In 1994, two years after my experiences on Ridley Scott’s “1492: Conquest of Paradise” with Gérard Depardieu (see below), I was working as VP of a movie PR firm called Dennis Davidson Associates in New York. Sony Pictures Classics hired me to do publicity on a film called “A Pure Formality,” which was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”) and starred Gérard and Roman Polanski. Depardieu played a famous writer called “Onoff” (Get it?) who was picked up in the woods at the time of a murder by a police inspector named in the credits as “Inspector.” Polanski interrogates Depardieu all night long and I think there was a twist ending, although it’s been 15 years and there’s no way I’m going to watch it again. I do remember vividly that Tornatore staged a POV shot through the flames of the fireplace.

There was an obvious publicity problem for this film in that one of its two stars couldn’t come into the country because there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. What I came up with is that we would bring Tornatore and Depardieu to New York and set up a satellite feed for Polanski. The only thing was that the satellite feed cost $20,000 and you had to commit a certain amount of time in advance for the space where we would have the junket and the feed. Those of you in the business are probably dropping your coffee when you read this in total disbelief that Sony would pick up that kind of a check, but it’s true.

It was up to me to make sure everything went okay, but I wasn’t too concerned. My boss, Mark Urman, had handled many of Polanski’s films and they were extremely close. Gérard was in Toronto, filming Norman Jewison’s “Bogus,” starring opposite Whoopi Goldberg and Haley Joel Osment. So he wasn’t far away and he loved Sony Classics’ Michael Barker, Tom Bernard and Marcie Bloom, who had fought so hard to get him the Academy Award nomination for “Cyrano de Bergerac” in 1991.” Tornatore was coming to LA as well as New York, and Sony was arranging his schedule.

Urman promised he would call Polanski right away and I left a message for Gérard at his hotel. He called me back in a few days and told me he wasn’t going to come. There was this man he didn’t want to see who was, in his words, “a real shit.” He went on for a while getting into highly detailed excremental detail about the kind of shit that this guy was. But he said if I had Polanski and Tornatore, he’d come too.

A week later, I got the news from Sony that Tornatore was cancelling due to a sudden illness. His malady came upon him shortly after Sony told him that he wouldn’t be going to LA. There were some suspicious types who thought he was trying to leverage a trip to the coast. Whatever the reason, I was down to two out of three.

I went to Mark Urman’s office and waited. You always had to wait a long, long, long time to see Mark. But it was extremely risky to go back to your desk, because then someone else would take your place in line, or he’d go off on a lunch date or even home--and you’d have wasted that huge investment you’d made in sofa time.

I hated sitting on Mark’s damned couch waiting for him. I only worked at DDA a very short time, but I’m sure that over a month of it was spent on Mark’s couch. (To cope with my resentment, my girlfriend and I snuck into the office late one night and had sex every which way on that sofa. I wanted to defile that damned thing. I won’t mention what we did to his phone.)

Finally Urman was done with his call and I asked him if he’d called Polanski. He hadn’t, but promised to do so soon.

So I had one guy who wasn’t coming, a second who would only come if all three came, and a third who hadn’t even been asked. On this firm edifice I was encouraging Sony Classics to spend $20,000.

A few days later, I called Gérard in Toronto, and he continued with his poop tirade. It would have been entertaining, if he hadn’t topped it off by saying that thinking about Turdman had changed his mind and he wasn’t going to come after all. I asked him to think it over.

I went back to Urman’s office and, as usual, waited for a very long time. It seemed like hours, I was so stressed out. It was over a week now since I had asked Mark and I had been following up with emails, etc. Finally Mark got off the phone. He hadn’t called Polanski yet. I asked him if he could do it right then, as my situation was getting more and more perilous. Instead, he looked at his rolodex, scribbled down Polanski’s number, and handed it to me. Great. Instead of getting a call from one of his good friends, he was going to get a call from a total stranger like me, asking him to do a press day at the last minute. It was unprofessional! It was insulting to a legendary director like Polanski!

Underneath my panic attack was the truth: I was intimidated by Polanski, and didn’t want to call him. But I had no choice, so I did. Polanski’s wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, answered the phone and politely asked me to wait while she got him. Soon I had Roman Polanski on the line. I explained the situation, trying hard to make it seem less desperate than it was, but he cut me off.

“Do you know what happened when Napoleon arrived in Reims?”

“Well, to be honest….no.”

“As soon as he got there he asked his men, ‘What about my 21-Gun-Salute?’ And they were embarrassed, and one of them finally said: ‘Sir, we have no cannons.’” *

He took a grand pause as I tried to figure out what the fuck this story had to do with anything.

“Well, it seems to me, my friend that….you have no cannons.”

I asked Polanski if he could be at the studio in Paris with the satellite feed at the right time and he said fine.

The day before the satellite hookup, Gérard came into New York and did a day of interviews in a hotel suite. There was a huge buffet table, and I cleared the whole thing, waiting nervously for the inevitable. Eventually, it happened.

“Where is Tornatore?” Gérard asked me, glaring.

“Um…he got sick.”

I don’t know who Gérard saw through more—me or Tornatore--but his answer was immediate:

“I could get sick too.”

At that point the press day was basically over and there was nothing for him to do but finish up the satellite feed interviews the next day. While TV journalists taped one-on-ones, I also set up a press conference with Gérard live and Polanski on a monitor. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but it turned out to be something very special.

Even via Satellite, Polanski’s charm was breathtaking. He was more present on the monitor than most people are in person.

As the conference was drawing to an end, Gérard put his huge arms around the TV monitor, hugging the visage of his friend.

It was funny, but it was also a very beautiful moment, and I doubt that anybody who was there will ever forget it.

*I’ve been checking this story and can find no basis for it. Either I got the city wrong, or It may be apocryphal.

Gérard Depardieu with the author on the set of  “1492: Conquest of Paradise”

It had been a stomach-churning flight from New York and the driver chain-smoked all the way from Madrid to Caceres. I was barely awake, but Smokey the driver refused to take me to my hotel.  Instead, he  ushered me into the production office and introduced me to the executive producer, Iain Smith. I told him I needed to get to my hotel pronto, as any conversation in my state of exhaustion, would be a waste of time for both of us.

“We’re doing a press conference,” he said.

“When?”

“In an hour.”  I was awake now.

Mr. Smith took me to the room where the conference was going to be held. It was a Spanish version of an Elks lodge, with all these stuffed animal heads festooning the walls. There were two rows of chairs set up like a wedding, and a makeshift dais set up in front. I noticed there was a side door. I told Iain to make sure that a P.A. blocked that door, so we could make all the journalists come in from the back, and avoid a pile-up when Ridley Scott and the actors came in. He said he would have everybody together in a room upstairs in an hour so I could tell them what they would have to do.

The journalists started to come in and I asked them some questions. Nobody spoke any English and I didn’t have a translator. Iain introduced me to the mayor, the first of many mayors I would meet in Spain. Everywhere we went, the locals would insist on some kind of event. I guess that’s understandable, as we were making a film about Columbus, sort of a local hero, even if he was born in Genoa, and a Frenchman, Gérard Depardieu, was playing him in our movie.

At the appointed time, Iain led me to the room where everyone was gathered. Ridley and Armand Assante seemed nice, and my hand was shaking as I shook the hand of Fernando Rey, the star of so many Bunuel masterpieces, when Depardieu came in.

I had spent a lot of time with Gérard when I handled the publicity for Maurice Pialat’s “Loulou” in New York, but he had come with his wife Elisabeth and had acted like a choirboy the whole time. The wild-eyed grin jumping off his face suggested that my limited Spanish was going to be the least of my worries on this movie. After I told them that I would lead them in the side door in such-and-such an order, the mayor would introduce Ridley, blahblahblah, Gérard came over and patted me on the shoulder. “And then the group sex?” he asked.

Of course, Gérard entered in the back of the room and created complete chaos, which would be standard operating procedure throughout the film. Gérard loved chaos and chaos loved him back.

After the conference, the press mob laid siege to the hotel, surging through the tiny lobby and lining the halls with furious demands for immediate interviews with everyone in the film for all 200 of them. Imagine being in the bleachers at Yankee stadium with two fights going on on both sides of you. And everyone’s shouting in Spanish. You’d figure that in Europe people would all be civilized and “European,” but these people were surly bruisers who could knock your block off with their tape recorders and cameras.Gérard came running out of his room with a scrawny photographer in tow. The little weasel had been hiding under his bed.

In the morning I went to the production office and many of the press were laying in wait for me there. They were even more angry. I didn’t know the exact words but I knew they wanted interviews. I went to Iain Smith’s office and told him I desperately needed a translator. He didn’t need to bring anyone or house them. It would actually better to just get me someone local, because it was a real emergency. Returning to my office I saw a stack of local newspapers that someone had collected for me. Not even knowing what the locals thought about us invading their town was unnerving.

The next day I came in early so I could get right to work with my new translator. I went to see Iain. “Catalina [not real name] is driving in from Barcelona,” he said. “Barcelona!” I said. “Whose daughter is she?” I was so screwed. These journalists had come from all over Spain and Portugal, and I was making them wait three long days before I could even communicate to them diplomatically that they weren’t going to get a damned thing. There was nothing I could do but take their abuse for one more day.

At long last, Catalina arrived. After I tried to make small talk—she was painfully shy—I handed her a stack of local newspapers. She sat down at a desk and looked them over for a few minutes. I was really curious so I was hoping she could just give me a quick thumbs or up-thumbs down.

“What do they say?”

“Many ‘tings.”

“What kind of things”?

She pondered this.

“’Tings about the movie.”

I told her to write out a translation. Catalina nodded and pulled out a little red plastic English-Spanish dictionary from her purse, the kind tourists carry. She read the first few words and then started flipping through the dictionary. I waited patiently until she found the first word and wrote it down. That was enough for me. “Excuse me,” I said, and ran down the hallway to Smith’s office.”

“How do you like Catalina?” he asked.

“She’s delightful,” I said. “But there is a little something: she doesn’t speak English.”

Iain looked at me sorrowfully. I had been on enough movies to know what the score was:

“We can’t fire her, can we?”

He shook his head.

“Well, you’re going to have to get me a second translator.”

He explained that we were already housing one translator and he had no budget to for a second one. But he understood what a fix we were in, and said if I could find someone who was already there; a relative perhaps, then he would cover the pay. After ruling out a few possibilities, I decided to approach Natalie, the daughter of the production’s financial controller. A graduate of business school, Natalie spoke fluent Spanish and was super-smart, but I wasn’t sure how well she would work with the local journalists. I gave her a newspaper and she translated it in no time. So the plan was clear. Natalie would be my real publicity assistant and translator for the world media we were bringing to the set ; Catalina would concentrate more on local press.

The first scene in the movie was staged as a long walk-and-talk tracking shot with Depardieu. Just before “action!” was called, Depardieu gave the dolly grip’s nuts a big squeeze, and then played the scene flawlessly, unaffected by the unnerving sight of the grip’s eyes bugging out of his head. The crew adored him for pranks like this and for the constant entertainment provided by his accent. They fondly bestowed the name “Yabba-Dabba-Doo” on him, although not to his face. I remember watching him bang his hand on a table, crying out, “Fools! They think the world is a flat as this tobble,” as I watched vocal coach Louise Vincent’s head sink down to her hands. Another day I had the behind the scenes crew on the set for a scene where Gérard was riding a burro. Gérard had previously told me that he was afraid of horses, and wasn’t too excited about getting on the burro either.  On the other hand,  he said liked to do things that he was afraid of. I loved that, and so I suggested that the behind-the-scenes director ask Gérard how he felt about being on the burro.

“Oh, it’s not too bad,” Depardieu replied, “I have an erection. Not a beeg one….more a laaazy one.”

For me, the exuberant, larger-than-life Depardieu is a limiting and cliched way to see him. I bore witness to a host of Gérards during the shoot: poetic, brilliant, selfish, thuggish, ridiculous (I’ll never forget watching him jog down a road in Costa Rica, Buddha belly bouncing like Jello), but ultimately hidden, unknowable. I remember once seeing him sitting by himself in a hotel lobby. He seemed sad, which was his right; we all get blue now and then. But seeing him like that was so different from anything I’d ever previously witnessed that I couldn’t help wondering what he was when he wasn’t on a movie set or on a stage or being applauded.   Depardieu had a very close friend on the film, the sound man, Pierre Gamet, who had worked on many of his films. Once when Gérard was being Gérard, I heard Pierre say softly, “Gérard…I know you so well.” Whatever he knew—he wasn’t sharing.

Meanwhile, my pair of translators seemed to be an ace team. Catalina spoke all day to the press. I had no idea what she was saying, but I didn’t care--I just wanted them to go away until I was ready to invite them in. It’s true that my attempts at conversation with Catalina often verged on the surreal. Lost in translation, I thought. Shortly before we left Spain for Costa Rica, I found out she was even stranger in Spanish than she was in English. Somebody had inquired if he could have a color picture of Depardieu, and she asked, “What color do you want?” Eventually I found out she had been taking acid during work hours, which explained a lot. (I’m totally serious; she was sent back to Barcelona immediately.)

Eventually, I found the perfect day for our first press junket—a massive production number with lots of extras in costumes and dozens of horses, to be shot in Seville against a gorgeous landscape. In other words, there would be lots of room to keep the journalists out of our hair, and it would be a nothing day acting-wise for Gérard. Catalina told me that the press would be very insulted if I didn’t feed them first, so we rented a big restaurant and put on a sumptuous buffet, which they made short work of-- particularly the wine.

After the repast, Natalie and Catalina corralled the journalists onto a bus, and we headed for the set, where the production had cordoned off a viewing area for them with stakes and string. I suppose the theory was they would stay within its confines, placid as gladiolas. With Natalie’s help, I asked everybody to wait for a few minutes, while I got Gérard. As I approached him, I could see Yabba-Dabba-Doo eying me gleefully. Uh oh.

“Gérard, remember I told you this would be a pr—“

“I knowwww….but I’m not really in the mood.”

“Please Gérard, I promised them you’d come right over.” I tried every trick of persuasion I knew, but he wasn’t budging; it was too much fun not to. The journalists were getting very restless and were pushing against the perimeter of their pen. One woman was already dangling her foot over the three foot high twine gate. Gérard glanced over and smiled devilishly. I had three more seconds before everything was going to bust out of control.

“Why don’t you ask Reedlee?” he said.

Ridley Scott was currently on a crane, telling a few thousand people what to do.

“I don’t exactly think this is a good--”

“YAAAAAAAH!” The Spanish journalists were on us like Katrina on New Orleans. They ran through everything, snapping pictures, spooking horses, swarming around Gérard and circling Senor Ridley on his crane with their cameras and tape recorders, firing off a million questions in Spanish.

Depardieu was in rapture, feasting on the pandemonium. He thrust his arms to his sides, twirling like Julie Andrews in “Sound of Music,” mouth agape like a crazed muppet. “Maaarvelous idée, Reid! Maaaarvelous idée!”

It must have taken an hour for the production team to put everybody back on the bus so we could get back to work. But one guy managed to elude us—the scuzzly little string bean who previously hid under Gérard’s bed.

Gérard gave him a three hour interview.

I was fortunate enough to take a course in Film Theory from David Bordwell when I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was probably the hardest course I ever took, as well as the most illuminating. I came out  of his cinematic boot camp with a lot of new friends and a completely new way of looking at movies. Some of the stuff from David’s course is still so entrenched in my mind that I can’t pry it out. Every time my wife and I go to the movies, I drive her insane because I want to follow Noel Burch’s instructions about where to sit. It’s always got to be where the width of the screen reaches the edges of peripheral vision so that you see “what the director sees in the eyepiece” and neither a portion of the image or a rectangle in a frame. Being faithful to Noel Burch is a real bitch in an IMAX theatre, and can cause arguments.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you are serious about movies and don’t know about David Bordwell yet—you should. He and Kristin Thompson have a wonderful blog that you should bookmark, as both of them are incredibly knowledgeable and insightful, as well as terrific writers.

One recent post from Kristin deals directly with what SpeedCine is all about, which is to spread the word about the great films that you can get online without stealing them. In this case, Kristin reports on Nina Paley’s animated feature, “Sita Sings the Blues,” which the director is giving away for free. Kristin calls “Sita” one of the highlights of Roger Ebert’s recent Ebertfest. She quotes Ebert’s program notes:

“I got a DVD in the mail, an animated film titled “Sita Sings the Blues.” It was a version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully filed it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week. Then I was told I must see it.

I began. I was enchanted. I was swept away. I was smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord.”

Thompson continues: “The four elements are: a sketchily animated account of the breakup of Nina’s marriage; the tale of Rama and Sita from the Indian epic, the Ramayana; musical numbers that all borrow recordings of Ms. Hanshaw; and three shadow-puppet narrators who try, not always successfully, to recall the details of the Ramayana and its background history. As Roger says, somehow all this achieves complete unity.”

Here’s the opening of the film, from YouTube:

You can watch the entire film on PBS’s Reel 13.

You can also download a copy of the film in SD or HD on Paley’s site, sitasingstheblues.com.  If you want to, you can also donate there, but she doesn’t pressure you to. If you’re interested in new models for online distribution of movies, definitely check out Paley’s site. She even allows people to make money off her movie, as long as they don’t put DRM on it!

One part that I found absolutely fascinating in Kristin’s post is that Paley had to pay $50,000 for music rights in order to give her film away. And she wouldn’t have had to pay a dime if it weren’t for all the funny games that have been played  to extend the years of copyright. Just another paradox in the topsy-turvy world of intellectual property in Web 2.0.

As a regular reader of Techdirt, I saw the video of Mike Masnick’s lecture on Trent Reznor a few months ago.   I was so intrigued by it, I immediately started sending it out to filmmaker friends, to a major blogger and even the singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith, a very talented acquaintance of mine who definitely could benefit from better marketing.  But when I didn’t hear the blogger, I figured this was something that had been passed around the independent film blogosphere already.   So I was happy to see Scott Macaulay and Brian Newman post it recently.  If you are a filmmaker or any kind of artist who would like to increase the audience for your work, it’s worth your time to look at this.

But this video calls to mind all the filmmakers who have been using the new tools of Web 2.0 to promote their work.  They are trotted out at every festival: Lance Weiler, Gary Hustwit, Susan Buice & Arin Crumley, etc.  As a traditional marketer, I sit in awe of these people.  When I watch a video like this one by Lance Weiler, I feel really old. 

This kind of marketing goes so far beyond what’s been done in the past to become a new art form.  It gets more people to look at the original film, but it also creates a totality that is more exciting that 99.99% of the independent films out there.   Gary Hustwit’s promotion of “Helvetica” is more traditional, but I don’t know of many people in the business who could have done a better job doing it than he did.  He is a great marketer, and it’s rare when a company has the luxury of giving the time and energy to it that he did.

So it must be a bit scary for filmmakers to go to the lectures and panels and watch these videos.  It’s so hard to make movies--they have to learn to do all this stuff too? 

And it reminds me of something that has dogged me throughout my career as a publicist.  Many of the best filmmakers are allergic to the idea of selling their films.  They feel it somehow diminishes them as artists.   They want to create; they don’t want to be hucksters.  They want their work to speak for itself.   They sometimes act like they don’t want to be successful, that there is something actually distasteful about success.  Many have told me flat out that they are proud of their film but doubt it will reach much of an audience.   

I worked on three films with a director long ago.  His movies were funny, witty, stylish, and had a dazzling visual style.  There were so many reasons why all  kinds of people could enjoy them.  But every interview he gave made them seem dry and boring; he cut off the possibilities for the way different kinds of people might perceive them.  He was effectively an anti-marketer.  It was pointless to talk to him about it.  If I had run the distribution companies, I would actually have canceled all his interviews and appearances, but distributors want to see a sheaf of articles—that’s what they pay for.  One of his movies starred a beautiful and charming actress, so I concentrated my efforts on her.  I was able to get bookings on a few talk shows.  She was so good that I would send the tapes to the next show and we kept getting better bookings.  She was having fun, and the clips from the film were very appealing.  One day she called me in tears.  He had phoned her and said he was grateful because he understood how soul-destroying doing these interviews must be for her. 

I love this director’s films, but sadly it is very difficult for him to get financing these days, and his output has slowed. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but this might have had something to do with it.

I admit that I am also ambivalent about marketing, because I am someone who loves movies first and promotes them second.   I don’t want a director to tell me what a movie means.  I don’t want to be saddled with the director’s insistence that the reason they made the film defines what the movie is.  In a lot of ways, the reason what a director thinks he or she made a film is irrelevant.  They may not fully understand themselves as human beings, let alone understand their movie.  Mysterious things come into play that they don’t understand.  That’s the miracle of it, really.  

Some filmmakers are very skilled about how to play the game of talking to the media.  They have a natural facility for giving great quotes without giving away the store. Some, like Jarmusch, have a strong image that works into the way you perceive their movies, expanding and not contracting your reactions.  Some are a hoot, like Almodovar, and draw you in with their high spirits.  Some invent their own myth out of whole cloth, like Herzog. Many of the people who last the longest in pop culture are shape-shifters, like Dylan, Madonna and Robert Redford—they are omnipresent, hiding in plain sight, and the more you think you know about them, the less you do. 

But there are many great artists who lack this gene.  With conventional distribution, if you don’t have a talent for self-promotion, you can walk away and let the distributors and the publicists do the heavy lifting.  You can have the benefit of advice, if you are willing to listen to it.

The question in my mind is whether Web 2.0 will increase the distance between the filmmakers who can sell themselves and those who can’t.   If we reach a day when the majority of artists are responsible for promoting their own work, are more of the greatest filmmakers going to be lost by the wayside?

It was with great sadness that I read about the death of the legendary super-agent Sam Cohn.  I had very few encounters with the man, but the first one was memorable.

It was 1993 and working at the PR firm Dennis Davidson Associates in New York, when I got the call.  “I have Sam Cohn on the line,” said the voice.  “Can you hold for him?”  “Absolutely,” I said.  While I was waiting, I tried to imagine why an important man like Sam Cohn would want to talk to me.

The voice came back.  “It might be a while,” she said, extremely politely.  “Would you mind staying on the line?”   Was she kidding?   For a chance to talk to a legend like Sam Cohn?

The voice came back.  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Um, he’s not here.”

It took a little while for this to sink in.

“Are you saying that Sam Cohn called me and he’s not there?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I’m very  sorry.”

This was something new. Imagine!  Sam Cohn could call people without having to be there.

“Don’t worry about it at all,” I said, and it was over.

I sat for a while thinking about what had just happened.

“Now that’s power,” I thought.

I’m sure the phenomenal grosses for “Wolverine” will raise for some the issue of whether file-sharing, rather than being a source of studio losses, can actually increase profits when a movie is available on the web before it is released. In other words, file-sharing serves as the world’s greatest sneak preview campaign.  This argument has been around at least since 2004 with “Battlestar Galactica”   It’s one of the excuses that is often trotted out for file-sharers not to see themselves as “pirates.”

I don’t agree with the  MPAA’s contention that the industry loses money every time someone watches a movie for free. But I also think that file-sharers are disingenuous when they say it has no impact. If we follow their logic, and consider that the studios might be able to make more money through file-sharing, then:  What kind of movies benefit?   Is it good for some and not for others?  Is it only valuable if you do it in advance?  I’m sure everything I’m writing here would horrify the MPAA, but who knows what the real answers are to questions like these.

It’d be interesting to see an adventurous studio--Lionsgate maybe—deliberately put a movie on the web before it’s released.  See what happens.