some images

final tally

I'm sitting in Heathrow aiprot now, tired from carrying my heavy ass carryon bag for miles.
Five minutes to write this. I left Nice this morning and I have decided to just stay up all night at heathrow rather than shell out a hundred pounds to get a hotel. going to be a long night.
so lets see if I can sort this out before I get home and go through the mountain of business cards.
I gave the film to 6 distributors and 2 other film festivals, gave postcards with the website out to over 100 people personally. The film was viewed privately by 21 separate badges, but I know that a couple of times it was seen by two people at once. I pitched the script to one producer.
I also met a bunch of new friends from Paris, the UK, Bareclona, and Berlin. good trip overall I would say. Times up.

friday

Here we are.... I meant to leave a couple of days ago, but the flights did not look good, so here I am, stuck in Cannes! I have to suffer through the beautiful vistas and gorgeous crowds a few hours more. In these extra days, I have given my film DVDs out to 3 more short film distributors- for a total of 5. Out of those five, I have one clear favorite who I am hoping will contact me after viewing the film and offer something. Or maybe they could all offer me some kind of non exclusive...? They're swamped and promised to get back to me in a few days. So in the meantime, I also checked out a couple of people on IMDB- and the producer who wants to read my script is not someone with any big credits. This has made me think quite a bit about pitching strategies.
These last couple days have also been great for meeting people, and yet even more surreal Cannes experiences.
The other night, behind the Grand hotel, Kartik and I took a little shuttle up into the hills to a huge party villa called the MINT- a mansion surrounded by lush landscaping, swimming pool, video screens everywhere. Partiers, who were mostly 40 year old rich men and expensively dressed young models, were diving into the pool fully clothed...
there were some interesting particulars and some real characters . . . we got fed up with it and went back to a giant street gathering outside of the Petite Majestic where we met up with some of our friends.
Walking up and down the Croisette, the beachfront strip with all the hotels and the Palais, is interesting... although there are lots of women essentially dressed like prostitutes, there are also many women in the most stunning dresses and outfits I've ever seen. Its really a sight to behold. There are also a fair amount of normal people like us! And lots of ferraris. I was almost run down by a black ferrari crossing the street late the other night- the guy was so far away I thought I was fine, and then he hit the gas flying towards me- those things must go zero to 100 in like 4 seconds.

day # ?

Walked around Cannes quite a bit the last few days. Been trying to figure out the smartest approach to take... the buyers are deluged with material from people like me, and thereby exhausted and unfocused. But I have had a few hits.
I showed up with 200 of these cool postcards for my film but I've had to conserve them because the place is flooded with them, and its easy for them to be wasted in the sea of paper promo material. So I had the revelation that I needed posters as well. I found a copy shop, and luckily had my flash drive with my large JPEG files on it. The guy didn't speak a word of English and I had to gesture for him to save it as a PSD and let me edit it in photoshop. Its funny trying to figure out the layer style menu in french, for drop shadows, etc. But I printed out a bunch of gorgeous glossy 8x10s with my screening info and plastered them around the relevant area.
Cannes is huge: on the west end it the Palais, a giant building with several levels and lots of screening rooms, a few auditoriums and of course the massive main auditorium, press rooms. This thing was built for the festival. In the basement is the short film corner. Here there are screening rooms just for shorts as well as a series of booths just for sitting in front of screens with heaphones and watching shorts. Theres also a big meeting area for seminars and happy hours. Then adjacent is a a separate building for the Marche du film, then outsite of this, along the beach are a series of pavilions from each country and other entities such as Kodak. All of these places have regular parties, internet, panel discussions, cafes, alcohol, lots of networking, and then across the street (the Croisette) is what must be nearly a mile stretch of ritzy hotels which both house the stars, and have suites full of production company offices- ie. you can walk down the hall and go into these various 'offices' with their cardboard standees of their film projects, etc. Having the badge has allowed us into many of these places.
Our apartment is at the far end of this. So in the mornings, after having tea and toast on our massive 4th floor balcony while staring at all the yachts, we walk the 15 minutes or so to the Palais and begin the day's work. I go to screenings of films throughout the Palais, then see as much as I can in the short film corner, head out to various hotel spots at different times. Happy hours with the free drinks start at 5, and they are everywhere. Then, the parties start around 7 or 8 and they go untill FIVE oclock AM-- no joke- you can be literally half a mile away on teh 4th floor and still hear and feel the pulse of the night clubs bangin', and see the 300 foot yachts rocking with partiers. There have also been some massive fireworks displays, and it seems like all of hollywood and half of France is partying out in the various pavilions or on the various huge yachts. But word on the street is the big stars themselves go by helicopter up to a place in the hills called Eden Rock, far beyond the reach of the rest of us. On the next rung below the Eden rock crowd, though, are still literally thousands of powerful industry people, like producers at various levels, buyers, distributors, directors, etc. And these people are all at the parties.
Also with the badge you can get into various interesting places. A favourite hangout of ours is the bar of Hotel Martinez. We've eaten breakfast and drank late at night there. At that one single bar, I've seen Rosario Dawson, Roman Polanski, Gerard Depardieu, Jude Law, pitched my script to a British Producer who subsequently told me to send it to him and that he might help me package it as a studio film, met about 10 other filmmakers from the UK, Paris, the Philipines... and paid 10 euros for one beer.
Kartik and I, along with his Parisian producers Julien and Roman, and a couple of German filmmakers, did get into a few exclusive parties, I cant' remember how... the Fuji tv party for example. I met a beautiful French distributor there who took my card... I think I have handed out about 80 of my postcards, about 20 of those to people who could possibly buy my film or give me work. I have only been able to hand out about 5 of my DVDs though, which was a dissapointment, although one particular one of these landed in the perfect place. Another person staying in our crowded but gorgious apartment is girl from the UK who's an associate producer on some large film projects, who's produced some Academy Award nominated shorts, and she told me the name of the company which acquires those films and many others- a reputable one which can be lucrative for the filmmaker, and who has deals with Itunes. So I tracked them down, and handed them my film after a little pitch. I've handed it out to a couple other distributors. The one thing I have failed at is networking with the other film festival programmers. I have been either unable to track them down or I have had near misses. Also, my screening was poorly attended: the powers that be were too busy to attend such a thing, and only a couple of the 30 people I invited showed up, so me and Kartik just dragged in a bunch of strangers just to fill the room. I think they liked it, but I was bummed. I knew it was going to be like that, so oh well. Other festivals coming up. Another little central frustration is this: walking around amidst all of these hundreds of companies, without an agent it is still just close to impossible to get anyone to listen to me pitch my script, except in circumstances like the UK producer I met: we were both trying to talk to the same girl while drinking in a ritzy hotel bar, and we end up talking and then an hour later he wants to read my thing and he says it sounds fantastic. I think about this all day as I walk around these hundreds of places.... its not unlike walking amidst the crowds of the hundreds of beautiful french women whose language I cannot speak. Its the same exact thing. Why isn't there just an office where I can just walk in and pitch my movie? No one will listen to me without an agent unless I happen to end up in just the right place at just the right time and there is alcohol involved(and this does happen but not enough)... this is just a fact of life, but its hard when you're surrounded by literally thousands of people who could buy my script or make my movie. Its like the answer here is to invest in hipper clothes and just get hipper and hangout with cool people in the right place and play it cool until the right people like you enough socially to listen to you, and then when that happens, to have the right answer that blows your mind. But being in the mix has really opened my eyes.
Another thing I have done to gt the juices flowing is this-- all these countries have these booths set up in the Marche du Film to entice producers to come and film in their beautiful locations.
So, I go up and tell them I'm making a 2.5 million dollar movie and I'm probably shooting in upstate new york but I want to keep my options open. I'm not lying, I just don't have 2.5 million dollars. They then proceed to give me the works: they load me up with packets, show me amazing HD video and give me a great pitch about tax incentives and other reasons why I should shoot in their locations. I have about 50 lbs of gorgeous literature about various locations now. And between them and all of the producers I meet at various places, I always tell them I'm out of business cards so that I can hand them my gorgeous movie postcard with contact info on it. This is more memorable: you look at business cards and think " who the heck is this" when you have 2,000 of them after an event like this. But my postcard is cool as hell, and I think they're more likely to look at the website.
All in all, being here is awe inspiring. I have seen a lot of fantastic films and had a lot of little revelations about what my projects should be.
I will upload some pics as soon as I get some time on a computer with a USB port available to the public. evidently I am missing a party now . . . gotta run . . .

Cannes

Thursday began at 3:30 AM in London. It ended at midnight in a rizty hotel in the french riviera. At 3:30 AM I woke up, still in LA time, took a 5 am shuttle to Heathrow, boarded a shuttle there to the Luton airport which is an hour north of heathrow, took an Easyjet from there to Nice, cussed at my non-working prepaid fone card, found an electronics store and purchased a prepaid cellphone, then jumped on a train to Cannes.
There I met with Kartik Singh, friend of a friend who is a film director living in Paris. This is his sixth Cannes, and it shows- everywhere we go, through crowds of people the size of Chicago, he always has someone to hug and greet from a past Cannes.
We walked to our apt-- on the 3rd floor with a terrace facing the ocean and the hundreds of huge opulent yachts that are hovering over the festival- and just a 10 minute walk from the event itself.
As for the festival du Cannes, thoughts on my first few hrs: there is nothing like this anywhere in the world. Its pretty overwhelming at first, cutting through crowds of thousands and thousands of people, just yards from the yacht-covered ocean, and all of the elements of a giant outdoor festival combined with the ritz of hollywood, most of the first few hrs were spent trying to understand whats going on.
Kartik and I met up with his friend Ian, after I got my badge, and we strolled into a few pavilions, met some people, traded business cards with lots of strangers, ended up drinking in many different places with filmmakers from Slovenia, Australia, the Philipines. Then, I learned that our badges allow us into the lounge at the hotel where many of the stars are staying. It was a funny thing to be sitting, drinking at a table outside on the terrace while 5 yards away from us an actor (Jude Law) is walking to his limo while being screamed at from a mob of fans behind a barricade. Being a famous actor must be a very strange life.

touchdown: London, 5/16, early afternoon

Ok... same day for me.... little bit of suspense at the airport while I waited to board since I was a standyby passenger- on an overbooked flight- but alas here I am. London. I feel kind of the same way here as I felt the first time I went to NYC as an adult- everything looks familiar, because its all part of our collective media memory. ya dig? we've seen it all in millions of movies and tv scenes and we all appropriate those memories as our own. So there's a certain comfort. or maybe I am just jetlagged?

Los Angeles: 5/15 12:38 pm

This is the plan:
get on a plane at LAX at 5 ish, fly to london. Arrive at Heathrow wed at noon. Buy a prepaid T Mobile cell phone. Sleep, check out the city, sleep, leave on Easyjet at 8 AM the next day for Nice, France. Establish contact with..um, my contacts, find travel from Nice to Cannes.

I think I'm ready.... I've got 200 full color postcards with a great image on the front and my web address www.allanholt.com on the back...of course these will have my T mobile cell phone # written on them as soon as I get it. I've got 20 or so nicely packaged DVDs for those special companies who are on my hit list but too swamped to go see the film. Four of those are HD DVDs that also come with a regular disc in case the HD one doesnt work.... I've also got 3 GB worth of flash drives with more and more versions of the movie in HD, SD, for MAC, PC, etc. I have considered getting one of those portable DVD players with headphones, to be even more prepared to show the film to anyone anywhere. Maybe I'll be able to pitch my feature script.... sell the short.... get a million great contacts.... we will see. Been having fantastic wierd dreams the past couple nights.
next entry will be from the continent.