No book could ever fully capture the beautiful, ugly, inexplicable madness that is the Cannes Film Festival — but that hasn’t stopped a handful from trying. Here are THR’s executive editor (awards) and resident film-book bibliophile’s picks for the five best.
1. Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook, by Roger Ebert (1987)
This thin travelogue by the Chicago Sun-Times’ longtime film critic, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and died in 2013, chronicles his experience covering the fest’s 1987 edition, having previously attended many times before. It breezily profiles true festival characters like the publicist Renee Furst, the schlock showman Menahem Golan and the gambler Billy “Silver Dollar” Baxter — all now gone — and charmingly illustrates how much some things have changed (journalists no longer file reports by telex when they can get around to it, but rather post multiple online dispatches daily) and others have not (the jetlag and lack of sleep, the key hotels and hot spots, the striving to get into films and parties, etc.). Two thumbs up.
2. Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival, by Cari Beauchamp and Henri Behar (1992)
Written by two veteran journalists with long histories at the fest and drawing on more than 100 interviews with festival insiders (from the late New York Times film critic Vincent Canby to the Columbia professor/fest translator Annette Insdorf), this juicy tome breaks down every aspect of a fest that people attend “to see and be seen, buy and be bought, sell and be sold, review and be reviewed, promote and be promoted.” It gets into the fest’s origins (first held in 1939 but canceled after opening night, when Germany invaded Poland); history of salacious incidents (from starlets stripping off their tops to James Woods and a female journalist getting it on in a hotel room); and gossip (novelist Henry Miller was supposedly asked to be…
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