Cannes Market Celebrates Decades of Legendary Parties, Deals and More
variety.comAngus Finney As the Cannes Film Festival celebrates its 75th anniversary, the concurrent Marché marches into its 63rd year (there were always deals done during the festival, but the powers that be made it official in 1959).
The wilder, oft-times disreputable sister of the more sedate, ergo, more esteemed, official festival, there’s no shortage of tales when it comes to the Cannes Market.There’s no better place to start than Cannon’s “go-go” boys: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
Cannon flew 18 staffers to the 1986 festival and took over the Martinez Hotel, encircling it with bodyguards. Cannon’s endless line of posters along the Croisette made the late critic Roger Ebert dub that year the “Cannon Film Festival.” “Golan [was] one of the last free-wheeling dealmakers at an event where a lot of people would like to be capitalist buccaneers, but few have the courage or the capital,” wrote Ebert. “People still talk about the time Golan had lunch with Jean-Luc Godard at the Majestic Hotel and wrote out a contract on a table napkin, committing Godard to make a Cannon version of ‘King Lear,’ with a screenplay by Norman Mailer … [when] Golan proudly displayed the napkin at the [Cannes] press conference … one journalist suggested that it would probably bring in more money than the movie.”In the 1980s, the Marché was all about eye-watering deals.
David Garrett, now Mister Smith Entertainment topper, remembers buying a package of 65 films from Cannon, “some of course with Chuck Norris.
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