End of day one: Meetingless, morose, sunk deep in a plush red settee in the Martinez bar in Cannes, trying to figure out how a gin and tonic and a Coke add up to 22 euros ($34 Canadian). Maybe the lady from Telefilm Canada was right; I have no business being at MIPCOM.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. A film and a half into a new, inadvertently business-heavy career making documentaries, where better to flog my fledgling wares than at MIPCOM, the foremost television business market in the world? Mounted twice a year at the Cannes Palais des Festivals under the alternating banners of MIP-TV and MIPCOM, (with offshoots MIPDOC and MIPJunior in-between), this is the four-day feeding frenzy where more than 10,000 executives, distributors and producers from 90 countries -- from Paramount to porn to PBS -- pay at least 1,928 euros (the registration fee for one to three people) to meet, mingle, flaunt and flog the programs that will ultimately wind up filling the world's TV screens.
Surely there's a place somewhere here for my two quirky little documentaries: Free Trade Is Killing My Mother, a black comedy about protest airing on TVOntario this winter; and Djangomania!, a personal journey into Gypsy jazz obsession, presold to Bravo! but with 80 per cent of the budget still to be raised.
Departure morning, I get an e-mail from Telefilm's MIP expert to whom I'd written requesting some on-site advice.
"Dear Jamie, Am I reading you correctly saying that you have not done any preparation for this market, that it was a last-minute decision on your part? I surely hope not, because you are going to be extremely disappointed." Of course, she'll do what she can when I get there.
The word Cannes conjures an era of black-and-white glamour only glimpsed now in the odd forced Gap ad. But the real Cannes -- the vaunted Croisette, the legendary Carlton, Majestic and Martinez hotels -- looks a lot like Miami: a row of white hotels, palm-tree lined boardwalk, eye-level billboards every four or five trees.
"You get blasé after a while. I could live without it," says Isme Bennie, CHUM's main buyer for the channels Bravo!, Space and Drive-In Classics, a veteran of about 40 MIPs. "As a buyer, you're just window-shopping for programming. This year, I'm looking for large-scale performance specials for Bravo!, which are difficult to find, and far-out 'aliens stole my mother' type stuff for Space, which are easier."
From behind her heavy Garbo glasses, wearing a tight, black "lose yourself in film" T-shirt, Bennie offers the MIP neophyte some advice at a Croisette café: "Go through the MIP guide, target your potential buyers, foreign broadcasters, distributors. Make a list, then try to get meetings. Most people arranged meetings before coming here, but go to their booths or their hotels and leave your sell sheet and a written message."
We leaf through the MIP guide, a three-inch thick bible listing participants by name, business, country, and in the case of buyers, the main MIP attraction, by hotel. I make a four-page hit-list.
"But to tell you the truth," Bennie says, "if I get something in my mailbox from someone I don't know, it usually goes straight in the garbage. It has to. "
The name Palais des Festivals does create an expectation of something, well, palatial. Picture instead a convention centre at the edge of the Mediterranean draped in TV logos. CBS owns a building-length awning oceanside, while a giant Juste Pour Rire Jumbotron commands the forecourt, luring passers for a glimpse of Montreal-produced hidden-camera shtick.,
Descending to the subterranean main floor of the Palais is like entering the back of a giant television and surfing live through a million-channel dial. A central corridor snakes off into a maze of lanes with 5,000 stands hawking TV product for every imaginable palate. In any given row -- and good luck keeping track of which is which -- a PBS subsidiary can sit boothside with ASP, legendary producers of the seminal Emmanuelle flesh flicks; Television Suisse Romande, with its earnest catalogue of Ecologie, Education, Société, Ethnographie, flanked by Tokyo-based Media Shogun, purveyors of Parasite Dolls ("the near-future adult-oriented animation") and Marvelous Entertainment, also from Tokyo, offering 13 animated episodes of Gunslinger Girl, ("The only things a girl is given . . . a big gun and a little hope . . ."). Canada has a surprisingly strong showing here with 100 smaller production companies taking meetings at Telefilm's umbrella booth, not to mention impressive encampments bearing the logos of CBC, CHUM and Alliance Atlantis, among others.
From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., the corridors churn with buyers and sellers, perennially on cellphones, ID badges never leaving their necks. Even beyond the palais in bars and restaurants, the line between Cannes life and television convention is thoroughly blurred.
"Ninety per cent of this is a big flea market" says Larry Leclair of PEI's Seahorse Entertainment. "I just sold a pet program to Iraq. Seems they want to know how to bathe their Shelties."
I scribble my French cellphone number to the back of my glossy Djangomania! sell sheets and wander up to the daunting booths of my hit-list European broadcasters.
The receptionist at Arte (a public French and German cultural station) gives a faint smirk and hands me a program catalogue. "Better to call Paris and try to talk to someone there. Everyone here has meetings fully booked." But she reluctantly accepts the sell sheet and a scribbled message to the arts buyer.
Similar trips to broadcasters from Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan and Britain bring similar responses. By 5:30 p.m., my bloodstream a battleground of espresso and jetlag, I wander by the CBC booth, where people in suits are huddled round a table of Labatt Ice.
"I remember when we first came here eight years ago," says Hugh Beard of Vancouver's Force Four Entertainment. "We had pamphlets, we walked around, no booth of course," his colleague Rob Bromley says. "But look at us now," Beard says. "Just a few years later and our miniseries Human Cargo for CBC and Showcase is on the Hollywood Reporter's A-list of programs to watch at MIP. All it takes is lots of hard work."
"And spending lots of your own money," Bromley says.
I wander around and as well as a complimentary Kronenberg and canapé, I get my fortune told by a woman in the corner. "Your career will be successful, but slowly." The fortuneteller holds her hand at a very light incline.
Indeed, not a single broadcaster message has been returned.
During the night, what CHUM's Bennie said comes back -- if she gets something from someone she doesn't know, she usually trashes it. "Unless of course it's a note inviting me to an interview.".
By 11:30 the next morning, I'm putting down the phone in the press tent, and looking at a full agenda.
The Arte receptionist eyes me skeptically, but waves me to their wicker lounge area where I'm met by Nicolas Deschamps, a young commissioner of social documentaries.
"It is our job as commissioners to be completely open," he says. "You have to go through the 20, 50, 100 meetings to get to the good project. I don't care if it's here, in the halls, or at a café across the street, I'm always willing to meet producers."
A half-dozen interviews later, my projects are in the hands of some of Europe's top broadcasters.
Now what?
"Nobody makes deals on the spot," Canadian distributor Milt Avruskin says. "You've got to wait three months to see what happens."
At the Telefilm booth, the lady who wrote me the stern, but not inaccurate, e-mail smiles and shakes my hand. "I'm impressed. You've done pretty well for a MIP neophyte."