Playing at Cannes: Invasion of the Agents

Agents have landed on the Cote d’Azur.

Maybe it started when Michael Ovitz of the powerful Creative Artists Agency touched down briefly with client Robert Redford last week. (According to one London paper, the visit lasted all of four hours.)

A flock of younger agents from Triad and William Morris arrived at about the same time.

“It’s because of the (writers’) strike. People are looking for a place with a little more action,” explained Cary Woods, a Morris agent based in Beverly Hills.

But no agency has matched the presence of International Creative Management. ICM has 14 agents in Cannes, up from just three last year.

And the ICM contingent is out to conquer the world.

ICM’s Jeff Berg, Sam Cohn, Peter Rawley, Ed Limato and their cohorts are working the film festival as part of a strategy that appears designed to outflank CAA, which has been stronger at home in recent years.

CAA has gotten a lock on Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman and many of the big stars who make Hollywood go ‘round. But ICM, quietly growing overseas, has become the transatlantic conduit for such Oscar-caliber talents as Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman and Adrian Lyne.

Two years ago, ICM began striking alliances with smaller agencies in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid. “We did it as part of an overall strategy of servicing the needs of our European customers,” said Berg, who is chairman of the Los Angeles agency.

In the short run, the alliances have created some good business for ICM, which represents not just writers, directors and actors here but a number of European movie and TV companies as well.

The agency, for example, is helping Espana Television to assemble “Sandino,” about Nicaraguan poet-general Augusto Sandino, from whom the Sandinistas take their name. The film, which will be produced in English and will star an American actor (not yet cast), will be shown in theaters in the United States and as a longer TV miniseries elsewhere in the world.

In the long run, Berg is betting on something called “harmonization.” In 1992, all economic barriers will come down within the European Economic Community. Inside the EEC, tariffs and passports will disappear--along with the current Balkanized system of national film subsidies that have helped keep Europe behind the United States in terms of broadly appealing popular entertainment.

The national subsidies will be replaced by a single European superfund, with power--in theory--to subsidize movies and TV shows on the basis of entertainment value or commercial value rather than national politics.

Doubters, among them Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, contend that inter-country rivalry will still keep Europe from besting Hollywood.

“Nobody can exactly predict” what will happen, concedes Rawley, head of ICM’s international operation. But Rawley believes that Europe could become a single 11-country market, with 300 million people watching films largely produced in English--and ICM wants to be there if it happens.

Wu Tianming, a Chinese studio chief, has never set foot on a Hollywood lot.

And precious few Americans have ever seen Wu’s Xian Film Studio, one of China’s largest production facilities.

But things are tough all over, apparently.

“There are more people (at Xian) who are eating rice than people who are working,” complains the acerbic Chinese mogul--who abandons his chair to sit on the floor while chomping a croissant in a suite at the Hotel Majestic.

Wu says Xian has 1,500 employees, up from 1,400 when he took over in 1983. He could happily produce his 12 movies a year with half the staff, but government officials keep loading him down with relatives who want to get into the business.

“It’s a problem that exists all over the world,” says Wu, who is here with Chen Kaige, director of “King of Children,” which is in competition at Cannes.

Another consuming passion: passion fruit milkshakes at the Casino Quick, France’s answer to McDonald’s. Gastronomically speaking, they are indistinguishable from banana.