Film Festival were a building, it would be the Carlton.

The iconic hotel, with its Belle Époque balustrades and twin cupola domes, its combination of old world elegance and over-the-top extravagance, is a manifestation — in limestone, stucco and pink marble — of the Cannes festival brand. “I often hear people compare the Carlton to the Eiffel Tower,” says Carlton Hotel general manager Pierre-Louis Renou. “On one hand, it’s gigantic, but on the other so immaculate. It’s kind of a monument to the glamour of Cannes.”

The first-ever Cannes festival was held at the Carlton Casino in 1946 — well before they built the Palais — and the Carlton has played a supporting, occasionally starring, role in the history of the festival ever since. The first Cannes celebrity photo-op? The best promotional stunts? The biggest backroom deals? They all happened at the Carlton.

A year after the first VE Day, the Carlton welcomed the world’s press (a total of 8 journalists!) to the first-ever Cannes Film Festival, held at the Carlton Casino, with a lineup that included Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and David Lean’s Brief Encounter.

They may look quite modest today, but in 1953, photos of 18-year-old French actress Brigitte Bardot posing on the Carlton beach in a tropical-print bikini were a shock sensation. It’s unclear how much the photo op helped the box office for Bardot’s film Marina, the Girl in the Bikini (which had been shot in Cannes the year before), but it made the skimpy swimsuit mainstream and launched a thousand imitators, including the creators that continue to swarm the Carlton beach today, posing for selfies.

The Carlton, notes Renou, is “probably the most photographed hotel in the world” but film cameos are rare. “We get a lot of filming requests, but we have to be very careful, because were are a hotel, not a film studio,” he notes. But Hitchcock got the green light to send Grace Kelly and Cary Grant clambering over the Carlton rooftop.

George Lucas, in Cannes on his own dime for the screening of THX 1138 in the Directors’ Fortnight, wrangled a 10-minute lunch meeting with UA CEO David Picker on the Carlton terrace. Picker liked Lucas’ idea for a 1950s teen drama about drag racing (American Graffiti), so Lucas awkwardly pitched him on “this space opera thing. Sort of an action adventure film in space.” Picker optioned it. For $10,000. (He’d later drop both options, and Alan Ladd Jr., at 20th Century Fox would score big in a galaxy far far away.)

Elton turned the Carlton terrace into a technicolor dance floor filled with bondage-geared concierges, aerobic French mimes and inspired pastel knitwear for this early MTV era touchstone. Elton himself did not dance. (His moves, he admitted, terrified the choreographer.) And the video, disrupted by an Elton booze-a-thon with Duran Duran, barely wrapped. But it stands as a 3-minute distillation of the Cannes brand of Mediterranean glam. “We still keep a strong relationship with Elton John,” says Renou. “And would be delighted to welcome him back soon.”

The festival has played host to many a wacky promotional photo op, from Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham rolling up the Croisette in tanks for Expendables 3 to Sacha Baron Coen posing in a neon green mankini for Borat. But for pure memorable silliness, few compare with Jerry Seinfield, jammed into an oversized bee costume, strapping into a harness and zip-lining off the top of the Carlton down to the beach to promote the Paramount animated feature to which he’d lent his voice. The great era of the Cannes promotional stunt may be behind us. Speculation that Tom Cruise might revive the austere festival tradition came to naught when, instead of abseiling off the Palais or parachuting in, he and crew of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning sedately walked the red carpet for the film’s May 14 premiere.

Speaking of the end of an era, Red Granite’s soiree, a coming-out party for the would-be mini-studio, was one of the last Cannes blowouts, with a guest list that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Pharrell Williams, Jon Hamm and Bradley Cooper, free-flowing booze and food and a Coachella-worthy duet by (pre-scandal) Kanye West and Jamie Foxx performing “Gold Digger.” The bash, which reportedly cost a cool million, became a cautionary tale when Red Granite became embroiled in the 1MDB scandal — and dissolved in 2018.