What will we be doing at Cannes?" Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard asked rhetorically. "We'll be reading scripts." Chances are that Bernard, along with fellow toppers Michael Barker and Marcie Bloom, will be doing more than that this festival. They are likely to be doing some wheeling and dealing as they jockey about an ever more competitive field to acquire the titles they really want. As Bernard put it, the SPC triumvirate has learned that they have to speak as loudly as their competitors in order to triumph.

"Our profile is fairly low," Bernard told Moving Pictures. "It's not as high as we would like it to be."

A recent article in The Los Angeles Times may go some way in remedying that, even if the projects that attract SPC's attention are less Hollywood and more New York/European/ art-house in nature. Certainly, a look at the company's successes should lift its profile. The past slate includes such titles as Howard's End, Orlando, Amateur, Crumb, Safe, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Caught, In the Company of Men and a host of other non-mainstream titles. Additionally, the fact that, according to Bernard, some 60% of the company's releases were acquired at script stage, should help add definition to SPC's muscle.

Speaking loudly in the quest for new titles, however, is not necessarily the equivalent of plopping the most money on to the negotiating table.  "We may offer less up front," said Barker, "but [producers] are likely to walk away from the table with more money when all is said and done."

Indeed, SPC has a reputation for acquiring plumb projects for less money than other distributors because it also has a reputation for paying producers more averages in the long run.

That reputation is the fruit of a fully fledged hands-on approach to distribution. "One of the worst things for a filmmaker," said Bernard, "is for an acquisitions guy to get all excited about a film, buy it, and then turn it over to a sales person who knows nothing about the film."

Distribution is a "cumbersome" process, he admitted, but those who do it successfully know all the nuts-and-bolts that make the process work.

"Other people's agendas are different," Barker shrugged, referring to the handful of New York-based companies that are involved in the "specialty film" market, some of which are now seguing into the mini-major realm. "We see a project all the way through."

That process extends from making a pre-buy to watching the grosses at individual theatres. "We're so anal," Barker laughed self-deprecatingly, "that we check grosses per showtime. We will discuss whether a multiplex operator is going to move us into a smaller room."

And Bernard, at least, is intimately familiar with many of the theatre operators who play their movies. Name any town in the midwestern US states and Bernard will be able to give you the name of its art-house, the name of the owner, and the owner's reputation.

 Their "anal" attention to this "cumbersome" process has worked well for Bernard and Barker, a duo that has worked together since first teaming up some 17 years ago in the classics division of United Artists. Their approach has also secured them a unique position in the Sony family, that of an autonomous, turn-key operation.

They choose their own films, make their own deals and develop their own marketing and distribution strategies. With the addition of Bloom, the team now has an element who, according to Bernard, knows the value of talent and how to exploit it.