Baz Luhrmann liked to tell the story of his first screening at Cannes, in 1992, with Strictly Ballroom:

"I remember every second of it," he recalled. "Nervously hanging up signs: 'Come and see our film.' A very small audience coming to see it, then a standing ovation. Then us being the TOAST OF THE TOWN. Twenty-four hours later, another screening being called - you couldn't get in. A security guard leaned over and said to me, 'Monsieur, your life will never be the same again.'"

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The film won the festival's prestigious Prix de la Jeunesse.
Luhrmann, Baz (1962-    ) Australian director noted for such films as Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge; and for his hit song "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)" (1999)


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Shortly after wedding his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in Chicago in September 1921, Ernest Hemingway, intrigued by Sherwood Anderson's tales of Parisian life, sailed for France. The family settled in Montparnasse, the hub of the expatriate community, where Hemingway wrote several short stories and his first two novels (Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, both published in 1926) and became the TOAST OF THE TOWN.

Though Hemingway left Paris in 1928, he returned in 1944 as the city was freed from the Germans. His role in the conflict? "Liberating," with a band of French resistance fighters, the wine cellar in the famous Ritz Hotel.

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Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899-1961) American sportsman and writer, Nobel Prize recipient (Literature, 1954) noted for his terse literary style; for his legendary machismo; and for such works as The Sun Also Rises (1926), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952)