Seduced and Abandoned

The director James Toback and Alec Baldwin go to Cannes. Their purpose is simple: to find the money for a film they want to make. They work their way through producers and financiers, naming figures, hearing figures, and getting turned down each time for a different reason. In the course of all this the back rooms of the festival come into view: who has the money, who will see whom, and who actually decides whether a film gets made. Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski, James Caan, Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain all speak in it. Toback makes his own film part of the telling. It is a film that looks not at cinema but at cinema's money.