Neon, winner of 6 straight Palmes d'Or, comes into Cannes Film Fest an unlikely heavyweight

LOS ANGELES, May 11, (AP): Neon chief and co-founder Tom Quinn has watched the last six Palme d’Or ceremonies from the same spot: gathered with colleagues around a laptop on the breakfast tables at his Cannes hotel. "I think we upgraded a couple years ago and connected the computer to a TV,” Quinn says. "I wouldn’t want to do it any different.”

Quinn has good reason to keep any good luck charm. In all six of those awards ceremonies, Neon has won the Palme, the prestigious top honor of the Cannes Film Festival. It’s an unparalleled streak for one of the most sought-after prizes in movies, second only to the best picture Oscar. No other studio has ever come close to anything like it. "No one ever believes it, but we’ve never gone to Cannes thinking we were going to win the Palme d’Or,” Quinn says.

"It’s been a surprise every single year.” When the 79th Cannes Film Festival gets underway Tuesday, Neon - a 60-person company founded in 2017 - rides in as an unlikely heavyweight. It’s backing more than a quarter of the 22 films in competition for the Palme. Its odds of making it seven in a row are good. Some of the most hotly anticipated titles - including Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "All of a Sudden,” Korean auteur Na Hong-jin's "Hope” and James Gray’s "Paper Tiger” - are Neon’s.

Altogether, the indie distributor has nine films in Cannes. All, Quinn notes, they signed on for before the films' Cannes invite. "I hate to break it to everyone but don’t hate us for our good taste,” says Quinn. "Who’s chasing who here? Thierry (Frémaux, Cannes artistic director) is going to make up his own mind and we’re going to make up our own mind. It just so happens that we agree.”

When Frémaux announced the lineup of this year’s festival, he lamented the almost nonexistent presence of Hollywood’s major studios. "When the studios are less present in Cannes, they are less present full stop,” he said. While studio releases like Warner Bros.’ "One Battle After Another” and Universal’s upcoming "The Odyssey” can be major Oscar players, a wide swath of the most original movies of the past decade have been released by specialty labels like Neon and A24.

Both have risen to prominence at international film festivals like Cannes and at the Oscars by focusing on filmmakers, not IP. "It’s not rocket science and there’s nothing secret about it,” says Quinn. "It’s pursuing the directors and films we want to be a part of.” Quinn had worked at Samuel Goldwyn Films and Magnolia Pictures before, in 2011, launching Radius, a boutique label with Harvey Weinstein.

Though, at Neon, Quinn expected A24 to be his chief competition, he found himself often bidding against Netflix, on movies like Neon’s first acquisition, the Margot Robbie-led "I, Tonya” and Céline Sciamma’s "Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” "We did not outbid them but we out-passioned them,” says Quinn.