For Variety and other trade papers from England, Italy and France, this was one of the high points of the year. Some of these trade papers printed daily editions that were chock full of advertising announcing films and screening times at the film market as well as projects of films being prepared. It was the market, not the main competing festival and its ancillary sidebar sections, that were mostly the focus of the trade sheets on display in the posh hotels, suites rented by film sales companies, and lobbies. The new titles vied for attention in the press as well as on posters plastered in hotel lobbies and hotel façades and up and down the length of the Croisette. 20,000 journalists, photographers, film and television professionals crowded into the small Mediterranean city for the ten days the event lasted, with films screened each day – the main, competing pictures in the Palais but also, from nine in the morning until midnight, in a half dozen commercial cinemas around the small city, many located on the Rue d’Antibes, the street that runs parallel to the Croisette, featuring commercial fare from around the world, mostly with English soundtracks, attended by buyers and distributers. The screenings might be packed tight with potential buyers when a film had been lavishly publicized, but at other times there would be only five or six in the seats.
That year, the girth of the International Film Annual, as the Variety special Cannes edition was monickered, ran to a gigantic 352 pages., still published on newsprint and unbound. A year later, when the issue had swelled further, it was at length bound and cardboard wrappers added, until finally the cover, spine and back cover were printed in full color. Perhaps the most spectacular Cannes cover was published in 1984. It showed the spectacular view of Anita Ekberg wading into the Fontana di Trevi, imitating a famous scene from Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita, with the added touch that she was seen holding a copy of the Italian trade magazine TV Sorrisi e Canzoni in her hand. The issue ran an astounding 562 newsprint pages, of which 200 came from companies outside the United States, most of them carrying advertising, a few of the ad pages tinted with “publisher’s red”.
Already in 1975 it required a huge truck to deliver the issues to the Variety stand in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel, located a few steps away from the crowded bar. The stand was serviced by a tanned, slim French lady called Evelyn who distributed the issues gratis and took down the names and contacts of new subscribers. Evelyn seemed to us the epitome of Gallic chic. In the winter months she worked as a ski instructor, and her French accent oozed charm.
That year was my second at the Festival. In 1973, just as I had been ready to make the trip from Madrid to Cannes, the sortie was cancelled when on May 12 Variety’s iconic editor, Abel Green, died in New York. Then, a year later, I was finally able to make the trip to the Croisette in my Volkswagen Beetle, a tiring two-day journey. Now, in 1975, I had learned my lesson and flew directly to the airport in Nice, from where a half hour taxi ride took me the Hotel Suisse in Cannes. The festival opened with Fellini’s Amarcord, out of competition. Heading the jury was iconic French director René Clair and the Grand Prix would go to Coppola’s The Conversation which beat out other entries such as Steven Spielberg’s Sugarland Express, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail and Ken Russell’s Mahler.
The previous year I had learned the Variety modus operandi at the festival. On the day of my arrival, as a neophyte attendee among the foreign veteran bureau chiefs and correspondents, I was astounded when, a day before the official opening of the festival, the staffers congregated with Syd in an apartment that had been rented by Harold Myers, who formerly ran the London office, and the Paris bureau chief, Gene Moskowitz, started handing out rolls of French francs to some of those present. After the meeting broke up, I asked Bob Hawkins who had visited me in Madrid when I was first hired and who at that time was the bureau chief in London, to explain how the “money situation” worked in view of the cash that had been liberally distributed to some of the muggs from Moskowitz.
“Just hold on to all the receipts for expenses you make,” he said.
I then learned that the wads of francs that were being distributed were money that had been received by the Paris office for advertising, so rather than transmit the funds to New York they were being used to defray expenses in Cannes.
Unlike what was the custom in most newspapers, there was never a morning editorial conclave of the reporters to decide what breaking news or events should be covered that day, though occasionally there would be a meeting in Syd’s suite in the Carlton to discuss gripes and suggestions to improve the paper. Instead, the daily routine consisted of each scribe gathering news at any place or time from sources in his own “territory” attending the festival. In my case this was Spain and in later years Latin America. Thus, I would drop in on the offices of Spanish producers and distributors, most of whose top executives I knew from Madrid and Barcelona, and see what developments and deals had been made. Sometimes I would “cruise the Croisette” and catch them walking along the boulevard, or sitting in a café or hotel lobby. Or I might buttonhole them at some cocktail party, of which a dozen were held each day in the hotels and restaurants, ready for a spur-of-the-moment chat to cull snippets of information or leads that might be turned into copy. Such scouring might be undertaken in the morning hours after breakfast or late at night after the final official screening had been held in the Palais. Working in parallel, the Variety film critics would be hurrying off to catch the films in the official sections. Many of the competing films had already been seen and reviewed in their respective countries by Variety staff and stringers in Paris, London and New York. However, films screened in the market were off limits.
Then the scribes would hie back to the Hotel Suisse or wherever they were lodged and write up their reviews and stories on their portable typewriters. Thin colored paper was used to type the articles and reviews on, double spaced, with a carbon copy underneath,. A different colored paper was used from each overseas bureau, so as to be instantly recognizable upon arrival at the desk on 46th Street. Mine was canary yellow. Reviews were signed by each critic with a four-letter “signature” chosen by the reviewer upon starting to work for the paper. Indeed, the muggs often referred to each other by their “sigs” rather than their names. Hence, one might say, “Go and speak to the Hawk” or “Give the copy to the Werb” or “Myro is arranging the dinner details” (for Bob Hawkins, Hank Werba and Harold Myers)
Once the reviews and articles were ready they were placed in a prepared brown envelope addressed in large letters to Variety (using its logo, with the flying “V”, marked “Rush News”) to the New York office. Then, since this was the era before the fax and the Internet, a trusted hand-carrier would be found in Cannes, usually an executive from some American film sales company, who was planning to fly back to New York the following day and who would drop the envelopes off at 46th Street or have then picked up at Kennedy Airport by a messenger sent by Variety in time to get into next Wednesday’s paper. In fact, the same procedure of hand-carriers was famously followed by Hank Werba in Rome when sending copy or advertising to Gotham. (See section on the Rome office in my book Inside Variety)
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That sunny, halcyon morning as the tricolor banners were wafted by a gentle breeze over the Croisette and the elegant restaurants along the beach prepared their gastronomic delicacies for the festival attendees who would descend to the plage for a gourmet luncheon, I entered the Carlton lobby and went to “our” stand where usually I could find some of the Variety muggs milling about. But only Evelyn was in sight.
“Bonjour, messieur Besas,” she greeted me.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
She said that she had seen no trace of the correspondents that morning. As I waited near the stand, a few minutes later the London bureau chief, Roger Watkins, appeared. He was his usual cheerful, chipper self and approached me with a bouncy step.
“Where has everyone been?” I queried.
“Oh, we’ve been having a writer’s meeting,” he answered.
“No one informed me there would be a meeting,” I said, annoyed that I had not been advised and thus had missed out on the editorial pow-wow. “What was discussed?”
“Upcoming special issues. Latin America.”
“Latin America!” I gasped. “But that is one that I had proposed! What was decided concerning it?”
“Syd said you should go ahead and do it,” Roger offhandedly informed me, leaving me speechless but basking in satisfaction.
A short while later, the whole Variety contingent, about a dozen of them led by Syd, gathered at a nearby beach restaurant. It seems Harold Myers, who had succeeded in organizing a very successful Far East special section, had been urged by the Rome bureau chief, Hank Werba, to undertake the Latinoland challenge. But the notion had been rejected by him and the choice fell upon me. The decision that I was to do the section was presently confirmed to me by Syd as we dug into a pleasant al fresco luncheon. No mention was ever made of how I would do the section, when it would be published, where I should travel to, what my budget for the whole project was to be. In effect, I was being given a complete carte blanche to launch into the undertaking with no guidelines, limits, restrictions or second-guessing by anyone.