The Winner Stands Alone

"Fine..."

"No, it's not fine. Call an ambulance. I can't move my hand."

12:44 P.M.

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 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.