Still, since we were here and beholden to play our little part, we walked to the arrival area. We saw a skinny girl there holding a sign up that said Toujours Plus. We walked up to her but she asked us to stand aside while she sucked at a cigarette with her bony white-knuckled hand and greeted other people with a big bony smile. To us she spoke mirthlessly.

Get your luggage and come back here, she said.

Let’s get our luggage, said Harcourt.

Ok, I said.

But I hadn’t checked in a bag. So I waited. And when I saw Harcourt’s massive suitcase, I felt panic. How would I manage, I thought. I didn’t have enough.

But concerns about being even more shabbily dressed than usual were overshadowed by a big ruckus next to me where a blonde woman in a large hat seemed to rush out to the exit, followed by a small shuffling crowd of nobodies.

Who’s that? I asked.

Who knows, said Harcourt shrugging.

But I looked around me. And instantly made my first acquaintance with the two main branches of the Cannes sub-species. Those who followed people around hoping they were celebrities. And those who gave a name regardless of what they’d actually seen. Thus I heard the latter exclaim with immense and loud confidence: Catherine Debeuve, that was Catherine Debeuve. While the former chased after the woman, small camera in hand. It was pathetic, I thought. Depressing somehow. I didn’t know why. Maybe because it showed how little respect people had to feel for themselves, to run after someone famous like that. Not someone they respected or someone they wanted to meet, but someone famous whose halfwit signature they coveted. It was ridiculous.

But our skinny skank friend had a comment.

It isn’t Catherine Debeuve, she said with immense boredom. She’s already here, she was at the Palais last night.

Ah, I said pretending to admire her knowingness.

But the girl didn’t care. My comment had no ingratiating effect on her. She just sucked harder at her cigarette.

Still, I observed her. And I realized expressing disdain for the hordes was a way of showing you were part of the in-crowd and that you knew what was going on. So I drew my conclusion. I decided to be part of the in-crowd or not be at all.

But then I looked around again. And damn, I thought. I’m in Cannes. I can’t believe it. Bloody Cannes.

It sure was thrilling. Even if this was only Nice and an hour’s drive away from Cannes. But even here you felt it. The feeling of excitement was raw hot and fevered. Like the heat and sunshine that hit you as you landed. All resorts had a sexiness about them. A lustful air of illicit over-wrought artificial enjoyment that had your blood vessels popping the minute you arrived. But the heat and sunshine of Cannes were different. They were the heat and sunshine of Cannes. Of cash, gold, fame and sex. Outrageous fame, phenomenal wealth. Outrageous privilege. Phenomenal power.

Yes indeed. Cannes brought together the most decadent and self-absorbed people in the world. That’s why everyone wanted to be here. The Festival was no longer about art. The days of Louis Malle holding up the ceremony for student protesters were over. Now Cannes was a glitzy promo hangout, a sort of whorehouse for international movie pimps. Where they all came with their expense accounts and movies and lens-fuelled hunger. The fever of pleasure not for pleasure. But to show it off. This was what Cannes was about. Intense and feverish ostentation. You felt it right away. It hit your face like the gust from a sandblaster.

Yes sir, Cannes boiled down to three little words: cash, snatch and power. Not international film and festival. No indeed. That was bollocks. Cannes was all about money, sex and the gigantism of entertainment. Even the allure of cash and power were felt not in your heart, where all the noble faculties reigned. No sir, they were felt in your snatch. The place where everything brought with it with a certain sadness. A certain bluesiness. A disturbing roiling ache that made you aware right away that what you were doing was probably going to hurt you in some way. A sort of premonition of animal triste was what it was. And I felt it right away.

You couldn’t help but feel it. The tingling in your blood, the loosening up of your limbs, the troublesome boiling in your nervous system and that surge of excitement in your nether parts. Your whole body reached out to it. To the allure of fame and money. The madness of industrial-strength desire. If you weren’t a part of it, you felt like shit. And it wasn’t something you felt gradually as you drove into the city either. No sir, you felt it right off. Right here at Nice airport. I saw it in the way people swaggered about already, in the way they deliberately shouted on their cell phones, in the way they laughed and talked loudly as they showed off badges. Already here at the airport, you sensed it. The fever that had taken over the city. I felt it keenly. And I knew everyone else felt it too. The painful turgid cavernous surrender to hysteria. That’s what Cannes was about. Massive and nurtured hysteria.

Yes sir, you felt it instantly. The wet shiny tinselly presence of hysteria and the lust it brought with it. It all filled the air to choking. You could see it in the faces of those who were landing, on those who were already here. You heard it in their raucous voices, you saw it in their hungry eyes, on their over-exposed bodies, their overcooked tans. It was important for everyone to overdo it. That too was clear. Cannes was excess. Cannes was hysteria. Cannes was a tsunami of phoniness that hit you like a drill in the teeth.

But of course that feeling was to pale in comparison with what I was about to feel next. Yes sir. And over the next twelve days. Because when we went back and stood near the skinny girl, not only did I sense the same bored hostility emanating from her clogged pores, not only did I sense massive hysteria swirling all around me, but most importantly, most noticeably, I sensed vast overwhelming arrogance swimming around us like sharks near bleeding meat. I saw in my mind’s eye a long step-ladder of arrogance, with yours truly right at the bottom.

Yes indeed. It began with the skinny girl and the way she sucked at her cigarette and insisted on not looking at us when she spoke. But I sensed this trend was going to continue and become alarmingly acute in Cannes, especially around the folks at Paris Plus.

Why did I sense this? Well I had a strong intuition for one thing. And I knew from past, present and generalized experience, that for most of the folks at Paris Plus, Harcourt, Hoffmanstahl and myself were little better than mouse turds. Little better than cat crap. In short, less than nothing. Why? Well because we were uncool. And why were we uncool? Well because we didn’t work in TV. And why didn’t we work in TV? Well because we were uncool.

Yes indeed. It was a circular argument. Of little merit to those of us who had brains and a little-valued commodity (in entertainment circles) called intelligence. But TV was full of people who had started out as assistants and moved forward by dint of ambition, greed and phenomenal servility. Consequently, these people tended to sport insecurities the size of sperm whales. And egos that were rarely smaller than the Eiffel Tower. And therefore, these folks were also filled with a desperate desire to protect their territory while expressing slavish adoration for their superiors. Which for us folks, meant nothing but generalized assholery and an infuriating school-girl ear-whispering cliquishness.

Of course we weren’t treated any better back in Paris. No sir. This was why I sensed Cannes was going to be a radical sort of hell. Because most of the production assistants back in Paris treated us like people treat their toilet-bound air fresheners. Like a totally disgusting but necessary evil. In their eyes we resembled rotting fish in open trash. Vultures near a corpse. So we were neither liked, respected, wanted or even noticed. At every step in fact, we were ignored, excluded, mocked and just about tolerated. With the exception of the higher bosses who made the decisions and hired us and paid us, the rest of the low-thinking bitcherati that staffed production at Paris Plus believed we were useless. That we were overpaid, underworked, intolerably spoiled and therefore deserving of the most relentless unrefined, non-processed nastiness.