David Mamet stood in the humid heat of the Palais des Festivals this week, but he wasn't just there to talk about dialogue. The legendary playwright has lent his name to a new AI-powered production system called New Hollywood, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival.

Alan Pao, the independent producer who backed Andrew Garfield’s Under the Silver Lake, is the man behind the curtain. According to Deadline, the platform promises to automate the messy work of filmmaking by creating production schedules, allowing actors to self-tape, and assembling cuts of every scene shot within a single day.

Mamet’s own Speed The Plow will be one of the first projects to use the system. Pao told reporters in Cannes that the platform is designed to “cut through that complexity” of the industry while giving financiers a more transparent way to move projects forward.

This column notes that the Riviera crowd, traditionally obsessed with the “human touch,” seems remarkably open to the machine when it saves a buck. The spectacle of Mamet, the master of gritty human speech, embracing a system that can assemble a film in twenty-four hours is the ultimate Cannes plot twist.

It is the perfect accessory for the era of the Biological Velvet Rope. While the Academy may be banning robot actors from the 2027 Oscars, the money in the South of France is betting that the most expensive part of a movie—the human ego—can finally be managed by an algorithm.

If the machine can handle the schedules and the cuts, the only thing left for the director to do is hold the champagne glass. This paper finds the irony delicious: we are using the most advanced technology on earth to make sure the director never has to work again.