Running in Heels, Rolling Film & the Glory of Getting Nothing Done on Purpose 😂

Or: What Cannes Taught Me About Endurance, Elegance, and Popcorn Butter 📽️👠🍿

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Hello, lovelies—how the hell are you?

Thirty years ago, I went to Cannes for the first time. That bastion of film, fashion, and foot pain. Let’s be clear: flats are still forbidden. The French think they’re for quitters. No Meghan Markle Vivaia’s for you, darling. You must learn to sprint across cobblestones in stilettos and chiffon, like a heavily armed ballerina.

By day, I was a lowly assistant—ravaged by espresso, sun, and the sheer stamina of back-to-back terrace meetings at the Carlton. Power floated by like perfume: Bob. Harvey. Milos Foreman. James Schamus. Keanu. Phil Collins. (Yes, really.) The only other women I remember were my colleagues. The rest were waify, bird-boned starlets, armed with false eyelashes and professional yearning.

Max Caulfield from Grease 2 kept appearing like a slightly confused ghost from a mid-range leather catalog. Sweet guy. Perfectly pleasant. And entirely wrong for every project we were pitching—each more snooty and British than the last. I kept asking if he didn’t feel Cannes was too warm for that much cowhide.

Despite being an assistant, I was an apprentice to the gods. I studied every deal point like scripture. Watched alliances form, break, and reform. Learned how the mountain of “let’s make a movie” becomes Everest—thin air, deadly crevasses, hallucinations of funding. We had stars, backing, scripts. But we were also… women. My bosses were midlife women. Lawyers turned producers. And as brilliant as they were, it was clear many people thought they had no business being in the business.

And then night would fall.

Oh, the gowns. The flashbulbs. The foie gras truffle lasagna canapés (don’t judge—it was a different time). Wim Wenders held court in castles. I wore borrowed designer dresses like some kind of socialist Cinderella. Everything was giddy, glamorous, gloriously unhinged. I was twenty-something, and art and life felt possible in the same breath.

This week, it happened again.

My former producing partner—whom I revere, full stop—had his new film Nouvelle Vague premiere at Cannes to rave reviews. The movie is stunning. A valentine to the messy birth of cinema’s coolest rebellion—the French New Wave—and to Jean Seberg, played by Zoey Deutch, who asks the most relatable line in all of movie-making:

“When will this fucking movie be over?”

If you've ever sat through a ten-day festival lineup or tried to get a single film greenlit by three execs and a hedge fund, you’ve asked this. Usually quietly. Sometimes while holding a Badoit.

Nouvelle Vague, directed by the endlessly charming and precise Richard Linklater, captures not the legend of Breathless, but the chaos of making it—on the fly, on the street, without a script. Just a girl, a gun, and a sense of “what if we just did it anyway?”

So many kudos and congrats to all who worked on it.

It reminded me of us.

Our sizzle reels, our scrappy shoots, our absolute joy in just making the thing. We didn’t always have the cash, but we had the taste. And Linklater’s film is that—tasteful chaos. Black-and-white, impossibly smooth, with actors who feel like they were grown in a garden marked “early cinema meets emotional nuance.”

It’s the kind of movie that demands to be seen in a theater.

Which brings me to our thread:

You’ve inherited an arthouse movie theater. Congratulations. What’s your first double feature?

Mine?

1. La Femme Nikita — because there’s nothing better than a resourceful, lethal, emotionally volatile woman on a redemption arc.

2. After the Thin Man — Myrna Loy and William Powell sleuth, drink, flirt, and solve a murder like it’s foreplay. The banter. The outfits. The martinis!

Speaking of which—my theater would serve:

• Popcorn with truffle butter, bourbon caramel butter, bacon cheddar butter, and dirty pickle butter (yes, it’s a thing)

• Hot dogs from Carney’s in West Hollywood (which may or may not contain trace amounts of joy-enhancing narcotics)

• And stiff martinis, because I believe in the sacred union of high and low culture.

Here’s to the movies. To the chaos. To the memory of what we tried to make, and the joy of watching someone else pull it off.

Now your turn—what’s on your dream marquee?

There’s so much opportunity for thematic programming!

Yours in heels and leftover Veuve, - xoxo - gotham girl

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PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.