We’re here as part of the regular press junket for Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What we’re doing is anything but regular.
The talent for any movie is usually moved through a series of set interviews with old media journos. Jumping from room to room and between worldwide print and TV press.
We’re aiming to open that up somewhat.
But even a regular junket is akin to a living breathing animal and it lives on compromise.
We’ll see what happens around 10.30am GMT I guess.
I’m carrying luke-warm coffee out to the car that’s taking me to Gatwick for the 6am flight to Cannes. Dan takes it gratefully. Less than an hour ago I’d had to call him and make sure he was ready to go. He wasn’t.
I wait until he’s finished drinking and we’re well on our way to Gatwick before letting him know I’d had to improvise in preparing his drink by using kitten milk. Dan, ever the professional, takes it in his stride.
Stupid-o-clock Friday
At the airport we meet up with Dom who is going to set up our media room while we dither about in the background and go through worst case scenarios. Like what to do if Seesmic goes down. Oddly, many hours later in France when Seesmic does go down temporarily, we simply find a bar and order a lot of beer. This is the only scenario we didn’t voice, but becomes a touchstone for the next twenty four hours.
Somewhere between the UK and France
I’m reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett - a story about a good man surrounded on all sides by bad - while snuggly seated between Dan and Dom.
The stewardess announces the flight is out of coffee and I have flashbacks to Airplane. When we land in Nice it’s through a lot of cloud and rain. Fuck.
The Carlton
Our cab pulls up just in front of a car unloading Jack Black and we all enter the hotel together. I like the look of his Kung Fu Panda t shirt, but say nothing. Likewise he fails to comment on the egg yolk splatter on my own chest.
A quick meander to the Paramount floor to check in and find out what’s gone wrong (something always goes wrong) while we were in the air. I drink more coffee while Dan paces the corridors talking into a cell phone. Hotel staff cluster around doorways talking about the celebrities dotted around the building. Dom sits on his equipment case and I can’t help but think of WW2 GIs sitting on their helmets to protect their testicles.
My own equipment consists of a an 84 sheet ‘Big Value Jotter’ with a £1.99 price sticker on the front. I leave it in my bag.
Things begin to spiral in and our of our control. We ditch our gear into a bathroom and go looking for more coffee but find Omar Sharif, Sean Penn and Peter Coyote instead. I Twitter as much and make a hash of at least one surname. I feel better a moment later when Dan rapes the Frech language by asking for directions to a ‘machine dur bonk’.
We pow-wow and look at the facts. It’s raining, we’re in Cannes and we have a job to do that no one has done before. Our contacts here have us down as the “web-chat” people. Which is fine because we’re having difficulty trying to summarise what exactly it is we’re doing. We get clogged down in buzz words like ’social media’ before realising it’s not about the technology but the people using it.
All we want to do is put the fans in front of the film makers.
Shouldn’t be too difficult, no?
Also not freezing to death while spooning on the beach at 3am has suddenly become a priority.
Our plan to crash on the floor of what will become our media room immediately went out the window after a quick glance at the floor plan. Instead we locate a reasonably priced place that can offer us a room each just a short drive away.
Sean Penn and I stare each other out one last time before we jump in a cab.
The cab
Our driver is clearly insane, but we take this to be a god omen. To the back of his seat is superglued the back cover of the vinyl soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Dan and Dom fall immediately asleep as I hum a little Ludvig Van. I work out when the last time it was that I slept and immediately close my eyes just as we pull up at our destination.
The Death Motel
Holy fuck.
Over lunch
We converge over a motorway services style meal and again give some thought as to why we’re here. My vegetables are openly mocked. We order some beer and the waitress allows Dan to mangle her language in exchange for a huge tip. More coffee and then we’re heading back to set the room up.
Online
We still can’t mention what exactly it is we’re doing here. People begin to guess via Twitter and Seesmic. I begin to catch up with my timelines and watch Beatrice submerged in water somewhere nearby. Even closer, someone seems to have secreted himself in a toilet cubicle somewhere in our building and is broadcasting updates to people far removed from the urinals.
Dan begins the dance of the laptops and then things converge and fall over. We retreat to a nearby bar and find an expert. We adopt him for the evening and he saves the day with a beer induced brainwave. We immediately relax.
The room we have to vacate by 10pm
By midnight it’s full of room service trolleys and discarded ideas, cables and bottles. A maid appears to turn down the bed we’ve moved into the corner of the room and are using as an idea-hub.
We protect the idea-hub from all new comers and rearrange our plan-pillows. We’re mocked on a series of online platforms and then we’re reviewing incoming footage from all over the world. Dom works magic, dispenses with the clunky crap we insisted was the whole point of THE PLAN and miraculously turns an oft pixelated interface into a thing of HD glory.
We have the Raiders march on a loop.
We have some empty chairs to fill.
Back in the UK, Gia is preparing for her flight and will see us in a few hours. Rock and roll.
Cannes at night
We wade through a street full of beautiful people, fake breasts and the almost famous. Spotting a black cab we find it manned by a very English cabbie who immediately refuses to take us anywhere.
Dan, ever the optimist, asks what our chances are of finding a cab.
I haven’t had the opportunity to get on Seesmic much since… well, I guess since going out to San Francisco and hanging with the Seesmic team. When I got back from that trip work just exploded and video was just too much a time suck. Over the last week or so I’ve been easing myself back into the video conversation arena, both on Seesmic and Phreadz.
Last night was my first sustained stab at conversation since Christian came over and we got drunk.
One of the longer running threads was about the vogue for comeback movies - older characters being brought back for another go at the franchise - sometimes with mixed results. I was keen to know what (probably unnecessary) sequels people would like to see and kicked things off with my need for a new Mad Max movie.
We soon had a good rambling squabble about Ghostbusters III, Big Trouble in Little China II and Three Men and a Little Crack Whore. Twas a fun night.
A lot of emotion came spilling out I’m glad to say and at one point we got this memorable post from Dana about James Spader:
Just like some trailers are way better than the eventual movies I have no desire to work through xx* years of X Men comic books, but I could look at this poster every day:
See what I did there? 45 years actually. Fuck that.
The new trailer for Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull popped up before Iron Man on Friday night and it’s the first preview in ages that had the audience cheering through it. There was some of this back before Phantom Menace but the demographic for that was always skewed away from the women folk, who just rolled their eyes at the nerds they were with.
Indy has a more unisex appeal.
In fact just today over lunch it was remarked to me that there’s quite a lot of expectation laid on Harrison’s shoulders from gals eager to see him don that fedora one last time…
For myself the excitement is growing after the initial ‘meh’ of the first trailer. There’s more than a glimmer of the old magic in trailer number two and I’m already tapping into a rich vein of fan excitement over this one.
Just watching the Twitter time line get all nostalgic over a screening of Raiders was a good gauge of the Indy love out there.
