Decannestruction: What is the Cannes market and does it matter? - Industry

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Roger Smith

Within hours of arriving in Cannes this year, I found myself on board a rented 100-plus-foot yacht under an azure sky, sporting a laminated badge from Kundalini Films that proclaimed me a "VIP." My hosts, newcomers to the Cannes scene, were launching their first film, Maya, in classic Cannes fashion, with a lavish dockside cocktail party. Moet champagne, Skyy vodka, inedible hors d'oeuvres and the usual crowd of would-bes, wannabes, and maybes completed the picture.

So what could be wrong? First, I am nobody's idea of a VIP. Second, almost none of the guests on the yacht seemed to know, or care, why they were there. It took some determined sleuthing to find a press release proclaiming Maya to be the first feature film to portray "the cultural and political implications of the cruelty of female circumcision." A worthy goal, and no doubt a worthy film -- although I, along with almost everyone else on board, never actually saw it.

The utter impropriety of renting a yacht -- a minimum of fifty grand, I would guess -- and hosting such a party to publicize such a film would never cross the mind of your average Cannes-hardened vet. However, wretched excess has long been part of the Cannes Film Festival, certainly since the late Seventies when I first attended. In the Eighties Cannon Films -- remember them? -- was all over the Croisette. By the early Nineties, my then-employer, Carolco Pictures, was the center of attention, with both the biggest films on offer to foreign distributors and the most lavish parties. The studios, paying more attention to the international markets, took up some of the slack in the Nineties.

But this year something had changed. Cannes has always been two discrete events happening simultaneously: a film festival and one of three major annual film markets, at which international fights to films are bought and sold. The festival needs no further description -- indeed, it is staggeringly over-publicized in relation to its intrinsic importance. On the first Sunday of Cannes, people were fighting for the privilege of watching Shrek unspool in the Festival Palais; the following Friday it was available -- black-tie not required -- for $8.00 at the local multiplex in Patchogue, to say nothing of 3,000 other North American screens.

The marketplace side of Cannes was, this year, truly depressed. Everyone had a favorite explanation: the swift departure of the film-related dot corns that infested Cannes last year; the shadow of the writer's strike (didn't happen) and the fear of a walkout by the actors; the reduced presence of the numerous new German media companies, whose stocks were down an average of 80 percent in the wake of the Neuer Markt collapse; and suddenly tightened budgets at the major agencies, which didn't feel the need to attend in platoon strength, unlike prior years. Take your pick.

I have a somewhat gloomier explanation. The Cannes market hasn't really mattered to the film business since the boom years of video led to a proliferation of indies in the Eighties, and nearly every trend in the business serves to further heighten its irrelevance. The market has always existed in uneasy cohabitation with the hordes of festivalgoers, competing for hotel space and restaurant reservations. The two other major international film markets, the AFM in Santa Monica and MIFED in Milan, don't have this problem. Of course, they are much less fun to attend, although this year fun was in very short supply at Cannes. Outside of the 50 or so films selected by the Festival honchos to appear in competition or in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, there are nearly 1,200 other films being shown somewhere in Cannes as part of the Marche du Cinema, most of them unspeakably bad and of interest only to low-end video distributors. For more than ten years, I have been hearing that there is no longer any room in the market for such grade-Z product, and yet each year hundreds of these films still manage to somehow get made and shown at Cannes.

The studios have always approached Cannes warily, eager to use it as a PR launch pad for their prestige pictures. It boosted Moulin Rouge this year, but Hollywood remains fearful of bringing anything solidly commercial to the festival. DreamWorks knew that it had a bulletproof movie in Shrek, one that even the snobbiest cinephile would like. They were fight, but of course the jury ignored it in favor of the preferred Euro selections.

Meanwhile, the remaining "independent" companies -- such as Miramax, Fine Line, Sony Classics, USA Films, Paramount Classics -- are independent in name only, each being directly or indirectly owned by one of the U.S. majors. While Cannes remains an important showcase for them, and the source of smaller foreign-language product to round out their release schedules, these companies rarely use Cannes as a place to sell their movies to the international marketplace. Most of them have long-term output deals in place in all of the major foreign territories, meaning that the rights to their movies have been sold long before Cannes. This year, for the major international distributors, the most eagerly watched piece of film was the 26 selected minutes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy New Line presented. While reaction was uniformly positive, I reminded a New Line executive that finding 26 smash minutes from nearly six hours of film shouldn't have proved too difficult. Of course, rights to the entire trilogy had been sold long ago.