THE MAYHEM FACTORY

CANNES HAD NEVER seen anything quite like it. It was May 12, 1990, early on in the town’s 43rd Film Festival, and on the famous pool terrace of the Hôtel du Cap — the swankiest, most eye-wateringly expensive of the area’s party venues — a movie bash of blockbuster proportions was in full flow. Earlier in the day, a planeload of stars and industry bigwigs had flown in from Hollywood on a specially chartered 747. The passengers had been met on the airport tarmac by a cavalcade of black Mercedes Benzes, equipped with mounted flashing lights, which negotiated tightly winding streets from the normally quiet Riviera town up to the Cap d’Antibes. That evening, speedboats roared in and out of the bay, ferrying yet more guests to the astonishing blow-out, at which the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, James Cameron and Oliver Stone schmoozed, the Gipsy Kings sang, and the titles of forthcoming movies were spelled out in the sky by fireworks. It was enough to raise the eyebrows of even the most jaded Cannes party-watchers.

The shindig, rumoured to have cost as much as $1 million, was ostensibly to announce such Carolco projects as and . But in reality it was designed as a way for the company to bask in its own considerable success. In a few short years, Carolco had transformed itself from a shoestring operation, repackaging the international rights to low-grade Hollywood dreck, into a major production company, one which operated from a swanky seven-storey office off Sunset