Of course, there have been endless B-list alternatives all week: some crappy drinks party to celebrate film production in northern Ontario, a Meet-the-Minister-of-Culture-for-Romania-Luncheon, and - rather more thrillingly - the Lick And Suck soiree, to celebrate the launch of an all-new porn video distribution company. Although Lick And Suck are not, strictly speaking, key players in the movie industry, the party has attracted widespread interest and a frenzied mob of international journalists and tourists bombard the Noga Hilton beach, where the party is occurring.The party begins at 6pm, and we are greeted on arrival by the sight of three topless women clutching trays of dark chocolates carefully moulded into sculptures of erect penises This concept turns out to be a mistake, however. What do you do for exercise around here? Lets go for a jog."It was a tough task getting into this, the hottest ticket of all the hot tickets on the Croisette this week. Even the Coen Brothers' Fargo dinner-do, where they shipped in acres of fake snow, hired out a fabulous villa in the hills, and didn't invite me, has been overshadowed by the Trainspotting party.

What's this got to do with the polemics of drug-taking in Leith?" Well, she's half-right. This party has got nothing to do with the sufferings of the housing-estate poor, but it does have a tremendous amount to do with drug-taking. The whole place is shrouded in a cloud of cocaine, the bars and dance-floor jam-packed with people who really, really love me, who really want to hold me and have a little happy sob."Look at this," says Peter, the producer of the one-day forthcoming Chloe - A Study in Good and Evil "Isn't life just wonderful? Wonderful to be alive Look at where we are We're in Cannes Wonderful Look There's that girl from Kids Marvellous film Marvellous, marvellous film Look There's Mick Jagger What a wonderful, wonderful man. This looks like the sort of place where thrilling million-dollar deals are struck for movies called Terror Bomber Babes or Your Fist My Groin. "How can they show their faces and have the Trainspotting party here?" says one infuriated English BFI cineaste type "What a sell-out.

The as- far-as-the-eye-can-see zebra cushion-covers could quite possibly be the result of a genuine and monumentally horrific Zebra cull, and the chi- chi terrace fountain seating area is every cocaine-snorting, starlet-abasing movie-executive's dream-pad. The Palm Beach Casino, Cannes, looks like the set of some high- class 1970s porn movie: an alluring melange of filth and wealth. This was a trial in which he and Marcia Clark exchanged gushy notes during hard times: "I am honored that you are my friend," wrote Darden in one billet-doux and, but for the scrutiny of the nation, things might have gone further - "I will say this," he writes of their friendship, "as spring melted into summer, I began to wonder what might happen away from the flash of tabloid photographers and television cameras." Murder One might be sentimentally hokey, then, and its lead character might be recklessly self-dramatising But so is the world it describes in such fascinating detail The defence rests.. (One of the prosecution witnesses, it's worth remembering, was a policeman who had actually taken bit-parts in cop movies.) The gumshoe style is picked up by Darden: the defence came forward with an alibi witness, he notes, but she "would later fold like a cheap tent under our questioning".Nor is it just Murder One's tough talk that is endorsed by In Contempt. The embarrassing emotional fluency of the characters in the television series, their readiness to get in touch with their feelings, is also reflected in Darden's book. It testifies (and this is where my Murder One defence comes in) to the irreversible contamination of reality by fiction in certain branches of American life.