Over the years I’ve never been more aware of the cries of seagulls than during the Cannes Film Festival. If you’re staying anywhere near the marina (as Hollywood Elsewhere is) their squawking cuts through the night air like an ambulance siren…wailing, aarking, “wake up, you sleepyheads.” Scavengers by nature, gulls are “often heard very early in the morning”, according to their Wiki page, but I’m telling you they are very nocturnal…2 am, 3 am, 4 am. And exacerbating my inability to sleep.

I brilliantly forgot to bring my ambien tablets this year, and so last night I was trying to ease up and let slumber come naturally and failing for the most part. Partly (largely?) because the gulls wouldn’t stop partying.

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I’m at my Heathrow departure gate — terminal 4, gate 10. A full hour before the departure of HE’s Nice flight at 8:55 am.

Yesterday’s London roam-around (see photos posted last night) was fairly glorious, especially ending as it did at Namaste Holborn, a Bloomsbury veggie Indian restaurant with outdoor seating. Perfection in all departments.

Today will be the only low-stress, comme ci comme ca day of the ‘24 Cannes Film Festival. Moving in, shopping, meditating, breathing in the seaside air, getting some dinner and avoiding all the shithead journalists with whom I was once on good, friendly terms with but have since morphed into William S. Burroughs-styled insects.

Hollywood Elsewhere is seated in row 46, right aisle, on a Virgin Atlantic flight to Heathrow…a flight that should have left at midnight but is only just getting underway at 12:41 am.

I have roughly the same amount of wiggle-breathing room that astronaut Alan B. Shepard had in his Mercury space capsule on 5.5.61. Plus I’m seated next to a person of considerable (dare I say oppressive?) size.

Coach flying is an agony-endurance test. You just have to somehow get through it.

4:38 am update: For purely sadistic reasons our Virgin Atlantic flight attendants insisted on serving drinks and snacks for just under two hours…1:30 am to 3:25 am…up and down the aisle, pushing carts, bumping into outstretched legs and feet. Thanks, guys.

It’s 11:20 pm and my midnight London flight is boarding, but the hugely crafty, creatively penny-pinching, super-influential Roger Corman — an industry giant, indisputably titanic, the godfather of hip-pocket cinema in the ’50s, 60s, ’70s and ’80s — has passed at age 98, and I’ve only time to say that anyone who doesn’t know who Corman was, is and always will be is absolutely required to watch Alex Stapleton‘s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Just watch it already — the whole amazing saga crammed into 95 minutes.

A vote for RFK, Jr. is for all practical purposes a vote for…?

Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported two days ago that Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) will direct a “hot script”, penned by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), about “the White House reacting in real time to ballistic missiles headed for America.”

Which sounds like a fairly close cousin of Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe, no?

Keep in mind that Oppenheim’s Jackie script wasn’t really the basis of Pablo Larrain’s 2016 film. Here’s how I explained it three years ago:

“Oppenheim’s Jackie was originally going to be directed by Darren Aronofsky with Rachel Weisz playing Jackie Kennedy. Oppenheim’s script told the story of what happened that weekend and pretty much how it went down on a beat-for-beat, conversation-by-conversation basis,

“[In 2016] it seemed brash and brilliant for Larrain, who took over the project sometime in ’15, to forsake the historical and sidestep that mass memory and not deliver a rote recap of what Mrs. Kennedy, only 34 at the time, went through that weekend, but to make a kind of art film — to give her portrait a kind of anxious, fevered, interior feeling.

“Which is why I wrote that Jackie really is ‘the only docudrama about the Kennedy tragedy that can be truly called an art film…it feels somewhat removed from the way that the events of that weekend looked and felt a half-century ago…intimate, half-dreamlike and cerebral, but at the same time a persuasive and fascinating portrait of what Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman) went through between the lunch-hour murder of her husband in Dallas and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery three days later.

“But after re-watching Jackie a couple of weeks ago I went back and re-read a draft of Oppenheim’s script, which is a whole different bird. Pablo cut out a lot of characters and a lot of interplay and a general sense of ‘this is how it happened’ realism, focusing almost entirely on Jackie’s interior saga.

“And honestly? I discovered that I liked Oppenheim’s version of the tale a little more than Pablo’s.

“The script is more of a realistic ensemble piece whereas Larrain’s film is about what it was like to be in Jackie’s head. I respect Larrain’s approach, mind, but I felt closer to the realm of Oppenheim’s script. I believed in the dialogue more. The interview scenes between Theodore H. White (played by Billy Crudup in the film) and Jackie felt, yes, more familiar but at the same time more realistic, more filled-in. I just felt closer to it. I knew this realm, these people.”

…before the start of the exciting, high-stress, sleep-deprived ordeal of the Cannes Film Festival, which is always a kick when you first arrive…here we all are! Great to be back! La Pizza! That briney air and those early-morning cries of seagulls.

But before long that 18-hour-per-day grind feeling takes hold, and before you know it you’re Trevor Howard’s soot-coveted, tired-blood coal miner in Jack Cardiff’s 1960 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. A coal miner with a pink badge, I mean. Don’t get me wrong — Cannes is never less than a “fun”, flush time, to be sure, but it’s never a day at the beach.

Unless, of course, you happen to see a film that’s so good you feel rejuvenated, and then life is beautiful again.

My first Cannes Film Festival was in May ‘92 so don’t tell me.

The online reservation process for press began early Friday morning (5.10), or more precisely an hour past midnight in Manhattan or 7 am Cannes time. Four days in advance, one reservation day at a time. I reserved tickets for a Tuesday afternoon showing of the first half (I think) of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (‘27) and an evening screening of Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act.

Early this morning I missed my 1 am wake-up (I arose at 3 am…unforgivable!) so I missed out on a couple of Wednesday films. (Don’t ask.) You have to pounce immediately at 7 am or you might be left out in the cold. It’s a semi-dicey, fraught process — many veterans yearn for the good old days of just lining up and come what may. Yes, you can still get into screenings on a last-ditch rush basis but…

Tonight’s 1 am reservation opportunity (Thursday’s screenings include Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis and Andrea Arnold’s Bird) happens one hour into my London flight, which departs at 11:59 pm. Let’s hope the Virgin Atlantic wifi will be in good working order.

Right now it’s 2 pm on Saturday, 5.11. For the last 22 hours I’ve been hanging in West Orange (and to some extent Montclair) with Jett, Cait and Sutton…TV time, soccer practice, book store, fresh market.