CANNES (Hollywood Reporter) - Cannes gives, and Cannes takes away. The granddaddy of all film festivals is an alluring siren, sweetly seducing filmmakers by promising fortune and fame and the joy of that magic red-carpet ride.

But in reality, Cannes can turn all that attention into a harsh red glare when a movie does not deliver. With the speed of the Internet, movies are declared winners and losers within moments of their final closing credits.

The studios love to take their summer pictures to Cannes, where they can woo the world in one fell swoop. But they forget that the same press that is eager to discover new actors and directors and proclaim a hit can be dangerous when it assembles in great numbers, ready to attack like Wolverine when confronted with something that is not what it wants to see.

For a U.S. studio to take advantage of Cannes, it’s crucial to manage expectations. Better to edge sideways into the spotlight than to risk the glare at center stage.

Because of their varying approaches, studios had very different Cannes experiences this year. Somehow, Paramount Pictures (and its sister company, DreamWorks) came into Cannes and did everything right — from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s competition hit "Babel" to the warmly received global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" to select footage from Bill Condon’s "Dreamgirls," all of which proved buzzworthy.

Paramount also teased the press with 26 minutes of Oliver Stone’s "World Trade Center," which played like a long trailer in front of a Cannes Classics presentation of "Platoon." DreamWorks presented several dazzling musical numbers from "Dreamgirls." Duly wowed, the media delivered just what DreamWorks was looking for: early Oscar talk.

Cannes attendees got just what they were expecting from 20th Century Fox’s "X-Men: The Last Stand" and DreamWorks’ animated feature "Over the Hedge."

Columbia Pictures, on the other hand, bungled its efforts right from the start with the festival opener, Ron Howard’s "The Da Vinci Code." It then dug itself into a deeper hole with Sofia Coppola’s "Marie Antoinette."

The studio figured that sending "Da Vinci" into the opening-night slot was a great marketing move. But the tactic backfired when a fusillade of negative press hit the media for two days before the movie’s global opening May 19. Shell-shocked Sony brass would have gladly fled town, but they had committed to staying for the May 24 opening of "Marie Antoinette."

Because Sony had marketed the hell out of "Da Vinci," nothing could dent the pent-up demand for the movie. And while its Cannes debut turned into a PR nightmare, it did not damage the record-setting global opening-weekend ticket sales, though it could still impact the film’s long-term playability.

Also tarnished by the "Da Vinci" debacle was Howard’s reputation. Looking for a hit after the disappointment of "Cinderella Man," the Oscar-winning director crafted a conventional crowd-pleaser that, while controversial for some Christians, aimed to entertain as many people as possible.

A period "chick-flick" shot on location in Versailles, albeit with a strong American accent, "Marie Antoinette" might have looked as if it belonged in Cannes, but it proved a bad fit. When the film met a chorus of boos and applause, Coppola became yet another disappointed Cannes competition director.

In retrospect, Columbia risked more than it gained by agreeing to walk two of its high-profile films up the red carpet. And Sony motion picture group chairman Amy Pascal has no plans to return to the Croisette anytime soon.

At least Howard and Coppola are probably not feeling as bad as Richard Kelly, whose end-of-the-world black comedy "Southland Tales," starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Sarah Michele Gellar, was booed at its first screening and derided by the press as an incoherent mess.

How the film wound up in competition is a fascinating case of a director falling on the festival’s double-edged sword. By all accounts, Kelly, who had experienced a hazing at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival with his debut film, "Donnie Darko" (only to have a new cut of the film prove more popular on DVD), was struggling throughout production with his neophyte producers, who kept raising more financing to allow him to film all the shots he wanted. They would tell him that he didn’t have enough money and would have to cut pages. He insisted on shooting all his scenes.

The sprawling rough cut of the $20 million futuristic adventure, which was submitted by his United Talent Agency representative agent Rich Klubeck and French sales company Wild Bunch to the festival selection committee, was two hours and 40 minutes. Wild Bunch, it turns out, has clout with festival director Thierry Fremaux, who agreed at the last minute to place the film in competition. Sources close to the film concur that if "Southland" had not been accepted, it would not have come to Cannes. Kelly wasn’t finished and did not have time to preview the film. The producers, who had always been aiming for Toronto in September, had pages of notes for the filmmaker. But once the movie was accepted, Kelly, rushing to add final effects shots, saw no reason to change it.

After the Cannes screening debacle — it did find a handful of critical supporters, including the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis — potential distributors eyed the results warily.

Now, with the film’s domestic rights unsold, the plan now is to submit it to Toronto, where a shortened version can get a second chance. Several distributors are talking to Kelly about how he plans to re-edit his dystopian vision of Los Angeles in 2008, which is packed with marketable names and strong music video elements, including a Justin Timberlake music video.

"He’s upset," confided one producer of Kelly. "He’s listening now."