Woody Allen's latest movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona premiered Saturday at Cannes to a standing ovation...but star Scarlett Johansson wasn't there to experience it.
Scarlett, it turns out, was back in New York while Woody and her co-stars Rebecca Hall and Penelope Cruz soaked up all the adulation at the world's most famous film festival. Did Scarlett have a cold? Was there a scheduling conflict?
No...in fact, Scarlett had every intention of being at Cannes with her doting director and fellow actors. Unfortunately, Ms. Johansson laid a load of absurd demands on the film studio, and rather than shell out the cash to keep Scarlett happy, the studio simply left her behind.
It wasn't that the studio was playing cheap either: They were already paying for flights, hotels, limos, clothes, hair and make-up. This wasn't good enough for Scarlett, who objected to having to share stylists with Penelope Cruz and Rebecca Hall, and demanded the studio pony up 20,000 additional Euros for her to have her own personal beauty staff for 4 days.
And then there was the hotel. Woody and the other actors were booked into a place in the center of Cannes to facilitate getting to events...but Scarlett apparently didn't want to deal with the paparazzi, and demanded to be put up in a place outside of town, an arrangement that would've thrown everyone else's schedules out-of-whack.
The troubles with Scarlett apparently didn't sit well with her drooling surrogate father Woody Allen. "...while Woody's terribly fond of Scarlett," a source said, "he was a little upset that she wasn't being a team player."
Of course, Woody's blind adoration of Scarlett is half the reason she has such a big head in the first place. Maybe one day he will wake up and realize she's only a mediocre actress, and will cease mindlessly adding to her over-validation issues.
By the way...it doesn't appear Scarlett was missed much in Cannes.
"Nobody cared she wasn't there," said one catty New York socialite in town for the festival. "The movie belonged to Penelope and Rebecca anyway with great help from Javier [Bardem]."
In fact, early reviews of the film speak highly of the comic rapport between Cruz and Bardem, who play a fiercely bickering couple, and apparently improvised most of their Spanish dialogue. Scarlett? Most critics agree that Woody and his movie would be better off without her.