The Winner Stands Alone

  (b) the pale, who scurry from one gloomy office to the next, watching auditions, and either seeing some really good films that will be lost in the welter of other things on offer, or having to put up with some real horrors that might just win a place in the sun (among the tanned) because the makers know the right people.

  Javits Wild, of course, sports an enviable tan.

  THE FESTIVAL THAT TAKES OVER this small city in the south of France for twelve days, putting up prices, allowing only authorized cars to drive through the streets, and filling the airport with private jets and the beaches with models, isn't just a red carpet surrounded by photographers, a carpet along which the big stars walk on their way into the Palais des Congres. Cannes isn't about fashion, it's about cinema!

  What strikes you most is the luxury and the glamour, but the real heart of the Festival is the film industry's huge parallel market: buyers and sellers from all over the world who come together to do deals on films that have already been made or to talk investments and ideas. On an average day, four hundred movies are shown, most of them in apartments hired for the duration, with people perched uncomfortably on beds, complaining about the heat and demanding that their every whim be met, from bottles of mineral water up, and leaving the people showing the film with their nerves in tatters and frozen smiles on their faces, for it's essential to agree to everything, to grant every wish, because what matters is having the chance to show something that has probably been years in the making.

  However, while these forty-eight hundred new productions are fighting tooth and nail for a chance to leave that hotel room and get shown in a proper cinema, the world of dreams is setting off in a different direction: the new technologies are gaining ground, people don't leave their houses so much anymore because they don't feel safe, or because they have too much work, or because of all those cable TV stations where you can usually choose from about five hundred films a day and pay almost nothing.

  Worse still, the Internet has made anyone and everyone a filmmaker. Specialist portals show films of babies walking, men and women being decapitated in wars, or women who exhibit their bodies merely for the pleasure of knowing that the person watching them will be enjoying their own moment of solitary pleasure, films of people "freezing" in Grand Central Station, of traffic accidents, sports clips, and fashion shows, films made with hidden video cameras intent on embarrassing the poor innocents who walk past them.

  Of course, people do still go out, but they prefer to spend their money on restaurant meals and designer clothes because they can get everything else on their high-definition TV screens or on their computers.

  The days when everyone knew who had won the Palme d'Or are long gone. Now, if you ask who won last year, even people who were actually there at the Festival won't be able to remember. "Some Romanian, wasn't it?" says one. "I'm not sure, but I think it was a German film," says another. They'll sneak off to consult the catalogue and discover that it was an Italian, whose films, it turns out, are only shown at art cinemas.

  After a period of intense competition with video rentals, cinemas started to prosper again, but now they seem to be entering another period of decline, having to compete with Internet rentals, with pirating and those DVDs of old films that are given away free with newspapers. This makes distribution an even more savage affair. If one of the big studios considers a new release to be a particularly large investment, they'll try to ensure that it's being shown in the maximum number of cinemas at the same time, leaving little space for any new film venturing onto the market.

  And the few adventurous souls who decide to take the risk--despite all the arguments against--discover too late that it isn't enough to have a quality product. The cost of getting a film into cinemas in the large capitals of the world is prohibitive, what with full-page advertisements in newspapers and magazines, receptions, press officers, promotion junkets, ever more expensive teams of people, sophisticated filming equipment, and increasingly scarce labor. And the most difficult problem of all: finding someone who will distribute the film.

  And yet every year it goes on, the trudging from place to place, the appointments, the Superclass who are interested in everything except what's being shown on the screen, the companies prepared to pay a tenth of what is reasonable just to give some filmmaker the "honor" of having his or her work shown on television, the requests that the film be reworked so as not to offend families, the demands for the film to be recut, the promises (not always kept) that if the script is changed completely to focus on one particular theme, a contract will be issued next year.

  People listen and accept because they have no option. The Superclass rules the world; their arguments are subtle, their voices soft, their smiles discreet, but their decisions are final. They know. They accept or reject. They have the power. And power doesn't negotiate with anyone, only with itself. However, all is not lost. In the world of fiction and in the real world, there is always a hero.

  AND MAUREEN IS STARING PROUDLY at one such hero now! The great meeting that is finally going to take place in two days' time after nearly three years of work, dreams, phone calls, trips to Los Angeles, presents, favors asked of friends in her Bank of Favors, and the influence of an ex-boyfriend of hers, who had studied with her at film school, then decided it was much safer to work for an important film magazine than risk losing both his head and his money.

  "I'll talk to Javits," the ex-boyfriend had said. "But he doesn't need anyone, not even the journalists who can promote or destroy his products. He's above all that. We once tried getting together an article trying to find out how it is that he has all these cinema owners eating out of his hand, but no one he works with was prepared to say anything. I'll talk to him, but I can't put any pressure on him."

  He did talk to him and got him to watch The Secrets of the Cellar. The following day, she received a phone call, saying that Javits would meet her in Cannes.

  At the time, Maureen didn't even dare to say that she was just ten minutes by taxi from his office; instead they arranged to meet in this far-off French city. She bought a plane ticket to Paris, caught a train that took all day to reach Cannes, showed her voucher to the bad-tempered manager of a cheap hotel, installed herself in her single room where she had to climb over her luggage to reach the bathroom, and (again thanks to her ex-boyfriend) wangled invitations to a few second-rate events--a promotion for a new brand of vodka or the launch of a new line in T-shirts--but it was far too late to apply for the pass that would allow her into the Palais des Festivals et des Congres.

  She has overspent her budget, traveled for more than twenty hours, but she will at least get her ten minutes. And she's sure that she'll emerge with a contract and a future before her. Yes, the movie industry is in crisis, but so what? Movies (however few) are still making money, aren't they? Big cities are plastered with posters advertising new movies. And what are celebrity magazines full of? Gossip about movie stars! Maureen knows--or, rather, believes--that the death of cinema has been declared many times before, and yet still it survives. "Cinema was dead" when television arrived. "Cinema was dead" when video rentals arrived. "Cinema was dead" when the Internet began allowing access to pirate sites. But cinema is still alive and well in the streets of this small Mediterranean town, which, of course, owes its fame to the Festival.

  Now it's simply a case of making the most of this manna from heaven. And of accepting everything, absolutely everything. Javits Wild is here. He has seen her film. The subject of the film is spot-on: sexual exploitation, voluntary or forced, was getting a lot of media attention after a series of cases that had hit the headlines worldwide. It is just the right moment for The Secrets of the Cellar to appear on the posters put up by the distribution chain he controlled.

  Javits Wild, the rebel with a cause, the man who was revolutionizing the way films reached the wider public. Only the actor Robert Redford had tried something similar with his Sundance Film Festival for independent filmmakers, but nevertheless, after decades of effor
t, Redford still hadn't managed to break through the barrier into a world that mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States, Europe, and India. Javits, though, was a winner.

  Javits Wild, the savior of filmmakers, the great legend, the ally of minority interests, the friend of artists, the new patron, who obviously used some very intelligent system (she had no idea what it was, but she knew it worked) to reach cinemas all around the world.

  Javits Wild has arranged a ten-minute meeting with her in two days' time. This can mean only one thing, that he has accepted her project and that everything else is merely a matter of detail.

  "I will accept everything, absolutely everything," she repeats.

  Obviously, in those ten minutes, Maureen won't have a chance to say a word about what she has been through in the seven years (yes, a quarter of her life) that have gone into making her film. There will be no point in telling him that she went to film school, directed a few commercials, made two short films that were warmly received in various small-town cinemas or in alternative bars in New York. That in order to raise the million dollars needed for a professional production, she had mortgaged the house she inherited from her parents. That this was her one chance because she didn't have another house to mortgage.

  She had watched as her fellow students, after much struggling, opted for the comfortable world of commercials--of which there were more and more--or some safe but obscure job in one of the many companies that made TV series. After the warm reception given to her short films, she began to dream of higher things and then there was no stopping her.

  She was convinced she had a mission: to make the world a better place for future generations, by getting together with like-minded people, to show that art isn't just a way of entertaining or amusing a lost society; by exposing world leaders as the flawed people they are; by saving the children who were now dying of hunger somewhere in Africa; by speaking out about environmental problems; by putting an end to social injustice.

  This was, of course, an ambitious project, but she was sure she would achieve it if only through sheer doggedness. To do this she needed to purify her soul, and so she turned to the four forces that had always guided her: love, death, power, and time. We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that such power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations.

  Caught in the web of time she might be, but she could still work on what gave her pleasure and filled her with enthusiasm. And through her films, she could make her contribution to a world that seemed to be disintegrating around her and could try to change reality and transform human beings.

  WHEN HER FATHER DIED, AFTER complaining all his life that he had never had the chance to do what he had always dreamed of doing, she realized something very important: transformations always occur during moments of crisis.

  She didn't want to end her life as he had. She wouldn't like to have to tell her daughter: "There was something I wanted to do and there was even a point when I could have done it, but I just didn't have the courage to take the risk." When she received her inheritance, she knew then that it had been given to her for one reason only: to allow her to fulfill her destiny.

  She accepted the challenge. Unlike other adolescent girls who always dreamed of being famous actresses, her dream had been to tell stories that subsequent generations could see, smile at, and dream about. Her great example was Citizen Kane. That first film by a radio producer who wanted to make an expose of a powerful American press magnate became a classic not just because of its story, but because it dealt in a creative and innovative manner with the ethical and technical problems of the day. All it took was one film to gain eternal fame.

  "His first film."

  It was possible to get it right the first time. Even though its director, Orson Welles, never made anything as good again. Even though he had disappeared from the scene (that does happen) and was now only studied in courses about cinema, someone was sure to "rediscover" his genius sooner or later. Citizen Kane wasn't his only legacy; he had proved to everyone that if your first step was good enough, you would never lack for invitations thereafter. And she would take up those invitations. She had promised herself that she would never forget the difficulties she had been through and that her life would contribute to dignifying human life.

  And since there can only ever be one first film, she had poured all her physical efforts, her prayers, and her emotional energy into one project. Unlike her friends, who were always firing off scripts, proposals, and ideas, only to end up working on several things at once without any of them ever really coming to anything, Maureen dedicated herself body and soul to The Secrets of the Cellar, the story of five nuns who are visited by a sex maniac. Instead of trying to convert him to Christian salvation, they realize that the only way they can communicate with him is by accepting the norms of his aberrant world; they decide to surrender their bodies to him so that he can understand the glory of God through love.

  Her plan was a simple one. Hollywood actresses, however famous they might be, usually disappear from the cast lists when they reach thirty-five. They still continue to appear in the pages of the celebrity magazines, are seen at charity auctions and big parties; they embrace humanitarian causes, and when they realize that they really are about to vanish from the spotlight entirely, they start to get married or have messy divorces and create public scandals--and all for a few months, weeks, or days of glory. In that period between unemployment and total obscurity, money is of no importance. They will take any role if it gives them a chance to appear on screen.

  Maureen approached actresses who, less than a decade earlier, had been at the top of the tree, but who now sensed that the ground was beginning to slip away from under them and that they desperately needed to get back to the way things were. It was a good script; she sent it to their agents, who demanded an absurd salary and got a straightforward no as an answer. Her next step was to approach each actress individually. She told them that she had the money for the project, and they all ended up accepting on the understanding that no one would know that they were working for almost nothing.

  In something like the film industry, there was no point in being humble. Sometimes, the ghost of Orson Welles would appear to her in dreams: "Try the impossible. Don't start low down because that's where you are now. Climb those rungs quickly before they take the ladder away. If you're afraid, say a prayer, but carry on." She had an excellent script, a first-class cast, and knew that she had to produce something that was acceptable to the big studios and distributors, but without sacrificing quality. It was possible and, indeed, obligatory for art and commerce to go hand-in-hand. As for the rest, well, the rest consisted of various things: the kind of critic who's into mental masturbation and who loves films no one else understands; the small alternative circuits where the same half dozen people emerge from showings and spend the small hours in bars, smoking and discussing one particular scene (whose meaning was, very possibly, quite different from the one intended when it was filmed); directors giving lectures to explain what should be obvious to the audience; trade union meetings calling for more state aid for domestic cinema; manifestos in intellectual magazines--the result of interminable meetings, at which the same old complaints were made about the government's lack of interest in supporting the arts; the occasional letter published in the serious press and usually read only by the interested parties or the families of the interested parties.

  Who changes the world? The Superclass. Those who do. Those who alter the behavior, hearts, and minds of the largest possible number of people.

  That's why she wanted Javits, an Oscar, and Cannes.

  And since she couldn't get those things "democratically"--other people were very
willing to offer advice, but never to shoulder any of the risks--she simply gambled everything. She took on whoever was available, spent months rewriting the script, persuaded excellent--but unknown--art directors, designers, and supporting actors to take part, promising them almost no money, only increased visibility in the future. They were all impressed by the names of the five main actresses ("The budget must be astronomical!"), and initially asked for large salaries, but ended up convinced that participating in such a project would look really good on their CVs. Maureen was so enthusiastic about the idea that her enthusiasm seemed to open all doors.

  Now came the final step, the one that would make all the difference. It isn't enough for a writer or musician to produce something of quality, they have to make sure their work doesn't end up gathering dust on a shelf or in a drawer.

  Vis-i-bil-i-ty is what's required!

  She sent a copy of the film to just one person: Javits Wild. She used all her contacts. She suffered rejection, but carried on anyway. She was ignored, but that didn't diminish her courage. She was mistreated, ridiculed, excluded, but still she believed it was possible because she had poured her lifeblood into what she had done. Then her ex-boyfriend entered the scene, and Javits Wild agreed to see her film and to meet her.

  She keeps her eyes on Javits all through lunch, savoring in anticipation the moment they will spend together in two days' time. Suddenly, she notices him go stiff, his eyes fixed on nothing. One of the friends with him glances behind and to the side, slips one hand inside his jacket. The other man starts frantically keying in a number on his mobile phone.

  Has something happened? Surely not. The people nearest him are still talking, drinking, enjoying another day of Festival, parties, sun, and nice bodies.

  One of the men tries to help Javits up and make him walk, but he appears incapable of movement. It can't be anything serious. Too much drink perhaps. Tiredness. Stress. No, it can't be anything serious. She has come so far, she is so close and...