Peter Noble, the editor of Screen International, once told me this story:

A guy is sitting in a sidewalk cafe at Cannes. He asks the waiter, "Can you tell me where the toilet is?" The waiter says: "Monsieur! I have only two hands!"

HEATHROW. The British Airways flight to Nice was delayed an hour for an equipment change: "An air-conditioning failure," the receptionist in the Executive Club explained cheerfully, as if, after all, it could have been worse. Reading her computerized passenger manifest upside-down, a skill I developed while bending over the printer's stone in the hot-lead days of newspapers, I found that the lounge also contained "T. Jones, dir Monty Python," "Lady Delfont — see note," and the president of New World Pictures. We were all on the flight to Nice, and we were all eyeing each other uneasily across the checked gray carpet of the lounge.

I was at a corner table with my battery-powered Radio Shack Model 100 portable computer, and my tapping had already annoyed a British businessman, who stood up to go look at the newspapers. We Americans are so very uncouth. The blonde in the green dress, for example, asked two polka-dotted British ladies to move over one position on their couch: "I just want to sit next to my father-in-law; is that all right?" she said, in one of those low, confident American female voices that carries across the room and into the corridor. The one thing many Americans never do notice in Europe is how quietly the Europeans speak to one another.

This was my twelfth Cannes festival, if you count that confusing week in 1972 when I knew nothing about the festival, decided to drop in while on holiday, asked my taxi driver to take me to the Carlton Hotel, and confidently walked in to ask for a room. I ended up in a pension somewhere up in the hills, in a room with French doors that opened onto a rose garden. That was the year the documentary Marjoe was shown, and I had dinner with the reprobate evangelist Marjoe Gortner and his directors, Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, in a Russian restaurant where during the coffee course the owner gleefully wheeled in a large silver cart and whipped off its dome top to reveal a stainless steel sculpture of two pigs copulating. I've never been able to find that restaurant again.

The British businessman, driven away by my computer, was standing by the wall, glaring at me and sipping his coffee. An American took the empty seat and asked me how much memory I had on board.

In the early days, covering Cannes was made considerably more difficult by the problem of getting copy back to the United States. After writing my stories on a portable typewriter, I had to take them over to the Telex booth in the Palais des Festivals, where French-speaking typists copied an approximation of my prose into their telegraph machines. Mistakes were de rigueur. In 1977 I wrote that 900 balloons were released at a cocktail party in honor of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she was then. After the French Telex operators had finished with their work, the Chicago Sun-Times and New York Post printed that "900 falcons" had been released — and there was an alarmed protest from Cleveland Amory on behalf of the Fund for Animals, inspiring a correction ("... they were not falcons. In fact, they were balloons. The Sun-Times regrets the error"), which I submitted to the news-break department of the New Yorker, earning twelve dollars.

For the last four years, computers have promised to make my life easier at the festival. In theory, I can dial up the Sun-Times computer in Chicago and dump my daily coverage directly into its memory. In practice, this has never quite worked, because the French long-distance system measures each call with a series of little clicks that automatically disconnect computers. Last year, in desperation, I brought along a portable printer, printed out hard copies of all of my stories and had them sent out by Telex, making the computer operation, if anything, less convenient than the portable typewriter. This year, my plan was to dump everything into the French arm of MCI Mail and let MCI figure out how to get it to Chicago. This had already cost me $362 for a temporary National User's Number, which sounds like a drug registry but is only the French method of charging me for the privilege of paying for my transmissions.

I HAVE ALWAYS felt a little out of place at these glamorous international events. The passengers in the lounge all looked as if they had dressed, this morning, in appropriate lounge-wear. Across from me, for example, was a tall, distinguished man with slicked-back iron-gray hair, an impeccable gray suit, and gold personal jewelry. He was traveling with a tall, slender young woman with a mane of black hair, who was wearing a form-fitting navy blue suit and gold slippers. She had just fetched him a cup of coffee in French. They looked like models in a slick magazine ad promoting the Executive Club. I imagined that all of these people were going to Cannes to stay in expensive hotels and eat in expensive restaurants and make expensive deals involving movies. Their expenses for the festival would equal an annual minimum wage.

The event they were attending at such great expense could be described as Disneyland for adults. During the day at Cannes, the Palais des Festivals churns away with the press and trade screenings, the grubby journalists and distributors darting in and out of the sunlight, looking for a good movie. At night, the elegant people emerge from their hotels, having spent the day playing tennis and lunching on yachts, and they stroll along the Boulevard Croisette in expensive formal wear, on their way to the official black-tie screenings. Narrow-eyed German film critics and French cineastes and American movie buffs crouch over their tables in the sidewalk cafes, watching them malevolently as they stroll toward the projection, blaming them for the death of the cinema. Meanwhile, on the back streets of Cannes, the local theaters grind away twenty hours a day with the interchangeable annual budget of exploitation pictures, a tribute to the industry's unflagging optimism that new ways can be found to combine tits, ass, and machine guns.

THE FESTIVAL is held for two weeks every May. There is nothing else like it anywhere in the world. The 1987 festival was the fortieth anniversary year for Cannes, which was originally conceived in 1939 as a response to Mussolini's Venice Film Festival, but which finally got underway after the war. The earliest years were fairly serious affairs, the sunny Riviera notwithstanding, but in 1949 a starlet took off her bikini top and embraced Robert Mitchum for the photographers on the beach, and the Cannes Film Festival as we know it was born. It is claimed that forty thousand people attend, not counting the hot-eyed fans who surge at the barricades and scream out the names of their heroes as the stars promenade into the Palais every night. This is the movie industry's annual trade fair, serviced by three daily festival newspapers, which run lists of prominent industry figures with the names of the hotels where they are staying, and then one of two words: Buying, or Selling. Every year there are festival jokes: The pope was just shot. Oh, yeah? When are they...