Some folks were afraid terrorists would strike. Others were suspicious that the fix was in.
May 22, 2025 | “So how come Rambo isn’t coming here, eh?”
The question, posed to me with a delicate mixture of playfulness and contempt, came from a bartender at the Hotel Martinez, reflecting the attitude of many locals during the opening day of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. In normal times, the bartender likely would have taken a slightly less snarky approach to his opening conversational gambit with any of the journalists covering the annual invasion by filmmakers, industry executives, tireless publicists and megawatt movie stars in his French Riviera resort city.
But May 1986 was not a normal time.
In the wake of then-recent terrorist acts in Europe and, arguably more important, the U.S. air strikes in Libya in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin disco just weeks earlier, many A-list celebrities — and yes, quite a few journalists — had called off previously ballyhooed appearances at the prestigious celebration of cinema, citing the danger of possible terrorist activity.
As had been widely reported in the international press, Sylvester Stallone did indeed cancel his tentative plans to attend the fest. Other notables — including Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Kim Basinger, and Martin Scorsese — also sent their regrets.
There were scads of stories in trade and mainstream papers about the incredible shrinking contingent of celebrities. Aljean Harmetz of The New York Times noted how “many Hollywoodians are reassessing their plans” to make their Cannes pilgrimage, and quoted Barbara Hershey, who’d originally been announced as an attendee to promote Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, thusly: “Probably if I were a single person, I’d go. But part of my responsibility to my son is not to put myself in any potential danger.”
As I told an inquiring colleague: “If someone could get close enough to Godard with a pie, maybe someone else could get close enough to another director with a gun.”
Depending on who you talked to, those who decided not to attend Cannes ’86 were either needlessly skittish or scrupulously wise. In any event, local police and festival officials took the threat of terrorism very seriously: Traffic was not allowed to flow directly in front of the Palais du Festival, the festival headquarters; uniformed police were more visible, and more numerous, than in previous years along the Boulevard de la Croisette outside; and festival workers were even more diligent than usual in their inspection of photo IDs flashed by anyone entering screenings.
The late David Overby, representing the Toronto International Film Festival (then still known as the Festival of Festivals) in Cannes, said early rumors suggested security police would check the packages and briefcases of everyone entering the Palais du Festival. “But can you imagine how long that would take!” he snorted incredulously. “We’d be here for 40 years, not two weeks.”
In her New York Times curtain-raiser, Harmetz quoted Michel Bonnet, general secretary of the festival, as warning that, while there would not necessarily be any frisking of individual attendees, security would be tightened to an unprecedented degree.
“Cannes is always a hot place, and every year we put under examination the hot spots,” he said, adding: “To enter the Palais this year, you will need to have your festival identity card. Sometimes people forget their cards and say, ‘I’m a VIP’ and we let them in, but this year we won’t let them in. We will have more police in civilian clothes. And we will recommend to the hotels on the Croisette not to let unknown people enter their lobbies.”
No joke: It got to the point prior to Cannes ’86 that journalists were interviewing other journalists about whether or not they would be attending the festival.
To be sure, more than a few Cannes residents thought festival officials, and the international press, were exaggerating the possible danger. “It’s all quite a bother, really,” a clerk at the Cannes English Bookshop told me. “They’ve set up barricades that make it very difficult to park where I usually do.
“And the newspeople! The stories they’ve been telling! Last night, I got a phone call from my mother, who lives in Australia. She wanted me to get out of here immediately.”
No joke: It got to the point prior to Cannes ’86 that journalists were interviewing other journalists about whether or not they would be attending the festival. “I suspect,” one scribe responded, “that the people who are making a big deal about not going weren’t going anyway and have never gone before.”
Maybe so. Truth to tell, however, even though I had been assigned to cover the fest in my capacity as film critic for the now-shuttered Houston Post, I was a tad anxious about actually going there, if only because — yes, I’ll admit it — I didn’t want to be caught in the line of fire.
At the previous year’s Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard was hit in the face with a cream pie, tossed by what Charles Champlin of The Los Angeles Times later described as “an iconoclastic Belgian journalist.” As I told an inquiring colleague: “If someone could get close enough to Godard with a pie, maybe someone else could get close enough to another director with a gun.”
In the end, fortunately, the most serious attacks on film celebrities — and festival jury members — were nonlethal brickbats tossed by critics and other media types.
As usual, there were complaints about the winner of the Palme d’or. In this case, it was The Mission, director Roland Joffé’s lavishly produced historical drama of religious conversion and cultural imperialism in 18th century South America. The epic, featuring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in lead roles, and a stunning score by Ennio Morricone that would late nab an Oscar nomination, premiered as “a work in progress” — prompting some cynics to suggest, if not bluntly claim, that producer David Puttnam and others had been promised the Golden Palm weeks earlier, in return for their making the film available for a world premiere at Cannes.
Not at all surprisingly, festival president Gilles Jacob heatedly denied rumors of a rigged ballot. “If you ask about this,” he said after the closing-night awards presentation, “you attack the integrity of every member of our jury. With another jury, we might have had another prize. But we have complete confidence in the prize they awarded.”
“Oh, no, Joe,” [Polanski] said, offering me another glass of wine and gesturing that I should return to my chair. “I don’t have another interview for a while.”
The press was even harsher in appraising the festival’s opening-night film, Roman Polanski’s long-planned and massively disappointing Pirates, a flat-footed comedy-adventure film starring Walter Matthau (another Cannes ’86 no-show) as a blustering buccaneer named Captain Red.
A massive chunk of the budget went toward construction of a period-perfect Spanish galleon that was docked throughout the festival in the Cannes harbor. It remained there for years after Pirates bombed at the box-office, perhaps serving as a reminder to other -filmmakers of just how easily dreams can turn into nightmares.
Polanski himself allowed at a post-screening press conference that maybe he’d waited too long, and worked too strenuously, for Pirates to be fresh and exciting. “I think that maybe the film would have had more spontaneity if I had made it 10 years ago,” he said.
“But, on the other hand, it might not have been so mature.”
Polanski was considerably more upbeat during a lengthy interview I had with him the following day in his hotel suite. How lengthy? After about an hour of conversation, I thanked him for his time and openness — he admitted that he wanted to end his exile after fleeing rape charges and return to America only because his murdered late wife, Sharon Tate, was buried there — and said something to the effect that I was sure he had many other people waiting to speak with him.
I was wrong.
“Oh, no, Joe,” he said, offering me another glass of wine and gesturing that I should return to my chair. “I don’t have another interview for a while.”
To this day, I remain uncertain whether he was pleased to be speaking with a nonjudgmental journalist who wanted to talk (mostly) about his movies, not his peccadillos, or if he really didn’t have all that many journalists vying for his time because so many of them had bailed on Cannes that year.
If I’m more inclined to select the latter possibility, that’s because I had several other extended conversations with other actors and filmmakers at Cannes ’86 — including a two-hour or so lunch with Eric Roberts, there to promote Runaway Train — who, quite frankly, probably would not have otherwise spent so much time with a relative nobody from The Houston Post. As Woody Allen once advised: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
That’s not to say, however, that certain precautions weren’t taken. Canadian journalist Harry Sutherland said, only half-jokingly, that he was handing out Canadian flag-pins for U.S. journalists who wanted to remain inconspicuous during Cannes ’86. The pin, I must confess, looked rather nice when placed on the lapel of one’s sportscoat.
