Cannes Becomes Carnival of Excess

When I started coming to the Cannes Film Festival in the early 1980s, the eye was attracted not only to the theaters, where films were being shown, or to the beach, where bodies were being bared, or to the streets, where mimes were competing with pickpockets for tourists’ change, or to the sidewalk cafes, where beautifully arranged calories were being served, or to the Old Port, where million-dollar yachts were moored, but to the sky as well.

Talk about big-screen entertainment. When the father-son producing team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind were in the heyday of their showmanship, they routinely dispatched squadrons of airplanes to the sky about Cannes, towing banners touting upcoming episodes of “Superman,” or the new “Supergirl,” or “Santa Claus--The Movie.”

It was a hot stunt, target advertising at its best, and it was duplicated by so many other film companies that the noise and clutter of single-engine planes began to fill out the festival landscape like a Mad Magazine cartoon panel. No wasted space here on land, sea or air.

These days the sky is clear of fluttering billboards, and you couldn’t hear a jet above the racket of horns, sirens, police whistles and the numbing percussion of pop music screaming out of the beach-side restaurants and party tents.

Cannes, in many ways, has turned in on itself. It’s become a carnival midway of commercial attractions. Near the Palais, where the main business of the festival is conducted, you can’t get an unobstructed view of the sky for all the white plastic tents that hug the Esplanade during the festival. A small city park has been converted into the fenced-off Ray Ban Terrace, which is a new adjunct to the American Pavilion, whose own slew of sponsors includes Delta Airlines and the Los Angeles Times.

The Salkind touch for promoting summer movies has been replaced by a kind of traveling theme park approach, best exemplified this year by the Walt Disney Co.’s one-day splurge on “Armageddon,” its version of “Deep Impact.” Buena Vista International, Disney’s foreign distribution arm, showed 50 minutes of assembled footage from the movie, which is due for a wide release in the U.S. July 1, followed by a press conference, then a party that drew hundreds if not thousands of people to the Palm Beach Casino on Cannes’ eastern end.

Guests and party crashers entered the casino through the debris of a destroyed city, where pieces of buildings and columns and vehicles were piled up in a haze of smoke. Inside, revelers waited in line for a ride in an action simulator where, at the risk of spilling their drinks, they got a sense of what it would feel like being in a space shuttle landing on an asteroid.

The party’s disaster movie atmosphere could have been worse; the movie’s star, Bruce Willis, might have chosen to sing at the party instead of the next night at Cannes’ Planet Hollywood, three floors below my room. But by all accounts, the “Armageddon” party has been the festival’s most extravagant.

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Oddly, it might have seemed, Disney didn’t spend all that money to raise public or media awareness of the film. In fact, most people here didn’t know about the screening, the press conference or the party, and the American press was explicitly not invited to the first two events. The screening was primarily for foreign exhibitors, whose enthusiasm in the expanding global market for Hollywood product may be worth a lot more than some cheap publicity. Besides, when you start showing bits of movies to journalists, there’s always the niggling possibility that they’ll write about them. That happened last year when Miramax, a division of Disney, showed a 30-minute assemblage of “Copland,” a movie that they assured the critics beforehand would change Sylvester Stallone’s image from cartoon hero to serious dramatic actor. And how did that work out? Well, sometimes you eat the press, sometimes the press eats you.

Two years ago, on another Disney ride, critics were given a 15-minute peek at “Evita,” which was still in production. The footage got mixed reviews, but few of us walked away with any thought other than it was going to be a big movie. Just the point.

The studios have always used the festival to promote other films, and they’ve learned how to steal the media right out from under the nose of festival organizers and filmmakers who have grumbled that the play is still the same. The truth is that since Cannes became a television darling, a regular stop on the celebrity tour of “Entertainment Tonight,” E! Channel and CNN, the core festival films--those in competition or in one of the official sidebars--are buried.

This has been an off festival for stars. Cannes is sort of a hangover from last year’s 50th anniversary, which saw more famous faces here than in any other year. There were appearances on the red-carpeted steps of the Palais this year by Johnny Depp, Mira Sorvino and Winona Ryder, one of the jurors, but it wasn’t until Sharon Stone arrived for Thursday’s premiere of “The Mighty” that the fans got to finally clear their throats. The quid pro quo is an official policy at Cannes. If Universal can get John Travolta, Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols to walk the steps at the Palais, then sure, it can have the opening night slot for their European launch of “Primary Colors.” And if Sony wants the closing night spot for “Godzilla,” what better way to cleanse the palate of all those art films?

The new wrinkle in Hollywood’s relationship with Cannes is in the sophistication of their marketing strategies. If they want publicity, they can do it directly, setting up screenings and interviews at what is the most heavily covered--or at least the most credentialed--media event in the world. And as Disney has shown with “Armageddon,” they can slip in and do business on a grand scale, while keeping an unruly press at bay.

And sometimes, they eat the press.