During the early stages of the project to save, restore and rejuvenate the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, my then partner, Chuck Eckerman and I launched out on our own to run the State and Varsity Theatres also in Austin. These were strictly film theatres – more art theatre as opposed to first run theatres. I believe we made a deal with Leroy Mitchell, who went on to found Cinemark Theatres which owns close to 2,000 movie “screens” in the U.S. and Latin America. Hell of a nice guy too.
Also, right at this juncture, we met or sought out John Santikos, a Greek who owned 60 screens in San Antonio. As always, we had no money and needed an investor. John was game and said “yes”. Frankly, I think he just wanted to do something for fun and to have an excuse to travel to Austin once in a while. I liked John a great deal. He was real, soft spoken, zero ego, humble and very pleasant to be around. He was also very successful and, probably the largest film exhibitor in San Antonio at that time around 1978.
We ultimately rely heavily on Burt Manzari, who was a film booker for several art houses around the U.S. He was damn good at it. Fun guy too! More on Burt later! His girlfriend, “Liska”, was one of the most gorgeous and sensual women I have ever met. She oozed sex appeal but in a healthy way. I envied the shit out of Burt for having her.
Over the course of meetings about the takeover of the Varsity Theatre on the UT “Drag”, John brought up the Cannes Film Festival (Festival de Cannes). Santikos had been toying with the idea of becoming a distributor of art film. That rang a bell. The Varsity was an art house. Finding good product that could generate enough ticket sales to keep the doors open – and to pay ourselves a paltry salary – was tough. Getting in on the game as a distributor could be fun, profitable and a great education of what product was out there, out it was made, production budgets and so on. And that was the impetus in the three of us planning a trip to the Cannes Film Festival during mid-May, 1978.
Fortunately, we had Santikos to get us our credentials so we could attend films unavailable to the public during that 10 day period. That included the big films in “Competition” which is the French version of the Academy Awards. The Palme d’Or (also known as the “Gold Palm Award) was the equivalent of the Oscar. There were other categories of films of more modest productions such as the Marche du Film which showcased movies of every type imaginable and from many countries in a sort of informal movie market. Un Certain Regard and Cinefondation are other categories.
We arrived by train from Paris through Avignon – about a seven hour trip. I’d never been on a train. Let someone else do the driving while you read, sleep, talk, eat cheese, bread and drink wine and watch the beauty of France go by in front of your eyes. The train system in Europe is incredibly well conceived. You can get a train to almost anywhere in Europe from anywhere every day and sometimes several trains to the larger cities. Thank God for Eurail passes!
Being our first trip to Europe and our first introduction to train travel we were unaware of the amount of luggage you could bring on such a trip without becoming a modern day version of Sisyphus. One of my bags could have carried Jimmy Hoffa. We found out we could ship our excess luggage to Paris Nord train station where they could keep it until we returned three weeks hence. We did, however, have to keep the tux wear – mandatory for the “In Competition” films including a red carpet entrance rimmed by dozens of cameramen, the Cannes police in white gloves and full regalia, the hundreds of tourists hoping for a glimpse of someone more famous than me, power lights galore and more.
Picking up our credentials at the registration desk was no small matter. There were 200 people with hands raised in that frantic way of someone going down with the Titanic hailing a lifeboat. The French may seem sophisticated, soave with effortless panache, however, I can promise you that they even the most important will climb over, shove, push and scream their way past you no problem.
The first couple of days we spent going to see half dozen films in the smaller Marche du Film. These cinemas that dotted the charming downtown were non frenzied. Also, most of the films were bizarre and boring and pure crap. It got to be a running joke – when would the bloodbath occur and the sex. It didn’t matter from what country the film had been birthed. Blood and sex saturated every film we saw with no storyline in sight. You haven’t seen bloody until see you see these “movies” and this was in 1978 – no CGI.
There were two films which actually had a storyline with no blood (almost) and no guts. Carol Kane starred in a very odd film called the Mafu Cage. The “Mafu” was a monkey and there was a cage in the house. Beyond that, you’ll have to Google it to learn more.
The other film was Thirst starring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. It is the most erotic film I have ever seen between two women. Deneuve was a luscious woman and seductress who, as an aside, is given to love making and a little sip of blood along the way (vampire). The vampire aspect, however, was rendered virtually invisible, overshadowed by sensuality that turned the theatre in to a smoky bar in Montmartre in the 1920’s. Steam heat!
These kinds of films – the best of the bunch – most likely never saw the light of day in America in any theatre of any type. However, a film like Thirst could generate some serious yen and yuan (not yin and yang) amongst Asians who don’t exactly get to see molten hot, stunningly beautiful women in their day to day lives.
It was the third day when the Cannes Film Festival went white hot with buzz. The word was that there was a film about Vietnam in competition that night made by Francis Ford Coppola called Apocalypse Now. One of the things I love about Cannes is that you get to sometimes see a landmark motion picture, raw and fresh, with no advance press, trailers – nothing. We made our way to the mosh pit of humanity to fight for tickets. Having one’s credentials did not assure you anything for the touted in competition films – the heavyweights of the festival. My some miracle, we snagged two without doing Jose Greco on someone’s face. Remember, no one and I mean no one had ever heard of the film except the power boys on the inside. The word was that it wasn’t even finished but finished enough it was. And that is the understatement of all time.
That evening, we negotiated ourselves in to our tuxes, put a couple hundred francs in zee pocket and headed out to become one with the literati. I cannot tell you how sumptuous the ocean front street of Cannes presents itself – The Croisette. It literally is perfect – perfect bedding flowers in a design, the beautifully attired police, palm trees that never met a bug, not one gum wrapper on the pavement and no rabble to disturb the fantasy at which the French excel. The Croisette is festooned with the finest advertising that can be created. Gigantic posters, 3D standees – it is a visual smorgasbord that is tantalizing and overdone in the same breath. It even cost $50 U.S. to just walk in to the casino!
Across the street from the ocean are world famous hotels but the mother lode was The Carlton. That’s where the movie moguls, pros from Paris, wannabes, stars, media darlings and officials party at a level even I can’t fathom and I can fathom awfully well. You can actually drink at the bar with George Harrison (which I did) and David Carradine (which I did not as he was more ghost than man). I’ll tell you something about the Carlton Hotel. Men rake the sand on the beach and, thereafter, stamp the sand with the Carlton’s logo every few feet – more than once a day, every day of festival and probably most days of the year. Now that’s what I call branding. I took a break from movie going to lie on that pristine beach to do some people watching. I turned over shifting my gaze from the ocean to the Croisette. And, there, facing in my general direction, was a topless goddess who had a similar look as Bo Derek (10 with Dudley Moore) but with more of a Swedish look. A more perfect body does not exist on earth.
As if via magic fairies, we arrived at the theatre entrance with some of the most beautiful souls I have ever seen in one place dressed in the world’s grandest fashions. There were old world dowagers present wearing enough diamonds, emeralds and rubies to make Harry Winston giddy. There’s an old saying that money doesn’t buy class. There was this little woman, probably in her seventies at five foot tall soaking wet, dressed in that way only old money can pull off, bejeweled like a bust at the Smithsonian. As the theatre doors began to open, she gave me a sharp elbow to my ribs, pushed me back and beat it in to the theatre. Whatever delusions I had of being a part of the French Riviera went up in the air like a weather balloon attempting to set a new altitude record. Expensive – you’ve no idea.
The main theatre in Cannes is 2,000 seats – probably a performing arts center converted for film for the festival. With everyone now seated the theatre’s lighting dims to blackout. There is nothing on the screen and no sound for what seemed an abnormally prolonged start. Then, I began to sense some very feint sound but I could not discern what it might be. The volume increased more and more. I still couldn’t make out the sound. Then, with the screen still dark, there was a new, slightly louder sound, like a “thup, thup, thup”. All of the sudden the screen lit up with multiple Huey’s flying over jungle and hills. The music came up but I can’t remember which piece. Some said Coppola was running sound.
(Note: The music of The Doors was extensively used throughout the film punctuating the power of the images. It was the perfect choice insofar as Jim Morrison and The Doors had a dark vibe to their music and lyrics.)
The film that unfolded was beyond powerful. I felt great unease at the tension that never let up. The eyes and mind were pummeled with disturbing imagery – no holds barred. It was brilliant and gut wrenching at the same time and brutal. After the screening, we emerged from the theatre to a stormy night full of foreboding. We went to a bar a block away and slammed down a few drinks to quiet the mind and provide a salve for the soul. The film rocked me to my very core. I felt incredibly grateful to have seen the film as a work in progress with no prior knowledge of what it might be.
The addition of Marlon Brando who had been virtually invisible from the film scene for years added that extra punch to an already wicked brew. His character, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, turned rogue commander leading a band of maniacal hero worshipers on an expedition to show the Vietcong what true violence could be like as they slaughtered their way beyond lines of demarcation in to Cambodia.
I would attend the Cannes Film Festival two more times – 1979 and 1980. In 1979, we were lucky enough to see another giant of a film – Chariots of Fire – the story of Britain’s involvement in the Olympics in track and one Jewish man’s passion to overcome longstanding prejudice and to strike a blow for his place in history. We also saw Midnight Express in one of these three festivals about a young man who is busted for trying to smuggle hashish from Turkey to America via commercial air. His imprisonment in a Turkish “prison” should be mandatory viewing for kids from 10 to 18 years of age of what a hellish experience it can be to be arrested for drugs in other countries lacking any due process of law. I don’t remember Midnight Express getting much if any play in the U.S. which is peculiar as it set a high water mark for realistic prison movies at that time. It would have been rated “R” and that would have killed its commercial prospects.
(Note: I contracted food poisoning in Cannes of all places that nearly killed me on my last trip to this Shangri-La for movie fanatics. That would be one “crevette” too many! Burt Manzari had a panic attack on one of our trips at a Chinese restaurant. He had fought in Vietnam and the two hit him hard).
(See “Postscript” for more on the festival and the trip.)
(Note: Rent Apocalypse Now if you have never seen it. It is impossible to give the due this film is worthy of in this writing. There are two versions. The original version (different than what we saw with additional scenes beyond Martin Sheen standing atop the stairs, bloody with machete in hand) was the first version; the “redux” version has a 20-30 minute scene never a part of the original film. The scene interjects a French family on their plantation in the jungle. The French were responsible for putting their colonial stamp on Vietnam going back to the 17th Century.)
(Note: The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first two films that had the balls to focus on the reality of the Vietnam War misrepresented by the government and the media from the beginning. Vietnam was a verboten subject. It was the first war America lost. We surrendered the country, many officials escaping from the embassy rooftop via Hueys. America’s invincibility and psyche was dealt a severe blow. The war had ripped the country in two, polarizing tens of millions and creating distrust and anger at President Johnson who inherited Vietnam from Kennedy.)
