I keep seeing pictures of friends of mine on Facebook and on
Alive Not Dead, either with their tits out and their legs long and bare – and
that’s just the guys – hanging loose at various Hong Kong Film Market events.
And I think to myself, why wasn’t I there? Why wasn’t I there leering down some
cleavage, drink in hand, arm around a starlet, and Jackie Chan passing swiftly
by in the back ground? I could have gone, if something inside me hadn’t kept
telling me to finish editing the film I shot last year, polish the script I’m
working on for later in the year, and get the power point presentation for the
lecture course on Series writing I’m giving in Singapore. Frankly, I too love the glamour, love
the sniff of hot babe, the flash of paparazzi, and the sense that despite being
a decrepit grey haired old git, I can still score more women that those who
make it their aim to be seen as actively rangy despite their lack of wit and
charm. In short, I love all that shit.
However, after thirty years floating around the film and
media world, I have to say that the only high flyers that go to these things
are those who are paid to be there, and often have to be dragged there. And
nearly everyone else is about as exciting and as useful as a used car salesman,
if that isn’t demeaning such a noble profession. People who’s job it is to sit
and decide which cheap zombie movie they can get away with in the one cinema in
Uzbekistan, are as a rule not going to further one’s career or inspire one’s
creative juices.
Back in the UK one was always told that only those who had
nothing better to do, went to Cannes. The guys who had any status, went by
helicopter to shake hands for ten minutes in front of the photographers and
then either went back to their mansions and expensive “companions” or the
location where they were shooting their latest movie. And the guys without
money but heaps of street cred and creative juice were all too busy making
films, writing them, starring in them, or rioting, or all of the above. Neither bothered mingling with the
unwashed and uncool trying far too hard to be seen in their vicinity.
In short, for the most part Film Markets have all the allure
of a day out in a supermarket. Even so, I still felt I should have been there.
Despite knowing that unless I am being paid to grace it with my presence or
have some high-powered sober and un-coked studio reps vetting my film project
with a serious view to funding, it has no value whatsoever. And I know, through repeated experience,
that all those guys and gals handing out business cards saying how they are the
vice-president creative finance honcho of the Never In A Million Years Film Finance Fund Incorporated will never
return a call, read a script, or be employed within a year, and most certainly
have no say in any decision whatsoever. In fact they will be working for some
half-baked web design company flogging T-Shirts by Christmas. Even though I
know all this, I wish I had gone, if only to scream at some arrogant and deeply
stupid person that one makes movies by writing scripts, finding actors, and
sticking a camera up their nose, and everything else is corruption and decay.
Corruption and decay can be very sexy nonetheless. It does
waste a lot of time and rots the decision making process, and it does attract
the idle, useless, unimaginative, and sleazy, but for a moment one can suspend
one’s disbelief and buy into the ersatz notion of glamour that enticed one into
the business in the first place. All it takes is one conversation with an
independent producer or financial representative to realize why they like cheap
zombie and gangster movies, and the illusion is dispelled. But I shall try get
there next year. Next year, they
will pay me to be there and be thankful for it.
