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 . . .