By Teddy Wayne
IHT, May 29, 2007

The Cannes Film Festival annually brings out the brightest stars for a red-carpet barrage of photos, gossip and generally profound discourse. Was the pre-show interview always this glamorous?

Joan Riverus: Hail, Caesar! Over here! How are you?
Julius Caesar: Fantastic. Et tu, Joanie?
Riverus: Super. You look positively divine, Julius.
Caesar: Thanks - this is a really simple, elegant white toga and strappy sandals designed by my talented, dear friend for his label, Emporio Bruti.
Riverus: I love what you've done with your hair.
Caesar: It's a new style - I'm calling it "the Clooney."
Riverus: What are you up for?
Caesar: Best Rhetorician. But, truly, it's an honor just to be given laurels alongside classic orators like Cicero and Mark Antony.
Riverus: Any upcoming projects?
Caesar: I'm working with my collaborators - I've heard them call themselves "conspirators" for some reason - on a new oration for an Ides of March release. The tagline is: "Beware. Be very wary."
Riverus: Handsome, eloquent - and a dictator, too! You know, my daughter's a Vestal Virgin.

William Bushe: Shakespeare, eminent scribe and player of Stratford-upon-Avon! Verily, confer with me!
William Shakespeare: William Bushe, with a magnitude of meretricious laughter and back-slapping I greet thee.
Bushe: Thou art merely presenting an award tonight?
Shakespeare: Aye, for Best Stage-Play.
Bushe: Is thine heart sodden that "The Winter's Tale" was bereft of nominations whilst the Guild cited Ben Jonson's "Alchemist"?
Shakespeare: Jonson's comedy hast merit, if thou dost revel in that sort of thing. No further comment shall loose from my proud lips.

Walter Barbier: Napoleon, thank you for joining me on Walter Barbier's Académie Française Awards Special. You're receiving a General Achievement Award tonight, and you're truly a survivor: Russia, Leipzig, your complex.
Napoleon Bonaparte: My what?
Barbier: I said, "You're complex." So, how does Napoleon Bonaparte prepare for a role in an invasion?
Napoleon: When I strategize with military advisers, it's intense. Ha! I just made a double entendre, because we also strategize "in tents"! Oui!
Barbier: Walk us through your attacking process.
Napoleon: I completely immerse myself in the character of the country. What are its vulnerabilities, by land and sea? What does it really want, treaty-wise? Is my mission impossible or possible? Then I conquer and indoctrinate its citizens in the principles of the Napoleonic Code, such as eradicating postpartum ennui with exercise and citrus fruits and not the glib pseudoscience of leeches! Woo-hoo! Vive la France !

Ryan Hegelcrest: K-Marx! Whose suit is that?
Karl Marx: Mine, insofar as one can claim ownership over goods and not vice versa.
Hegelcrest: You're so dialectically funny! I meant, who made it?
Marx: My wife sewed it with materials we harvested ourselves. I do not participate in the unjust exchange-value relationship by which the alienated proletariat toils at subsistence levels as his factory owner reaps immense surplus value.
Hegelcrest: Turn around, let's see the back.
Marx: The only turning shall be from the worker's wheels of revolution, oiled by the blood of his superstructural oppressors.
Hegelcrest: Who did your beard?
Marx: My wife trims it.
Hegelcrest: Wow, you lovebirds can't get enough of each other! How does she feel about your spending so much time with Friedrich Engels, your producing partner?
Marx: That is a falsehood akin to the illusory dream of social mobility. We are not capitalist producers.
Hegelcrest: Sorry. Um, who's going to win Best Supporting Ideological Apparatus?
Marx: Awards ceremonies commodify art and opiate the bourgeoisie. And drag on way too long. Nevertheless, it is a historical inevitability that my book "Das Kapital, Volume I" will triumph. The rest of the trilogy is in development.
Hegelcrest: Well, have fun at the "Vanity Fair" William Thackeray tribute party.
Marx: Awards-show shirkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your office pools.

Teddy Wayne is a lecturer in fiction writing at Washington University.