a prank.’
He shows them the needle.
These two idiots are prepared for attacks with firearms and knives, for acts of physical aggression or attempts on their boss's life. They're always the first to enter his hotel room, ready to shoot if necessary. They can sense when someone's carrying a weapon (a common-enough occurrence now in many cities of the world) and they don't take their eyes off that person until they're sure he's harmless. When Javits gets into a lift, he stands sandwiched between them, their two bodies forming a kind of wall. He has never seen them take out their guns because, if they did so, they would use them. They usually resolve any problem with a look or a few quiet words.
Problems? He has never had any problems since he acquired his two ‘friends’, as if their mere presence were enough to drive away evil spirits and evil intentions.
‘That man, one of the first people to arrive, who sat down alone at that table over there,’ says one of them. ‘He was armed, wasn't he?’
The other man murmurs something like ‘Possibly’, but the man had left the party some time ago. And he had been watched the whole time because they couldn't tell what exactly he was looking at from behind his dark glasses.
They relax. One of them starts answering the phone again, the other fixes his gaze on the Jamaican, who looks fearlessly back. There's something strange about that man, but one false move on his part and he'll be wearing false teeth from now on. It would all be done as discreetly as possible, on the beach, far from prying eyes, and by only one of them, while the other stood waiting, finger on the trigger. Sometimes, though, such provocative acts are a ruse to get the bodyguard away from the intended victim. They're used to such tricks.
‘Fine …’
‘No, it's not fine. Call an ambulance. I can't move my hand.’
What luck!
The last thing she was expecting that morning was to meet the man who would - she was sure - change her life. But there he is, as sloppily dressed as ever, sitting with two friends, because powerful people don't need to show how powerful they are, they don't even need bodyguards.
Maureen has a theory that the people at Cannes can be divided into two categories:
(a) the tanned, who spend the whole day in the sun (they are already winners) and have the necessary badge to gain entry to certain restricted areas of the Festival. They arrive back at their hotels to find several invitations awaiting them, most of which will be thrown in the bin.
(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 authorised 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 Congrès. 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, 400 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 4,800 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 any more 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 500 films a day and pay almost nothing.
Worse still, the Internet has made anyone and everyone a film-maker. 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 happen to pass.
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 arts 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 other 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 labour. 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 film-maker the ‘honour’ 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 re-cut, 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 was 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, favours asked of friends in her Bank of Favours 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.