A Festival Wife's blog

Chapter 2: Day One

The stately hotels along the Passagia saluted the rising Mediterranean sun on the morning of the Festival's first day as I made my way from the Medici Hotel toward the Festival Director's office at the Castello di Festival.

Pavements steamed from the shopkeepers' soapy buckets as they flushed away last night's sour accumulation of cigarette butts and spilt booze. The municipal police, eyes red-rimmed and uniforms lacking some of their starch, studiously re-stacked barriers from the opening night's crush. Poster-hangers affixed movie one-sheets to kiosks with hurried brushes glistening with glue, the out-of-place images of guns and bikinis dripping with the optimism of marketing departments.

Early risers jogged the beach or rippled the drowsy waters of the bay. Vans parked askew curbside re-stocked restaurant kitchens with produce - La Pizza, Argento's, Il Pescatore, l'Operetto, Tre Fiori - and the bars - Zebra, Diavolo, Stanco's Disco, Mike's American Bar, Medalia d'Oro - with beer, wine and liquor, bottles rattling in plastic racks. A transvestite trio fluttered from the Jazz Blue Piano Bar in plumage too fantastic for daylight and, tittering and tottering on high heels, flew around the corner seeking the last vestiges of night in the shadows of the narrow Via Garibaldi, laughter echoing faintly against the cobblestones.

I descended into the Castello's labyrinthine basement offices to pay my respects to the Festival President, becoming caught up in the urgent flow of Festival staff rushing from floor to floor; this perilously steep stairway leading to "the dungeon," as it was called, must have been designed by someone who had never imagined on paper what it took in physical reality to organize the actual event which the building had been built to enshrine.

Festivals are as much about ceremony as they are about film and I regarded this little ritual tête-à-tête with the Festival President as the first official event on the schedule. It was, essentially, a pro forma conversation about credentials, per diems, dinner expenses and any little pieces of business that needed looking after.

This usually took no more than twenty or thirty minutes and involved customary pleasantries about family, gossip regarding what outrageous perks the invited VIPs were demanding this year and - most importantly - a plain envelope containing a fat wad of lira for which no accounting was ever necessary.

This time, the conversational portion of our visit was pleasant enough. When it was over, Demo - he had presided over this event so long that Demosthenes Columbo was simply referred to by cineastes around the world as Demo - looked at me sadly from across the worn desk that he used each year and folded his hands into a little tent... from which no envelope emerged.

With many sighs and apologetic smiles, the explanation followed: along with the New Mayor had come new rules. Among them, no more cash advances on expenses. Each expense, no matter if it was airfare for a star or an espresso for a hangover, it was to be detailed on receipts, invoiced separately and repaid at the end of the event.

"I don't know, Demo sighed. "In the old days we always seemed to have whatever money we needed. We didn't bother with what this little thing cost here, what that little thing cost there. No worries, the Party paid for everything."

"The communists were good for the arts."

He smiled. "Yes, we were all communists then, since the war, of course. And more so since '68, but now..."

Once upon a time Demo had been a student activist himself. At the University of Turin he organized the film club and programmed movies like "Battle of Algiers," all the while diverting government-supplied school funding to the most radical protest groups. He was targeted in a crackdown and busted, but all they could pin on him was phony marijuana charge. They let him out of prison after a year, which was good because being inside kept him out of involvement with the kidnapping and murder of the Italian premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades.

"How are all of your Brigato Rosso friends?"

"Getting older. Like you and me, my friend."

Demo used to employ them on the Festival staff. It was the only job they could get. They were good workers. Kidnappers, bombers, blackmailers, anarchists, even terrorists, maybe - but you could not say they didn't love film.

"Those were the best years," Demo sighed. "the Seventies. Big stars, big parties, big movies."

"Good movies."

"Good movies, yes, and good times. But now - " the little tent exploded, his hands in the air. "Can't get good staff. Can't get good movies. Can't get the stars. Today they all go to Cannes or Toronto. It's all about marketing in Hollywood, the studios there. And here, this shit they call -" he spat it out like a lemon pit - "privatization." He jerked a thumb in the direction of Those Who Decide Such Things.

"Privatization is like a disease. All of Europe has caught this disease going private, going to shit. The Euro, all of that. And the bottom line rules everything. Even art. Which in my opinion should only have a top line, never a bottom."

"So, are you saying no dinners at the Tre Fiori"

"Rico will always keep your table. But our budget has been cut to the bone. We must justify every expense. Even your fee, my friend."

"There have been complaints?"

The Festival President held up his hand to reassure me. "No, no complaints. Of course you are the best at what you do, Henry, and everybody in the business knows it. But our new mayor, that asshole. Excuse me but I have to say this - what exactly does a man from the telephone company know about film? Can you tell me this?"

"Does he know anything about being mayor, at least?"

"Did he know anything about telephones? The way the telephones work in this country -" He picked up his telephone receiver and banged it back down on its cradle.

"So, they have been looking closely at the festival's funding," he continued, "They have questions, all these questions. Where the money goes, who it goes to. It's crazy, crazy. And our accounting - it has never been, shall we say - perfect? No one is accusing anyone of doing anything wrong. But they are investigating the books to see how the money was spent. It's all politics, of course. So, you understand what I mean?"

"They want to see results."

The Festival President shrugged and his hands came together once again in the little teepee on his desk.

"The new mayor," said Demo, "he wants buzz."

Our business is about "buzz," that indefinable spark of shared information, almost telepathic, that is heat and light and, eventually, gold at the box office. It is the excitement created mysteriously overnight in the dark of the moon, fanned by strategic expenditures until it becomes reality and, because it is a fragile illusion, disappears just as quickly.

Guys like Dennis Davidson, Nadia Bronson, Tony Angeolotti, Howard Brandy, Bobby Zarem, Walter Cowan - they knew how to do it, how to make the buzz happen as naturally as rain in April and the sun in June. They made fantastic amounts of money creating ideas and real value out of nothing, stuff that lives on today as legend: Madonna at Cannes mounting the red carpet and revealing her Gaultier bustier to the world. Snow on the Croisette in May for "Cliffhanger," with mountain climbers scaling the façade of the Carlton Hotel. How do you add up the impact in dollars? How can you quantify buzz? These guys were the masters, in the days when budgets could afford their mastery.

"Big stories in the American press. That's what we need."

"But Demo, our guest of honor this year is not a big story."

"He was big, not so long ago," sighed Demo. "Time moves on. It is sad."

"Sad for all of us. Demo. But press is going to be difficult. I can only work with what you've given me."

"He is not the hot young thing, I know," the Festival President nodded, peering down into his tent of fingers as though the past resided there. "Like the year we had Quentin Tarantino," he smiled. "Pulp Ficcione. Tarantino was hot."

"He and his friends tore up Stanco's."

"O boy, and more. The car crashing into the fountain in the plaza. The girl that claimed she was, you know - eh? And the riot outside the theater that night. It was magnificent. The town still talks about it."

"It cost the town a lot of money for Quentin Tarantino to be guest of honor."

"No, no, the studio paid. He was hot."

"Your guest of honor this year is not hot."

"I did not choose the guest of honor."

"You always choose the guest of honor, Demo."

"Not this year, unfortunately. No. It was the festival committee making the choice. The festival committee, which is headed by the new Mayor. The Stallion was his favorite movie as a boy."

"And he is the one who is so fond of the bottom line."

"He is the one who cut our budget. He also expects to see his favorite director celebrated in the press. Especially Variety."

He picked up a copy of the venerable entertainment industry trade newspaper with the famous green logo. Variety, "the Bible of Show Business," it was called.

"Why Variety? Why not the Hollywood Reporter, Moving Pictures, Screen International, Cinema Oggi?"

"I don't know," the Festival President said, putting the paper aside and returning to his finger tent. "The new mayor subscribes to Variety and don't ask me why, but he reads it religiously. Maybe he believes it puts him in the movie business."

 "Demo, why on earth would anyone want to be in the movie business when they could be mayor of San Lorenzo. Come on, what's the real reason?"

"You're a funny guy, Henry."

It was what he said when he didn't know what to say. I was a funny guy to him. He understood that my outlook on life was different from his own, but as long we could do business together, we talked the same language.

"My friend," he said, after the silence. "I will be quite frank. If the new mayor does not see a story in Variety about our guest of honor, preferably accompanied by a picture of the new mayor side by side with the guest of honor, I know this. He will fire me. If he fires me, then I'm afraid that you, too, my friend, are fired."

"That is the bottom line?"

 "Bottom line. Unfortunately," he said, the little tent he made with his fingers folding flat onto the worn surface of his desktop.

* * *

 

That afternoon in San Lorenzo, well before the end of the Festival when a journalist betrayed my trust and everything collapsed around us, I was not happy with the journalistic race.

I had to get Variety to interview my director or I would lose my PR job. Trouble was, the Festival had begun and it was too late. If you don't nail journalists down weeks in advance for interviews the very first day of a film festival you are utterly screwed. The men and women of the media, like children at a Sunday carnival, become easily distracted and rush off headlong in some absurd direction from which it is impossible to retrieve them.

Weeks of advance work had resulted in a round of interviews scheduled for my director on that particular day, including the trades and the electronic media, according to a day-by-day I'd methodically plotted out on a paper grid. For twenty-seven years that paper grid had bloody well worked.

Now the grid was red-marked with a rash of cancellations bollocks-ing everything. Entertainment Tonight saying it had to adjust its schedule to accommodate the fest's one semi-hot young director, a former rock video kid from the East End who'd made his first feature. The precious little punk's publicists were apologetic but unhelpful. Vanity Fair's writer was spending the day with the Hot Young Actor of the Festival's one big studio movie. The Hollywood Reporter promised to call in the morning but here it was well past noon and still no word.

Ordinarily Variety would have been no question, but this year I'd had no luck finding out whom they had sent to the festival, or if in fact they had sent anyone at all. I checked with the Medici desk but the Variety regulars - Walter Keel and Sandra Most (they alternated years covering San Lorenzo) - had not yet shown up.

My director sat in his room, becoming increasingly morose by the minute. Around two, after refusing lunch, he shuffled to the balcony and squinted into the sun, measuring the distance to the street below. He had been doing this with alarming frequency ever since he'd arrived.

"You know, there was a time when Ken Tynan was after me for months to do an interview and I simply refused. For the fucking New Yorker and I refused! He wrote about that in his diaries, you know, the ones they published with all of that spanking stuff. Ah, but no one cares anymore," he moaned. "Did you check with the front desk, Henry?"

I had. No messages. No calls. No word from the Hollywood producers who were deciding this weekend about the project he was supposed to direct, his first in eight years. A low-budget TV movie, some kind of boxing drama, it was going to have to be shot on digital video. A minimal crew, a second rate cast, a script so bad it had already been trashed. It was something he seemed reluctant to talk about so I avoided the subject.

"I should do everybody a favor and leap, just fucking jump right off this fucking balcony. Over. Be done with. Ba-dum."

The phone chirupped, bringing an awful twitch of hope to the director's face. But it was only the concierge telling me that he was sending a man up to fix the balcony door, as I'd requested. Just then came a knock.

"There's some kind of message at the desk," I fibbed. "I have to go down now. Come inside while they fix the door."

Two handymen entered. While my director went to lie down on his bed, they discreetly fixed the balcony door so that it locked shut from the exterior. The guest of honor's suicide at San Lorenzo would not be good PR for the Festival, and would probably terminate my annual sojourns at the Medici with Leticia, not to mention my career, such as it was.

Still, my director desperately needed to get some press. I made the case for going to Rassi's luncheon on Wednesday, because all of the journos would be there. But he was adamantly opposed.

"I hate these things, so sanctimonious about the great cause. Speeches, passing the plate, begging for money, etcetera," he ranted. "If I want to give money to some bloody charity I will bloody well do it quietly."

"So you'll go to the luncheon and just send a check later."

"No, damn it."

"Why not?"

"I said if I wanted to."

"Well, do you?"

"I don't want to, okay? So please don't fucking push this shit on me, Henry. And please don't fucking push this Rassi character on me, this phony baloney Count whatsisface. I don't like him. I don't like fucking San Lorenzo. I don't like this fucking hotel. I just want to get these damned interviews done and get out of this fucking place, get back to London and get back to my fucking work. Make movies instead of talking endless fucking nonsense with people who haven't a damned clue about movies or me or fuck all, for God's sakes. So where are they, all these reporters you've lined up, eh?"

Off I went to work. After thirty-five years in the business, I was still chasing down reporters, calling in favors, questioning the fucking meaning of life

 

* * *

 

The habitual chaos of the festival press office notwithstanding, the staff was helpful by giving me a name: Adam Jeffries. Variety. Registered just this morning. Staying at the Medici. I left a message for him in his box at the press office, went back to the Medici and called him in his room. No answer. I left another message and continued my hunt.

I caught up with Charles Mitchell, correspondent for the ---------------, coming out of the afternoon press screening, strolling purposefully up the Via Inglaterra which was thick with shoppers. Our reflections glided from one display window to the next, each one chock-a-block with women's shoes, arrays of watches and "designer" handbags of questionable provenance.

"Another so-so one from Spike Lee," he shrugged as we waited for a light at the corner in front of ArmaniXchange. "A brilliant filmmaker but he can‘t tell a story to save his life."

"Yes, but now you have the opportunity to interview a master story-teller."

"Your director, I presume," said Charles warily.

"I can tell you are eager."

"All of his stories were told twenty years ago."

"No one has told them quite like that since."

"True, but jeez, Henry, you -"

Knocked violently in mid-sentence sideways off the crowded sidewalk as the signal changed, Charles jumped back up on the curb and grabbed a young man with one ear glued to a cell phone whose shoulder had collided with his and he spun him around.

"You could say excuse me!"

"Piss off," snarled the kid, trying unsuccessfully to brush Charles' hand from his arm while keeping the cell phone pressed to his ear. Smallish, slender, with pink skin that was completely hairless, the fellow had an unformed fetus-like appearance, from which two malevolent eyes stared from underneath a blank brow.

Charles slapped the cell phone from the kid's hand, sending it skittering into the street.

A passing taxi made a crunching sound.

It was like one of those things you see in the movies. You wish you could do it, but never do. Charles did it. I recalled that Charles had played college ball - football or basketball, or some kind of team sport - and had done some kind of military service after university, covering several conflicts as a young reporter before switching to a less perilous beat. He was one of the few reporters I knew who was more than just words. He once told me he was an admirer of Hemingway.

But now I was afraid his action-movie macho had been a wrong choice as the kid reached into a back pocket and out came a folding knife that he showed us, but - with a glance around at the gathering crowd - slipped the blade back into his jeans pocket.

Onlookers smiled as the kid groped in the street for the unfortunate cell phone. He shoved the remains into his pocket and gave us the finger before taking off down the sidewalk.

"I think the little worm learned a lesson," said Charles coolly. "Now what were you saying?"

From that moment on, the kid we saw - and we saw him everywhere in San Lorenzo that week - was officially "The Worm."

As we continued without further incident, making a dogleg off the Via Inglaterra onto the sun-splashed esplanade of the Passagia, I made the case for why my director was a good and appropriate interview subject for his publication.

Charles looked at me to see how hard I was pushing; he must have seen I was serious because he finally quit parrying my points with jests.

"Look, honestly Henry, My editor, you understand. He wants stars. He wants a cover. Tits and ass. Hunks. Happening dudes."

"That's Cannes."

"I've run out of angles for San Lorenzo."

"I'm not asking for the bloody cover," I countered. I wasn't even asking him to write anything. Just a half hour interview one of the world's best-known directors, a classic filmmaker from the golden age of studio movies, for God's sake, I said.

"Think of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas."

"He's a washed-up, boring old fart and you know it," Charles said, playing the hard-ass reporter. "But for you, Henry. I'll do it for you. How about Friday?"

The festival would practically be over by Friday. But assuming my director didn't jump out of the window of his suite or wasn't strangled by his publicist, an interview by the famous and respected Charles Mitchell had been arranged.

"Thank you. And by the way," I said, "you wouldn't happen to know the guy from Variety would you? Jeffries - Adam Jeffries?"

"Jeffries? Search me. All those Variety bylines begin to blur after a while. See you in the Coronary later?"

 

* * *

 

Nora Callaway, the European cultural correspondent for -----------, was sipping tea and devouring pastries at her favorite café around the corner from the Castello. Women who knew Nora openly hated her because she could consume five-course meals topped off with trays of crème-puffs and custard tarts, never adding an inch to her slender figure.

"Oh, he is just the greatest. I've seen all his films," she said, wiping a dash of crème from the corner of her upper lip with a pinky. "But what does he have to say, Henry?"

"Don't give me a hard time," I said.

"Have a pastry, Henry, and don't fucking pitch me."

"Sorry, it's my job. He'll add some color to your wrap story."

"I did my wrap story before I got here. What I'm looking for is today, what's happening today in film. New talents using new technology. Breakout work by unknowns. I'm looking for innocence, Henry. Is there any innocence left in this business?"

"That's Sundance."

"I know that. You know that. Everybody knows that. But my editor doesn't. Anyway, what's he going to tell me, your director - about all the stars he's fucked in his life? How tedious."

"He's a just a lonely old guy at the short end of his career who happens to have made some of the greatest movies of the 20th Century," I said. "I think he might have one or two interesting things to say to the readers, or at least to some of your unknown new talents who, while they are busy with all that new technology, still have to use the old stuff. Plot, actors, dialogue, that sort of thing."

"It's sweet that you really do care, Henry. One of the very few. An endangered species."

"They have passed laws protecting me from journalists' sarcasm."

"I'm being as sincere as I can. Tell you what. Day after tomorrow. Rassi's luncheon - we'll do it there?"

I bit into an apple tart and said, "You're on."

"What's the matter? I can tell you're not happy."

I assured her that I was completely and utterly happy, now. The only thing was, I needed desperately to find the reporter from Variety - Jeffries. She hadn't by any chance run into him?

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"But, darling," she said, removing a spot of whipped cream from her pinky with a flick of her tongue. "Nobody takes Variety seriously."

 

* * *

 

By the time cocktail hour arrived, I needed and deserved a nerve-tonic. The Coronary Bar was in full swing. Waiters hustled trays of drinks around the crowded room. The air was thick with Marlboro Light and heavy talk and the slightly hysterical laughter of people on the make.

A quieter group - the AMOCC folks who traveled as a tribe from festival to festival - congregated at their usual spot in one corner. They were the Alliance Mondiale Critiques Cinématographique, an association of rather testy international film critics headed by Duncan Thistlewaite, editor of Cinema Journal. AMOCC rated the festivals according to some magical formula and fought over it constantly, among countless other issues. The rating was not even supposed to exist. However, everyone understood that Cannes, Venice, Toronto were all "A" level festivals. Others were "B" level. San Lorenzo had always been "A," but word had it that AMOCC was re-considering. Something else for Demo to worry about.

You could tell the festival was really underway because the Lavender Twins had taken their customary place at the bar, occupying two barstools in the very middle. They were two not-unattractive women - one older, one younger - who wandered around the streets day and night during the festival dressed head-to-toe in purple.

Rumored to be either sisters or a mother-daughter team, the Twins lacked any resemblance to one another but for their matching gear. No photo layout on the San Lorenzo Film Festival was complete without a cameo appearance by the Lavender Twins. Tourists stopped them in the street to have their pictures taken, arms entwined with the Lavender Twins.

I happened to know (because Demo told me) that they were Monegasque working girls, entirely unrelated, on a bit of a lark. They cadged party tickets for the free food and to rub shoulders with movie stars, they conned their way into premieres (you would see them on the red carpet sometimes) and they whimsically plied their trade from twin perches at the bar in the Medici Hotel.

I started for my own usual spot, a table in the corner by the window, but saw somebody had occupied it. I attempted to cross the room to claim my turf but was stopped by Myra Kilgore, a tall, large-boned PMK hand-holder with a horse-face and a claxon voice much feared among the press. Her ability to say no could easily go beyond a simple denial of a request to interview the celebrities in her custody and become a knife at the throat of a journalist's career if she thought she was being crossed.

Nobody fucked with Myra Kilgore. In actuality she was the devoted single mother of two boys and a behind-the-scenes AIDS activist whose husband had died in the plague's early days after a tainted blood transfusion. She did not suffer fools gladly. And at San Lorenzo she ran the AIDS benefit luncheon hosted by Count Rassi each year at his fabulous villa.

"Don't tell me you aren't coming to Rassi's with your director or I'll murder you," she honked at me. "We need star power!"

"He'll come," I assured her. "And the usual suspects?"

She gestured toward the outside terrace where a group of a dozen or so journalists and critics sat around a table.

"Look at them, Henry. Huddled together as usual for mutual protection. Like birds."

"Protection from you and me, Myra?"

"They hate us because they can't do without us," she said, adding her signature line: "But baby, it just ain't my fault."

A few were good at their jobs: Corbett from The Hollywood Reporter and Petrone from Screen International and Billy Vaughn from Moving Pictures lifting a glass with his former colleague Peggy Ziegler who now did special issues for the Reporter, and Ed Loomis from the Village Voice, arguing with shaggy Kirk Dennison, the lead critic from the LA Times. In fact, it was the simple herding instinct that brought them together, the underpaid and unkempt in slightly shabby wardrobe. Harmless, most of them, and lacking in true guile (unlike some of us) they stood slurring gossip over ill-kept teeth, trading second-hand opinions and worn-out scraps of malignant hearsay.

No publicist worth his salt begrudged a reporter who did the job assiduously and honestly. It was only through carelessness, or sheer laziness, that the bastards caused real damage.

"Is Adam Jeffries among them?"

"Beg your pardon?"

"The Variety guy. Jeffries."

"Don't know him. Is he new?"

"Must be. Nobody seems to know him."

"That revolving door," Kilgore observed. "Never know who or what you're going to get from Variety. But you'll run into him, no worry. The Face-To-Face Axiom, remember?"

The Face-To-Face Axiom was one of the peculiar syndromes endemic to festival life: you never ran into people when you were looking for them but you were sure to into them when you weren't.

"See you at Rassi's," she warned. "I'm not kidding about your director."

"See you there, Myra."

No sooner had I extracted myself from Myra Kilgore's clutches then I turned to find Artie Delfont bearing down on me.

"Thought I'd snag you here, Henry."

"Nowhere else to run to, Artie," I said without smiling.

Delfont positioned his lanky frame so that there was no escape and with anxious wave of his arm wiped the sweat away from the sparse strands of combed over hair criss-crossing his brow. A kind of Terry Thomas look-alike, complete with gap-tooth, brushy moustache and slightly frantic old-school affectations, Artie was always sweating, summer, winter, spring or fall. A sweat gland for all seasons.

 "Aha - I hear that tone of voice, now, old chap. Can't you at least allow me to buy you a libation?"

"Got somebody waiting, Artie."

"Can't be still holding a grudge, Henry."

"Grudges I let go. IOU's I hold on to."

"Pin it on my late partner, poor soul. He snookered me, too. Ah, but that was years ago. We've been over all of this before, you and I."

"Yes," I said, "we certainly have," and I started to leave but he grabbed my arm.

"Saw Angie yesterday."

"In London?"

"Here. Arrived same time at the airport. Shared a cab. She's here with a picture. Some documentary."

"Didn't see her listed in the program."

"Not a completed picture - one she's researching, I believe. The Jews of San Lorenzo, or something."

"There are no Jews in San Lorenzo."

It was one of the oft-repeated bad jokes of the San Lorenzo Film Festival was: "there are no Jews in San Lorenzo - except when the festival's on."

I never thought it was all that funny, but the joke took off on the well-worn rumor that in this particular Italian Riviera resort town the local population of Jews had been all but wiped out during the war through the complicity of their fellow San Lorenzanos.

Nevertheless, it never prevented any of the festival-goers from having a jolly good time over the many years. It could even be said that the rumor provided a sort of perverse frisson. The sour-faced old waiter bringing you the bronzino at, say, the very popular Tre Fiori - well, now, don't you know (your dinner companion would whisper) that bloke was once a Fascist collaborator who sold out his neighbors to the SS execution squads?

Pure rubbish, of course. Rico, the Tre Fiori's avowed communist owner, would never have allowed fascists on his staff (ex-bomb-throwing leftists, maybe). But at film festivals, a world unto themselves, rumors tend to take on a life of their own, and at San Lorenzo it became a moral question, when dining at certain restaurants, whether to leave a tip.

"No Jews. Well, for Angie, a minor obstacle, I'm sure. Well, we'll have some laughs together, Henry, the three of us. Like old times?"

For a time they'd actually gone out together, after our break-up, Delfont and my ex-wife, Angie. She'd been a budding film producer then. Delfont knew his way around money circles. I'd always thought it was a business arrangement that had turned into an affair. But I could never get rid of the suspicion that it had been the other way around. The very sight of Delfont, therefore, made me queasy, though it had been some twenty-odd years since my wife and I split.

"Answer me this, my friend. What is the bird of peace?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Come on, Henry - what's the bird of peace?"

"One of your jokes? Please -"

"The dove. Right. Now, tell me - what's the bird of wisdom?"

"The owl."

"Good. What's the bird of love?"

"Sorry, I give up."

"Swallow. Hey - I've got a job for you, Henry. Five grand in it if you're keen."

Artie Delfont was notorious for bad jokes and creative financing schemes that invariably lost money. Like some awful horror movie sequel, he always seemed to pop up with new money, new partners, a new plot that was the old plot.

And he always had a job for me. I once ran into Delfont at the Meridian Hotel off Piccadilly during the days of the London Screenings. He was pushing Soviet war bonds as an investment opportunity, claiming that due to a recent court decision they could be redeemed at fifty percent face value in rubles. He showed me a trunk full of them on his bed, right next to a couple of West End hookers. I could have my share of both bonds and bimbos if only I'd place a little story in the trades, etcetera, and etcetera.

Still, Artie Delfont was always amusing, intelligent, and well connected in weird ways. He'd actually been to Oxford, spoke a bushel of languages, and was a distant cousin (or so he claimed) of the producer and theatrical impresario Sir Bernard Delfont.

He affected a curiously conspiratorial manner. With Artie there was always a giant scheme in play involving just about everybody (unbeknownst to them, of course), and he had selected you, only you, as his confidante, to share his clandestine world chock full of inside stories on things and "the real dope" on so-and-so - mostly, if one bothered to check up, bilious recycled tabloid fictions clinging to a parched shred of fact.

Artie Delfont was darkly rumored to have succumbed at school to the brandy and blandishments of those old deans who picked out the bright young things to recruit for MI5. He did nothing to dispel the rumors - it was good business to encourage others to think he possessed privileged information and perhaps even a fey side to his personality. Put everyone off balance and, truth be told, oftentimes - or just often enough - he did have excellent inside poop.

I'd often thought the occupation of foreign sales agent in the film business was perfect cover for a spy. They travel internationally peddling distribution rights to movies: MIFED in Milan in November, American Film Market in Santa Monica in February, Cannes in May and festivals like San Lorenzo year round. Meet lots of people professionally. Collect economic information on foreign territories as well as intimate information on individuals including those dodgy government types assigned to cultural bureaus. Have reason to possess documents full of numbers that could be coded messages.

But then again, real spies probably couldn't lie, cheat or backstab well enough to be really good foreign sales agents.

"Who do you want killed?"

"Henry, please," he said, pursing his lips and twirling the end of his moustache to show he was secretly flattered. "Got a new company, my partners and I. Got some big pictures with star elements. Brad Pitt is reading one of our scripts as we speak. Just need to position a little story in the trades. Pay you ten thousand cash. Five upfront. Taxman will never tip. Can you swing it, old boy?"

"I don't do corporate publicity. I'm strictly talent now."

"You used to do corporate. You were the best."

"Can't we stay in the present tense?"

He was about to say something but suddenly someone was shoving a cell phone in his face - it was the kid who had bumped Charles on the sidewalk - The Worm - with a new phone.

"Yes," said Delfont, taking the call. "Yes - I will. Of course I am. I'm chatting with him now."

The Worm peered at me from beneath his pink brow, trying (I was sure) to recall where we'd met before. If he recognized me from the sidewalk incident earlier that day with Charles, he said nothing. Delfont handed him the cell phone and he slid away into the crowd.

"Who was that?"

"Ari Safta."

"No, that kid."

"Ari Safta's assistant. Ari wants to know if you're on."

The look on my face must have said it all.

"Don't get snobbish on me now," he said. "You're going to like Ari. He really knows how to produce movies. But surely you've met Ari?"

I'd never actually met Safta - a B-movie producer - though I'd seen him around at film business functions. Safta was the new money on the block. There was talk that he was seeking to produce a higher-level of movies than the direct-to-video action fare that he'd been involved with to date, that he received an injection of cash, stories in the trades that he was making offers to big stars. But I'd never met him. It was not at all snobbish thing on my part. The kind of business he did was simply not the kind of business I was in.

"Line of credit out of Luxembourg," Delfont said, snagging a passing waiter and ordering two glasses of wine. "Tax shelter deal."

"Is there a press release, anything on paper?" The cash was tempting, especially since the envelope of lira that usually paid my daily expense was lacking.

In actual fact, I confess was in a serious financial quandary, not knowing if I would be able to pay my own way through the entire Festival. My credit cards were tapped out. I had very little in the way of funds to draw on. Shutting down Henry Dean Associates had proven to be an expensive proposition. I had uncovered debts, concealed for years like the dust behind my desk. I'd been sued by a dismissed and disgruntled employee and had to settle. Various fees and taxes sapped the rest of the money I'd put away for a rainy day.

Now the rainy day was here in the bright sunshine of San Lorenzo and to be frank, I was broke, which was why I was living most of the time in the guest cottage on daughter's estate in Surrey and looking forward to the Festival. The envelope of expense cash I usually received from Demo - only a fraction of which I actually spent at the festival - factored critically into my annual income.

"So you'll do it?"

"There has to be an angle, a peg. This Luxembourg tax shelter deal - "

"Wouldn't want to talk about the Luxembourg tax shelter deal, old sport. Under the radar, very much so."

"Well, I don't know, Artie -"

"Can't we just leak the story to the trades? You know how to manage these things."

"Sounds less than kosher."

"Pay you in advance, Henry."

"I don't think so."

"Ten thousand. I'm sure Ari will go for it. Five upfront."

"We'll talk later, Artie."

It was a tough decision, to take on this dirty little job. Ten grand, in cash tax-free, was a very attractive proposition. But my immediate mission was to find the reporter from Variety, whoever he was, get him to interview my director, and save the job I already had.

I found my way to my customary table, the one reserved for me in the Coronary Bar for the past quarter-century, with a vantage point from which to observe the comings and goings in the busy bar. Much to my annoyance found it occupied.

"May I?"

The young man sitting there looked up, shrugged, and went back to scribbling in one of those long top-hinged spiral notebooks that reporters carry. I took the empty seat.

"Any big stories today?" I hazarded.

He shrugged again. "Working on it," he said, grimly.

We sat there in silence after a waiter took my order, which included a second red wine for my new companion and the same for me. The waiter returned to pour a mid-1980's vintage Gaja Costa Russi Barbaresco, an awesome Piedmontese that could have aged another few years but was in full and hearty bloom from the very first sip. I complimented the young man on his connoisseurship.

"I don't really know wine," he said. "I just ordered red."

I offered my hand across the table and introduced myself.

"Harry Dean. You're a PR guy aren't you? "

"Henry, actually."

 "I'm Adam Jeffries," he replied. "Variety."

He was slight, with pale blotchy skin and thin blond hair. If forced to guess his age I might have said eighteen, although Variety usually hired staffers with more experience. But times were hard in the journalism world, with Internet companies having hired away all the veterans and pulling the best and brightest out journalism schools, paying them inflated salaries (only to fire them later when the dot-com boom went bust). Now there was a lot of high-priced talent wanting to come back in, but the jobs were all taken. These were good times for any half-assed intern who had moved from delivering faxes one day to covering a studio beat the next at half the salary of a veteran staffer.

"So, how do you like San Lorenzo so far?"

 "It's okay," he shrugged.

"Your first time?"

"No. I came through here with my parents once. On vacation. I was in school."

 That must have been last summer I was going to say, but held my tongue. "You're based in Paris or Rome?" I said.

"London."

"Guy Stevens is a terrific editor."

"You know him?"

"He covered San Lorenzo for almost as many years as I've been coming. In fact, I talked with him a few weeks ago. I don't recall him mentioning that were you coming. Usually it's Walter Keel or Sandra Most."

"Keel retired. Most moved over to Financial Times. I was with Screen Digest until last week."

"Walter and Sandra were good reporters."

Jeffries looked hard at me, trying to take my measure. He must have come to some conclusion, one that was apparently distasteful to him.

 "You're HDA, right? Is that still in business?"

"Here I work for the Festival."

"I do my own reporting. I don't need PR guys to pitch me stories. Just so you know."

"That's great," I said. "I always respect reporters who do their own reporting, who know exactly what's going on and what they're after. Since you're based in London you probably already know that the Festival's guest of honor is a British director."

"He's British?" Jeffries looked at me quizzically.

"You've probably already interviewed him and have that story filed."

He stared sourly. The young man evinced an unpleasant air of shyness, aggression and ignorance, one trait feeding hungrily off the others. I decided it was time to take control.

"Stevens said to me that getting an interview was a priority - didn't he tell you? Or maybe that assignment fell through the cracks."

"I'm not doing celebrity fluff pieces or reviewing movies," Jeffries said firmly. "If that's what you're pitching."

I said I wasn't pitching anything. But if he wasn't here for the movies or the celebs - what exactly, I asked, was he doing here - color stories? He should do something on the Lavender Twins.

"What are the Lavender Twins?"

I pointed them out. He squinted across the room at the weird women in purple, then looked back at me, searching for a sign that I was kidding.

"I'm a financial reporter," he said stiffly.

"A financial reporter?"

"That's right."

"Follow the money - that sort of thing?"

"Uh huh."

"Let's see, now. You're doing a financial story on the San Lorenzo Film Festival. How it's funded, where the money goes - ?"

"No, not really," he said. "Why - is that a story?"

He stared at me like a bad poker player. I told him I was just guessing, that's all. Should he call my bluff or had his own been called? He sipped at his wine, trying to figure it out, and glanced away, out toward the beautiful bay whence some vague inspiration seemed to spur him into word.

"My editor wants me to get into the financial aspects of the European film business. An in-depth inquiry, sort of. How movies are being put together on an international level. Subsidies. Tax shelter deals. There are some loopholes that are being abused. Like the Luxembourg tax shelter deal. You know about the Luxembourg tax shelter deal?"

I said I'd heard of it.

"I hear that a lot of money laundering is happening through Luxembourg tax shelters. I'm trying to find somebody to talk about that."

I said maybe I might know somebody.

"It's got to be somebody who knows finance. Really knows it."

"I think I just might know some financial types who can help you out."

"Really?"

"In fact, I'm sure of it," I said seriously. "In the meantime, there are still a few interview slots open - the director I was talking about? Let me know when I can set it up for you."

"I'll take a pass on the director. But let me know on the finance types. I'm staying here at the Medici."

"I know that."

He stared at me. "You know everything, don't you?"

"I know this much," I said. "I know it is highly unlikely that you will get to these financial types through me without doing the interview with my director."

"I get it," he said, his face bending into a smirk. "You're asking me to trade favors. I don't trade favors. I just don't work that way. Some of us journalists actually have ethics, you know."

"Thank you for reminding me," I said, standing up, reaching across the table to shake his hand. "But as part of a wide-ranging, in-depth inquiry into the nature of contemporary filmmaking, you might do yourself a favor and interview the award-winning director of more than sixty feature films as an essential step towards something vaguely resembling journalistic truth. I'm here at the Medici, room 765."

"I'll think about it," said Jeffries, placing a cool, damp paw in my hand and allowing it a limp wriggle. I stifled a shudder and walked off.

The little prick and his ethics didn't even pay for his glass of wine for which the thieving bar charged me an outrageous twenty pounds in addition to my own.

 

* * *

 

The crowd at the Miramax party that evening was the usual cross section of the international film business, a multi-lingual mélange of buyers and sellers in bad suits, heavy accents, choppy haircuts and frequent-flyer pallor. The commodities dealt by these unglamorous merchants could have been anything: wheat futures, steel, oil, or hog bellies. In this case the commodity happened to be motion pictures featuring glamorous movie stars and the global distribution rights to those films.

There was Kirk D'Amico, the head of Myriad Films, with a couple of German financiers... Robbert Aarts from the buttoned-down Dutch banking firm that quietly collected everyone's millions in residuals and royalties... Guy East, Nigel Sinclair and Moritz Borman, the three co-chairmen of Intermedia, along with some of their Munich-based moneymen and Jere Hausfater, their major domo of international sales, all of whom would eventually split up and form new companies, make new movies, spend millions, lose millions and somehow continue.

Harvey Weinstein was presiding, of course, since it was his party. The Miramax mogul stood with his brother Bob, chatting with a couple of young and hopeful honeys... this was well before they abandoned the company named after their mom and dad to its financiers at Disney and started another.

In walked Rita Rusic, fresh from another court battle with ex-husband, Vittorio Cecci Gori, at one time Italy's biggest distributor, now in mired in bankruptcy and scandal... Gianni Nunnari, who used to work for Vitorrio, now out for himself... Gordon Steel, the reigning buyers' consultant with his Pony Canyon clients from Japan... Avi Lerner and his partner Danny Dimbort from Nu Image with their star Jean-Claude Van Damme, in town to promote his latest actioner... wandering expectantly was the former head of New Line International, Massimo Gracioso, still out there selling direct-to-video fare... Graham King, the burly head of International Entertainment Group (they were some of the money behind Scorsese's "Gangs of New York"), Maxine Leonard and Nikki Parker who together represented King through their Denmead Marketing, looking anxious at their client's side.

Leaning against the bar was the dapper Errol Easterman who was fired years ago from Miramax International for (I'd heard someone once say) "getting his hand caught in the cookie jar." He was trying to get the attention of Patrick Wachsberger, the suave master salesman of some of the industry's biggest blockbusters, but Wachsberger was attentive only to the blonde at his side who, in a departure from many festival couples, happened to be his charming wife, Margie.

Charles was talking intently with Cassian Elwes, of the talented Elwes brothers (Cary, the actor) who ran the William Morris indie division with Rena Ronson. Charles paid no attention to Nora, seated in a corner with Chiara Mastroianni. Of the two women it was difficult to say which was more beautiful.

I had to admire the restraint and discipline Charles maintained in keeping his illicit connection with Nora under wraps in this very public situation... except for one single lapse when I looked up at the sound of Nora's laugh and Charles looked up too, catching her eye across the room: his festival wife winked slightly. Something almost physical passed between them before the flowing crowd intervened.

Anjelica Huston and her husband Robert Graham, the sculptor (she'd directed another picture) passed through the room... David Linde, who was then head of international for Good Machine, chatted with Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, former partners in the once-high-flying Carolco Pictures... Robert Dowling, the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, before the publication was bought by a hedge fund and fell on hard times. Across the room, his competitor Peter Bart, Variety's aloof editor-in-chief, huddled with his London-based editor Lou Gustofson who always took me aside at these things and told me what was "really going on."

Tonight Gustofson and I exchanged a bundle of information about who was screwing whom and which companies were going down and what filmmakers were hot and which were not. Of course the business had been going downhill for some time, ever since the video boom and bust of the Eighties when there was plenty of money and opportunity to make movies seemed endless. Now, if you were in the movie business, life was a struggle.

But Gustofson, from a main street California town where the local movie theater outdrew the church down the block in attendance, was an eternal optimist about movies; he believed in the essential virtue of film. Filmmakers were his saints and as long as the cameras rolled, there was hope in the world. For him, film festivals and their ecumenical call to the faithful were evidence of human continuity, no matter what filthy wars or calamities were tearing up the far corners of the planet.

His concept was seductive, and for a moment I succumbed to the warm feeling (or maybe it was the wine) as I gazed across the room at the people I saw year after year at festival after festival, their faces grown older. Even after all this time, here we stood, this unruly clan of worthies linked by love of the universal art of cinema and sustained by its global commerce. Others following in our wake would surely carry our banner valiantly into the future forever and nothing would change.

But later, alone in the darkened hotel room with the marine air rippling the curtains, I awoke with a start to the anxious tolling of a boat horn beyond the bay and the remnants of a dream in which a kelp-draped coffin adrift in the sea bobbed on blackish waves, tide-borne until it bumped painfully ashore.

My unpleasant dream left a melancholy aftertaste. The dirge of a far-off boat horn seemed to carry the portent of something coming to an end. The imminent arrival of things that would, in ways both subtle and hugely violent, wrench the world from its familiar moorings and send it sailing rudderless across dark waters.

On this night I stepped out on the balcony of my room to see off to the left the village bathed in blue, the bay glassy and tranquil to where it kissed the sea wall stones. Amber halos of briny mist strung a necklace of street lamps around the deserted curvature of the Passagia, gathering into vaporous fingers to grope beyond the chiaroscuro of tourist hotels and retirement condos back up into the black maze of streets to trouble the dreams of San Lorenzanos slumbering beneath the raised brow of mountains.

My watch said 4:45 am. I turned to go inside, but a small light caught my eye, dancing on the rocky cliffs to my right. I could see the silhouette of a man walking there and the phantom orb of a flashlight. It came to rest on the rocky point, in the hand of a solitary soul standing still. He appeared to be gazing up at the hotel. I could not discern his features at that distance in the swirl of the mist, but there was something curiously familiar about him - the stiff set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, but I could not place him in my mind. Then, ghost-like, he was gone.

I went back inside and lay awake until dawn, prodded by an ineffable fear that attacks everyone in this business: could this deal carry me through another day?

 

Next week's episode: The Dirty Deal and My Ex-Wife

Last week episode Chapter one

 

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