By DON MORRISON Editor, TIME Asia

Along time ago in a TIME office far, far away, I met one of the most prolific writers ever to grace the magazine's pages. When I realized he would be crafting this week's cover story, I tracked him down in France--where he's taking in the annual Cannes Film Festival--and asked him for some quotes to use in my letter to readers. His response, word-for-word:

Senior Writer Richard Corliss has a job many would envy: he is paid to see and review movies. In the past two weeks Corliss has had two especially enticing assignments. First he attended an early screening of Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace in New York City. Then he was off to the Riviera for the 52nd--and his 26th--Cannes festival.

Eric Robert--Sygma for TIME

To get into the Star Wars screening you needed a ticket, more precious than a passport out of Kosovo, and a fluorescent hand stamp with the 20th Century Fox logo. Security guards, as imposing as anyone named Darth, eyed you at four separate checkpoints. Inside the theater, an official asked that audience members turn in anyone who might be camcording the movie. After the screening, journalists stood in the rain surrounding and taking notes from an 11-year-old boy who had seen the film. For one wet moment he was a celebrity.

At Cannes the weather and the women are much more beautiful, but the sense of urgency, almost desperation to see movies is the same. Twenty years ago, gypsies would beg for money; now the streets around the Croisette are clogged with well-dressed people imploring, "Une invitation, s'il vous plaît?" If you're a lucky critic, you have a white pass, which literally gives you carte blanche to hundreds of films and gets you past the guards and metal detectors. Most days, Corliss will see five or six films, furiously scribbling notes in the dark and hoping he can decipher them when the time comes to write his stories. The schedule can keep him in screening rooms from 8 a.m. until after midnight. But sometimes he gets a break. He lunches with filmmakers who are in town to promote their latest pictures.

One evening last week, he had a special treat: dinner in the sumptuous Carlton Hotel casino restaurant with Hsu Feng, the elegant actress of many great King Hu action fantasies of the '70s (and later producer of Farewell My Concubine) and Jiang Wen, mainland China's leading actor (and director of the superb In the Heat of the Sun). The conversation flowed like fine wine, in Mandarin, Cantonese, French and English. And at evening's end Corliss thought about his job: nice work if you can get it.

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