Madrid, May 19,2026
By Peter Besas
Once again, the Cannes Film Festival is in the news each day. Photographs of this year’s celebrities on the Croisette – Jane Fonda, Demi Moore, Javier Bardem, Peter Jackson and a gaggle of thesps I have never heard of. The glitz and glamour are ongoing, harking back to the time when Brigitte Bardot dazzled the shutterbugs on the pier in front of the Carlton Hotel in 1956.
This year’s media coverage brought back memories of the many years during the Silverman era of Variety when I attended the Festival, or perhaps I should say “the Market”. For most of the thrust of Variety’s presence in Cannes had little to do with the official selection of films or the stars attending, but rather with the film business being transacted in the leading hotels –the Martinez, the Carlton, the Majestic. After all, we were a trade paper not a glossy fan magazine. Celebrities and toplining “stars” were of minor interest to us (no photos cluttered the inky pages of our newspaper — not “magazine”!) since our focus was on the independent worldwide producers and distributors,many of whom ran ads in the gigantic Cannes “bumper” issue of the paper. At its bloated apex, in 1986, the issue reached the gigantic girth of 552 pages! On its cardboard cover was an ad for the Italian movie magazine Ciak. Included in the issue were 34 pages of full-page ads from Menahem Golan’s Cannon Films, then at its pinnacle, featuring a galaxy of talent ranging from those in “art” films to those in meretricious exploitation reels. I have never checked to see how many of these films were actually made.
Copies of the issue – it required the use of a large truck to deliver them to the Festival – were distributed from a Variety desk in the lobby of the Hotel Carlton, the hub of festival activities. The desk was serviced by a charming French lady, Evelyn, hired for the length of the festival. The Carlton’s bar and outdoor terrace were always filled from mid-day until the wee hours of the morning with tradsters, news hounds, aspiring filmmakers and thespians.
Sometimes our publisher, Syd Silverman, would call a meeting of the bureau chiefs attending in his suite in the Carlton to discuss novelties in the home office and the planning of special issue, but not for giving assignments in Cannes since each correspondent knew how to cover the key “players” attending from his own territory. This was done by “cruising the Croisette”, looking in on the film offices in the major hotels, gathering news items or breaking stories, like a bee gathering honey, schmoozing with film sales executives and mixing with the trade at the countless receptions, cocktail parties and dinners held in the posh hotels, restaurants (indoors or on the beach), yachts, in the Casino, or out of town at the exclusive Hotel du Cap – Eden Rocin Cap d’Antibes. As for the films: those that needed to be reviewed were judiciously assigned to the critics, sometimes prompting a rivalry between scribes when it came to catching some new film from a prestigious foreign director.
I recall on one occasion, when the Variety contingent was hanging out or busy writing copy in an apartment (the Josefa) used as an office during the festival, the question arose of who would cover a huge reception held in the new Palais to honor director David Lean. On the wall was posted that day’s list of cocktail parties and receptions that needed to be editorially reported on. More than a dozen such events were listed. All of us having been at the festival for more than a week and having attended dozens of parties and cocktails, no one wanted to cover yet another talky event. All were surfeited with having spent hours at long press conferences, announcements of new film projects, interviews with producers and cineastes and listening to tiresome speeches and cloying encomiums. Many of the “boys” preferred having a pizza in a restaurant in the port area or a leisure meal in some bistro far removed from the Croisette. At the end, when no one else volunteered, I reluctantly offered to attend the gala event. When seated at the table for the David Lean homage, I learned that some of those at my table had struggled for weeks to obtain an invitation to the event, which was considered to be one of the social highlights of the festival. I do not recall what David Lean had to say or what kudos were showered upon him. I believe I did file a few lines on the event that ran in the miscellaneous “Chatter” column the following week. But I missed out on a good pizza dinner.
What else I remember is the constant search for “hand carriers” that could take editorial copy that had been typed in Cannes as well as new ads back to New York. Upon arrival there, such material would then be picked up at Kennedy airport and taken to 46th Street. This was a time long before the use of the fax machine and eons prior to when the first cell phones came into use. In those days all copy was written on typewriters and only the most urgent news would be sent by telex to the New York office, a relatively expensive and cumbersome procedure. Normally, muggs from each bureau filed their copy to New York by Special Delivery mail placed in pre-addressed brown envelopes. It took about three days for such an envelope to reach New York from Madrid.
Usually, on one day of the Festival, Syd would host a luncheon for all the staff and “stringers” attending the festival. The term “stringer” came from the correspondent’s “string” that was sent to New York once a month – a clipping of his articles that had been published, taped together in a long “string”. Its length was then measured in New York and depending upon how many inches long it was, the corresponding dollar amount would be paid to the journalist, so much per inch. At Syd’s party cocktails were served, films discussed, banter exchanged, but some of the zealous film critics might then duck out and rush off to catch a screening, either of an official entry at a press screening or some film in one of the sidebar sections such as the Directors’ Fortnight. Those films shown in the cinemas where the market films were shown on the Rue d’Antibes were off limits for reviewing in Variety.
My first trip to Cannes for Variety as a “hybrid” journalist cum ad salesman was in 1971. It was a dazzling experience. The muggs were lodged in a charming old villa a block away from the Palais des Festivals on the Boulevard de la Croisette called the Hotel Suisse. It was fronted by a large garden where in clement weather we would be served breakfast by our hosts, an elderly French couple. The hotel had a ground floor dining room and a front desk with a switchboard that connected with dial-less wall-telephones in each room.
Our Berlin correspondent, Ron Holloway, described it in the Variety Centennial Souvenir Album printed in 2005 for the sheet’s 100th anniversary celebration at Sardi’s restaurant in New York:
“It was a place of legends, some say of miracles. Certainly, a haunted hotel of memories for all who recall with an aching heart and maybe a tear on the cheek what the old Festival International du Film was really like.
“I’m talking about the old Hotel Suisse.
“Look in an ancient Fodor’s Guide for a pleasant place to stay at Cannes and you will find three hostels listed together: Splendid, Savoy, Suisse. All first class. For journalists, cineastes, festivaleers, the addicted and the accredited, the Suisse was the only place in town worth hanging your hat in.
“But ‘first class’? It was anything but.
“Built around the turn of the century, the old Suisse was run by an elderly Mistral couple who saw no reason to make any improvements at all. The plumbing made frightful noises, the beds sagged and creaked, the wallpaper had telephone numbers scribbled all over it, and you could hear the old guy yelling Ne quittez pas! at the switchboard down the hall better than the scratchy cacophony emanating from the receiver.
“But the Suisse had a garden and a spreading chestnut tree that is still standing just inside the gate. Some film directors, like Wim Wenders, still go back to that garden out of nostalgia to conduct their Cannes interviews with the outside world. The hotel, the garden and the tree were located across the street from the garage in back of the Hotel Carlton. And it was a two minute walk from there to the old Palais des Festivals. Both the Palais and the Suisse are gone now, torn down to make the Noga Hilton and a plastic hostelry .—godawful monuments to progress…”
(The Noga, built in 1992 was renamed the JW Marriott in 2011)
Perhaps the scene in Cannes now is not that different from what it was back in the Silverman era. The film market around town still thrives; tents with film companies now surround the Palais that opened in 1982 after the original one was torn down, new high-priced restaurants have replaced La Mère Besson and some of the cheaper ones we used to frequent. And competing trade papers are now online. But the hype along the Croisette is doubtless as virulent as it was in our day and the purveyors of schlock product and pie-in-the sky film projects as ubiquitous. Most of the old film companies have long since gone the way of the dial telephone. I guess the ladies that walked along the Croisette that charged you a small fee for sitting on the chairs overlooking the sea are long since gone. As are copies of the International Herald Tribune, a “must read” for expats of the past, which ceased publication in 2013; nor are there postcards at the kiosks.
Sitting at an outdoor eaterie digging into a moules marinière or lolling along the Croisette with a soft breeze wafting the tricolor flags on a sunny May morning remain cherished memories of the halcyon days on the Cote d’Azur. when a contingent of Variety muggs, all of them now gone, covered the Cannes Film Festival. Even more so, not the films, but the Variety muggs who shared the Cannes experience with me during the ten days that the festival ran.
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