Cannes
A year ago this week I tried to sell my idea for a blockbuster movie to Sam Goldwyn Junior. It was 12 noon, at the Majestic Hotel. I picked up my briefcase and strode past the upturned packet of Paprika Pringles on the floor. You don’t mess around before this sort of meeting. You prepare — numbers, market share, audience demographics. ‘Tell me,’ opened the mogul, ‘about your film.’ Without hype, but without understatement I laid it out. ‘Eating & Weeping is a Hollywood classic,’ I told him. ‘It is the mainstream, genre movie of Stanko the Bulgarian pastry chef, who accidentally causes the collapse of capitalism.’ Goldwyn looked blank so I pressed on. ‘Stanko casts off the shackles of liberty, deflating the soufflé of capital and licking clean the spatula of injustice.’ Goldwyn spoke: ‘Let me tell you something.
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