Acknowledgments

      While a fiction writer can create on his or her own, a journalist, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams's especially apt line, is always depending on the kindness of strangers. And when a book has been in the works for as long as this one, close to a decade, that's an awful lot of thank yous.

      I'd like to start with people who are hardly strangers, past and current staff at the Los Angeles Times, where earlier versions of many of these pieces appeared. Shelby Coffey III, Narda Zacchino, and John Lindsay made it possible for me to become the paper's film critic, and several levels of editors — Oscar Garza, Ann Hurley, Rich Nordwind, Kelly Scott, and Sherry Stern— supported my passion for watching films in distant lands. Francine Della Catena and Cindy Hively helped with selecting and procuring photographs, and Calendar's fine copy editors, too numerous to mention, had the unenviable task of trying to keep errors out of my stories. I'd also like to thank the editors of Smithsonian, where a different version of the Pordenone chapter appeared, for believing that the silent film revival was worth a trip to Italy to investigate.

      At each festival I went to, the staff and fellow journalists who helped me are too numerous to single out individually, but I could never have survived without their cheerful, selfless assistance. Where Sundance and Cannes are concerned, because I've attended for more than ten years in a row, I'm going to break precedent and thank Sandra Sapperstein and R. J. Millard for the former and Catherine Verret and Christine Aimé for the latter. I also have nothing but gratitude for the owners and staffs of the Old Miners' Lodge in Park City, Utah, and the Hotel Splendid in Cannes, which have made me feel so at home that I look forward to staying at their establishments at least as much as to the festivals in question.

      I'll always be grateful to James Clark at the University of California Press for immediately and wholeheartedly believing in this project, and to Eric Smoodin, who made the transition to finished book as smooth as possible. And of course my agent, Kathy Robbins, whose assistance with the contract was invaluable.

      When film becomes your life, it's hard to have any other kind of life, and I would really be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the friends who put up with me while all this was going on. That also goes for my daughters, Whitney and Devin, who have enriched my life in unexpected ways. And to my wife Patty Williams, who also took many of the book's photographs, my thanks are too strong and complex to be safely entrusted to words.