Making Priscilla (13 page)

By now breathing rarified air, we fly to Cannes.

This time there is a car waiting. Indeed, there are two cars waiting, as well as several photographers and a small television crew, which gathers spectators as it shuffles and swerves through Nice airport. We are in a real sense hitting the ground running.

Waiting for the plane in London, I remark to Stephan that, while we will return to Cannes with bigger, perhaps better pictures in the future, we will never again be assured as open a licence to boundless fun with a film as we have with
Priscilla.
We have had some disagreement with PolyGram about which section and time-slot within the festival would most benefit the movie. (One night, dressed in a cape, I spent an hour arguing with them from a phone in the lobby of a Sydney hotel, while people walked past me and my dinner companions consumed an entire meal in my absence.) But we have ended up where we wanted in the festival: first Saturday at midnight, official selection, out of competition; all of the amusement, none of the pressure.

In Cannes, every palm tree and lamppost along the seafront
promenade, the Croisette, has already been wrapped with a
Priscilla
‘DRAG IS THE DRUG’ poster. It has been a commando operation of unparalleled thoroughness, accomplished with kinetic speed by shadowy figures in the night, and it is evident even at this early stage how much curiosity it is prompting about the film.

As I did on arrival last year, I have lunch with Hercules Bellville, who understands better than anyone how, despite the influx of neophyte hustlers each year, Cannes fundamentally revolves around tradition, ritual and a kind of ironic familiarity in which one is both above the nonsense and in it, equal parts observer and participant. Landmark absurdist figures such as the inseparable mother and daughter in leopardskin, widely understood to operate as a courtesan double act, have by now acquired a picturesque dignity, prompting the rumour that they have been given festival passes this year. At the next festival perhaps they will be appointed presidents of the jury.

During a meeting with PolyGram I am perturbed to see the word ‘Classics’ on our new sales agent’s business card. Except when used as a marketing euphemism for ‘old’, ‘classic’ is a suffix most commonly employed by studios with art house divisions, reflecting correspondingly diminished box-office expectations. We see our movie as a popular entertainment and do not wish to have it perceived as ‘specialised’ in any way. We are reassured that it will be sold as a commercial picture, and the high initial offers appear to corroborate this.

In the congestion and effort of completing the film in time for the screenings in the U.S. and Cannes, some delivery materials, mainly routine documents, have not yet been supplied, and the film’s lawyer Martin Cooper and I work our way through these with PolyGram’s post-production supervisor. My attention strays towards the torpid hum of another meeting being
held across the terrace, while under a parasol at a table on the grass a perspiring distributor is attempting without success to reduce the asking price of a film for which he is bidding. Occasionally, we are interrupted by requests for the supervisor’s presence in another part of the building. ‘Steve, come upstairs quickly,’ says a frantic sales executive, ‘we’re having a lot of trouble with the Turks.’ With all the potential for pleasure in the build-up to Saturday’s midnight screening, I begin to begrudge the way in which procedural drudgery is eroding my energy.

The gathering storm clouds are dissipated briefly by an encounter in a hotel lobby with Nik Powell, the executive producer of
The
Crying
Game
and a long-time friend. Discussing, inevitably, the transvestite parallels in our respective films, he tells me that when he was first seeking American distribution, the then president of Paramount rejected
The
Crying
Game
without ever being aware of the movie’s crucial twist: that the leading lady is also a leading man. The studio chief left the screening room, where he was watching the film alone, to take a telephone call seconds before the key scene and returned after it was over. As the moment is not referred to again, and the consequent change in the characters’ behaviour is subtly developed, he had no idea that he had missed a moment that would soon make, in its way, film marketing history.

There appear to be even more ‘DRAG IS THE DRUG’ posters around the town today, and it has not escaped the notice of a reporter from the
Los
Angeles
Times,
who corrects the claim: ‘Any Cannes regular knows that positive buzz is the drug here, both for driving sales to film distributors and building audience awareness’.

Invigorated for a moment with positive buzz, I arrange a discussion in which Gramercy and our newly acquired Australian distributor Roadshow can work out how best to make their plans overlap to mutual benefit. Russell Schwartz has decided to open the picture in the U.S. on August 10, a Wednesday rather than the more customary Friday, to give the film a chance to build up favourable word of mouth before the weekend. He gives me a preliminary marketing plan which reveals the intention of selling the film initially ‘to the gay and art film audience, followed by a push to cross the film over to the mainstream upscale audience’. The picture will be released in a series of expanding waves around the country, reaching its peak by the end of September. In addition to press, radio and television — initially only cable — advertising, there are to be life-size cut-outs of the three principals, nationwide lip-synching drag competitions and numerous merchandising items such as key chains in the form of high-heeled shoes. Depending on the scale of the release, the stages of the campaign completed and the corresponding money spent, Gramercy are estimating a North American box-office gross of anywhere between five and twenty million dollars.

Alan Finney of Roadshow, the distribution counterpart of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, has a view of the film which is simultaneously limitless in its enthusiasm and circumspect in its promotional boundaries. ‘One of the most exciting, adventurous and satisfying movies to come along in years,’ he affirms. ‘It blends the musical, drama, comedy and “self-discovery” genres into one totally entertaining and thought-provoking entertainment experience, a statement and celebration of individual choice and the search for fulfilment.’ His main concerns in reaching the widest possible audience are the dangers of hard sell and of positioning the picture as a movie about drag queens in as enduringly homophobic a society as Australia.
‘Contemporary, socially relevant, intelligent but not elitist, entertaining without compromising its content, challenging but not didactic, aware of its audience but not pandering to its expectations,’ he concludes with a flourish. His emphasis is on frequent previewing in full theatres and building on the enthusiasm he feels sure will follow. He outlines the release-date options through to the end of the year, listing the respective pros and cons. We agree generally that July is too soon to have a campaign ready, that August does not allow for the possible critical acclaim and commercial success to percolate through from the U.S., and that November and December are too late to benefit from any momentum created by its screenings at Cannes. I favour early September, in the lead-up to the Australian school holidays.

There is a U.S. press lunch for
Priscilla
at the American Pavilion, which I am interested in visiting principally because it has an ‘interactive video kiosk’ called Inter-Elvis in which one can ‘interact’ on touch screens with Elvis to access all kinds of information about the festival. Instead, I am steered around various tables to interact with the press, among whom there is a consensus that the few studios present are here mainly to meet with European money sources about sharing finance and splitting rights. This is an unusual reversal, as the overtures routinely flow in the other direction. It reveals that film budgets are now so far out of control that this may become the only way that studios will be able to make their now preposterously expensive movies.

Mostly though, Cannes is being propelled by the usual delusions and lies.
Variety
laments that the place is ‘overrun by lawyers and agents, all so preoccupied with trying to screw each other on deals that they have no time for the kind of sexual scandals that once made Cannes so worthwhile’.

But there is one element which has never changed; one that, in many respects, characterises the festival better than any deal or sexual scandal: the photocall. This is, after all, the only place in the world where the former Mrs Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, can still be guaranteed to attract a swarm of paparazzi wherever she goes. Approaching the Majestic Beach, we can see that our three drag queens — Cindy, Stryker and Portia — have already stopped the pedestrian traffic on the Croisette and are being navigated with some difficulty through the onlookers. As Terence Stamp and I push our way down the steps towards the beach, a man recognises him.

Many people recognise Terence. His enduring presence, his appearances in European films and his history with Cannes (
The
Collector,
for which he won the Best Actor award in 1965, and
The
Hit,
a Directors’ Fortnight success in 1984) have made him a popular figure here, and he has not besmirched his lustre by attending the festival too often. But this man
particularly
recognises him. ‘You remember me,’ he says, unmistakably Italian, the three words a declaration rather than a question. ‘Party scene. Fellini.
Toby
Dammit.
You. Me.’ Terence is gracious but keen to move on. Only in Cannes could an actor be stranded in a crowd with a bit-part player with whom he shared a screen moment twenty-seven years earlier. By the time Terence has joined Stephan, Hugo Weaving and the drag queens on the pier, a near riot has developed, with so many photographers and television cameramen shooting and shouting from so many angles that at one stage the wooden pier begins to buckle and someone falls into the water. A colour picture capturing this madness, by an adjacently positioned British photographer who realises his subject is not drag queens but other photographers, appears on the front page of the British newspaper the
Inde
pendent
the following morning. (It was only after
La
Dolce
Vita
had conclusively established him at Cannes in 1960 that Fellini’s films became populated by the grotesques for which his surname doubled as an adjective. This has led some to conclude that he may have considered himself more a documentarist than a caricaturist.)

Later we have dinner with Russell Schwartz and various Gramercy people at a restaurant called Le Moulin a Poivre, whose chef
(cuisine
signée
G
é
rard
Guth),
in consonance with this most
auteur
ist of towns, dispenses a business card with his photo, in which he is wearing an impressive toque.

As if to demonstrate the connection between all things, Henri Béhar, no stranger to toques, shows up at our print rehearsal at the Salle Debussy later that night. It is clear he has done a splendid job in creating the French subtitles, and for each merely eccentric change (‘raccoon’ has mysteriously become ‘panda’), there is a cleverly idiomatic one (‘bats for both teams’ is translated as ‘double agent’, as there are no French sports played with bats). The Salle Debussy, smaller than the main cinema, has the best screen-size-to-seats ratio I have ever seen, and the design of the theatre favours width, which in turn gives us an ideal Scope image.

In my exhaustion, I remember somebody telling me that the director Emir Kusturica has a ‘nap clause’ in his contract, which officially permits him to take a snooze at certain times. I invent my own nap clause and invoke it immediately.

It is the morning before the big night. I am still having considerably less fun than I could be.

A trade magazine calls
Priscilla
‘the hottest ticket of the festival’. Soon, no doubt, it will be usurped by an even hotter ticket such as Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp
Fiction,
which has
shrewdly been programmed for the following weekend to keep the Cannes aristocracy, none of whom have seen it, from leaving early. I also note that there is a screening of what I assume is the Italian picture which Rupert Everett chose to do instead of ours, but it may be another one. It is called
Dellamorte
Dellamore,
and in it Everett plays a reclusive cemetery caretaker who has to contend with the resurfacing of freshly buried bodies. There is a photograph of him naked holding an also naked (but dead) woman as if she were a musical instrument, prompting memories of Alain Delon’s hilarious post-coital compliment to Marianne Faithfull in
Girl
on
a
Motorcycle
: ‘Your body is like a violin in a velvet case’.

The only striking thing about all the finished, half-made and completely imaginary films which are advertised at Cannes, is how many of them resemble each other. Two movies that day are represented by images of people having sex in water: the first, traditionally but enthusiastically, in a shower (
Intruso
); the second, more imaginatively, in a subterranean waterhole illuminated by candles (
Dark
Tide
). A leaflet I am given also involves the promise of aquatic sex. Titled
Sailing
Adventure,
‘the hottest California girls’ (unaccountably a trademarked name, as if such a sequence of words could be owned) are represented either loafing around the decks in prodigiously inappropriate sailing outfits, or pulling at ropes in lacy underwear and full make-up.

Priscilla
’s launch will commence with a pre-screening dinner at the PolyGram villa, followed by a gathering at the American Pavilion during which the drag queens will perform, then the movie itself, a drinks party following at two-thirty in the morning, and tomorrow’s screening and dinner for distributors. The whole operation requires an exactness of orchestration that defies the customary chaos of Cannes life. Names are
added, subtracted and transferred on dozens of lists before we are satisfied that the right people are attending each function. Afterwards I discuss the renegotiation of the PolyGram licence agreement with Catriona Hughes of the FFC. We are in a coffee shop, perched on unstable canvas chairs inscribed with the misspelt names of Hollywood actors. I am sitting on Jacques Nicholson, she on Warren Batty.