairman of one of those entertainment/production companies whose advertising billboards blotted out whole parts of the Carlton Hotel. (See the Melsite.)

If there was one thing I’d always heard, it’s that you can’t just mail your script to a motion picture studio. Unless sent by an agent, it is immediately rejected – unopened and unread. With that in mind, the following Wednesday I wandered back into that same office. There was the same chairman seated in the same chair. To my amazement he recognized me immediately and asked if I was going to send him the script. I told him I feared it wouldn’t be accepted. His reply: "I gave you my card. Send the script to me at the address on the card. I’ll accept it."

Genuflecting involuntarily, I whispered "Okay," wandered out, and floated down the hall like a cloud of golden daffodils.

Cannes has its good moments and its bad moments. That was a very good one, morale-wise. Still, even as I write this, the script may be in the mail, heading back to mama.

By Monday I’d learned enough about Cannes and the festival to create a daily "routine" for myself. Up in the morning, select the "Mel"-logo-of-the-day top or jacket to wear, patch the feet with moleskin, then down to the Majestic Hotel. There in the lobby was a table bearing piles of daily Varieties, Hollywood Reporters, and other slick Festival-friendly magazines – free for anyone to take. I’d carry off a weighty trove directly to some sidewalk café, order café-au-lait and a croissant, and read the latest.

After Variety screwed up the placement of my "Mel" ad, they’d made up for it by sending me an invitation to their Monday, May 14th cocktail bash to be held at their pavilion. We lucky chosen ones were to meet 10 upcoming producers. Five showed; five were off working feverishly on their productions in case everyone in Hollywood decided to go on strike. I had a lovely time, wore a long, matching Banana Republic skirt and top that were not particularly unbecoming, and wrinkle-free to boot (see the Melsite), and drank a few of the simply awful little glasses of vodka with something pink in them that they were serving. They soon ran out of the pink, so the vodka drinkers among us switched to the really rough straight stuff. As there was nothing to eat, I was soon pitching "Mel" with a certain abandon to anyone who cared to listen, which included all the vodka drinkers.

Aside from this extremely pleasant interlude by the waters of the Med, the invite had given me the right for one entire day to wear a badge and get into anything anywhere. I headed right upstairs into the Riviera, of course, but soon found that the production companies there were independents with budgets under $10 million. As "Mel" would take several times that to produce, I was advised to go after the big studios and production companies with offices in the hotels, which is what I’d been doing up till then, and did thereafter.

For Americans, a nice place to visit was the American Pavilion where one would find coffee, stuff to eat, free online computers (!!!), day-old L.A. Times’s (available after 3pm), and tables by the sea where one could sit and rest one’s moleskin. I visited it on the Day of the Badge, but the next day the guards stopped me at the gate. No problemo; I schmoozed the lot into submission in less than five minutes and thereafter they waved me through like friendly robots. ("How’s your bum knee, Mario? Sell the screenplay yet, Iaqinta?")

Badge Day brought other results: I was given tickets to a couple of films. Not wanting to spend the day looking at movies – I was there to flog "Mel," not be bored or grossed-out to death – I did go into two screening rooms just long enough to see the short subject preceding the film, and the first minutes of the film. Waiting for the afternoon feature to begin, I started chatting with an elderly Frenchman in the next seat. Seeing my day badge, he begged me to do him a favor. Seems his granddaughter absolutely had to have one of the blue TF1 shoulder bags that he insisted I could get for free if I would just go to the TF1 stand inside the Palais. (N.B. The schmoozer was being royally schmoozed.)

I dreaded the thought of going back into the rabbit-warren atmosphere of the Riviera, and doubted anyone there would give me a gorgeous, roomy, pocket-studded, free shoulder bag. But the Italian film we were starting to watch ("Almost Blue") – coming right after a short film involving a novice fork lift operator and a chain saw (a side-splitter in more ways than one) – turned out to be about a gay serial killer who did things like remove his victims’ nipples. Five minutes into the film (detained that long because I’d dropped my reading glasses on the floor and couldn’t easily find them), and almost green, I fled the hall with the old gent on my heels.

We went to the Palais and he waited outside while I found my way to the TF1 booth. The French receptionist informed me that my day badge wasn’t the kind one needed to qualify for a bag, and that anyway they had no bags there – they were giving them out downstairs. I told her in French about the old man and his granddaughter, and she said she’d write a note on a card for me to take downstairs. I suggested she give me a note for two bags, in case they balked but would settle for giving me only one.

"So, how many do you want?" she asked, pen poised over card.

"Deux."

Obligingly, she wrote a note on the card asking them to give me two bags. I went downstairs, but approached the wrong counter and was given two wine-colored shoulder bags that were the official Festival shoulder bags. They were loaded with about 5 pounds of Festival literature each, and it was plain that, dumped out, either would be perfect for my morning foragings in the Majestic lobby. I staggered back outside with these on my shoulder, happy I hadn’t said "Trois."

The old man shook his head. "Mais, non," he clucked, "this is not the right bag. You’ll have to go back."

So I staggered back in, found the right counter, and, holding these bags down out of sight, handed over the magic card. They gave me two shiny blue TF1 bags, each filled with about ten pounds of literature, including the priceless Festival "Guide." (See the Melsite.) I staggered back outside and gave one of the blue bags to the old man, expecting to see him collapse under its weight. But he didn’t seem affected, thanked me warmly, and told me that his son was a pharmacist and that if I needed any medicines, I should see him.

As a matter of fact I did need to get some over-the-counter French pills for an American friend suffering from bad gums, plus, for myself, some date-rape-cum-sleeping-pill pills (popular at Cannes among the American yacht-party crowd) that normally one cannot get in France without a prescription. I didn’t have a prescription, but the dutiful son sold me the pills anyway.

French should be the universal language. I’ve always found that much good flows from being fluent in it.

On another day, a VP cum Acquisitions guy at another large entertainment company listened to my pitch and asked me to send him a "Mel" script. (If I don’t mention names here, it’s because I feel it might be bad luck, plus it’s none of your business. Plus I think he’s turning out to be an asshole and this whole thing is a runaround.) He told me to send it through an agent or a lawyer to a certain person in their New York office. Fair enough. I do have a lawyer, albeit not an entertainment lawyer, but back in New York I was informed that just any old lawyer wouldn’t do. So then I asked if my literary agent – the one who’d handled some of my novels – could send them the script. They said yes and told me to have her call them, which I did. (These events occurred a few days ago and at this writing everything is in a complete and probably hopeless muddle, but I’ll keep y’all updated on the Melsite.)

While going about Cannes I not only handed out my "Mel" cards, and a few one-page plot synopses, but took away some business cards that Acquisitions people had given me. Back now at home I’ve been following up on the few that seem the more promising. Given that "Mel" will take tens of millions of dollars to produce, my options and expectations are limited.

But what the heck? The thrill was writing the screenplay. Cannes was icing on the cake. And, if everything should fall through? Well, there’s always those French prescription pills.

One thing I promise, whichever way it goes for "Mel" and me, you can find out sooner or later on www.melsgospel.com. 

And maybe in Variety.

Don’t fret if it takes longer to reach, say, the sixth floor in a Cannes hotel elevator than it does in, say, a Waldorf Astoria elevator. This is because French elevators start at zero or R/C. If you decide to walk up to the second floor, it will be two flights.

Don’t fear going to the powder room in those big Cannes hotels located on the Croisette. Some guy came through a while back and talked them all into replacing their squat toilets with a toilet-seat system where you press one button and the seat comes down with paper on it; press another button and it flushes and the seat goes up. If the seat has run out of paper, the mechanism will not look inviting to sit on, so go to the next stall.

When faced, in one of these hotels, with a dozen razor-thin arrows pointing variously right and left to room numbers or names of film companies, do correctly note which way the arrow is pointing to the place you want to go. Otherwise you will walk and walk and walk, and three days later someone will trip over your bones.

If you are lucky enough to find the office of a company where the Acquisitions person loves your pitch, do remember to ask for his or her card. After you walk out, that office will disappear in a hundred-year mist, like Brigadoon.

Don’t become cavalier about "Poussez" and "Tirez." You can not pull open a door labeled "Poussez."

Don’t order the 65F fixed-price menu in a Cannes restaurant. Every course will be lousy. If you order wine, even a carafe of table wine, do make sure the waitress knows exactly the sort of wine you are asking for, and that your conversation is overheard by diners at nearby tables. It is a very old trick for them to bill you for a more expensive wine than the one you ordered.

If the well-known words "Service compris" are not on your check, don’t ask the waiter if the tip is included; you will not get the truth out of him. Do remember that the tip is included.

The French observe a strict 35-hour work week. Don’t assume that just because you need a potholder or carton of o.j. Saturday evening at 6:00, you will not still be needing it Monday morning before 8:30.

If a motorcycle or small car comes silently up behind you on the sidewalk and beeps loudly to pass, don’t show fear; it will attack.

The French have lots of nuclear energy, but consuming it is very expensive, so they do not leave hall lights on in apartment buildings all day and night. That said, if you are lodged in a French apartment house, don’t expect that the little light you switch on in the hall or stairway will stay on until you find your door, your keys, the elevator, the exit, or until you get all the way up or down the stairs.

Don’t press the lighted doorbell of a neighbor instead of the hall light switch; the neighbor will always be home and respond immediately.

If you finally succeed in squeezing your tiny car into your designated stall in the dark, rabbit-warren garage under your apartment building, do know that the main reason you have to celebrate is that you will never find it again.

Don’t be afraid a Frenchman will accidentally hit you in a crosswalk with his car, even if the light is against you. They are excellent, sharp-eyed drivers and can stop on a wet dime…uh…franc. The greatest danger for a pedestrian in Cannes is men who tread on the backs of your sandals, and dog doo on the sidewalk.

Don’t ask traffic policemen for local directions during the Festival. They have all been brought there from other cities. (Ah, je’n suis pas d’ici, Madame. If I heard it once, I heard it a dozen times.)

There was general agreement on the following in a poll of Festival participants: Don’t set anything down on the table or sofa in your hotel or apartment, or put anything into your purse or shoulder bag, that you won’t want to spend a half hour looking for.

If there comes a time when suddenly you have nothing to do, but can still walk, do visit the Casino and look at their beautiful aquarium exhibit. If you enter their slot machine hall and see hundreds of players robotically putting in coins, but don’t hear the crashings of small change, don’t go any further.

Don’t expect that just because you are in Cannes the films will be any better than those you avoided seeing at your Cineplex back home.

If you are at a screening and some young man on the screen approaches another young man’s nipples with something resembling a needle, do feel free to head for the nearest exit. The only people present who will regret your defection will be the producer, the director and the actors.

Do get a good haircut before going to Cannes. You do not need a bad hair week.

If you live in New York and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge a lot, or take the Staten Island Ferry on Sundays, don’t hesitate to ask a French person to take a photo of you standing in front of the Palais with your own camera. It’s payback time!

Don’t worry; everything you thought you forgot to bring to Cannes with you, you will find when you get home and unpack.

Copyright 2001 by Nina Galen

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