A French friend of mine sent me a text a month ago. “Come to Paris,” he said. “Bring your little vax card, and let’s have dinner.”
Which was all the encouragement I needed. I’ve spent the past week wandering around the city, and except for the dwindling supplies of Cuban cigars available — “Desolé, monsieur,” the shopkeeper at one of the best cigar shops in town told me with a shrug, “C’est le pandemie. C’est le supply chain” — it’s the Paris I remember, this time with the occasional mask.
The other reason I went to Paris was because I have always wanted to produce a show in France. Television, as everyone knows, is a global business these days. American shows have always been popular in France, but it’s now a two-way street. This seemed like a perfect moment to restart a project I worked on a few years ago that had lost some momentum.
I’ve been part of the creative team on a promising show that’s designed to be shot partly in Los Angeles and partly in Paris, for a French audience. The reason I agreed to help out, aside from the primary motivation that it’s a fun, smart idea, is that I’ve always wanted to be able to respond this way to someone when they ask, “Hey, can we get together next week for lunch?”
“Next week? No, I’m sorry. Next week, I’m filming Paris.”
And even though I don’t smoke, in my version of this conversation, I am suddenly smoking and wearing a scarf and sipping a small cup of coffee. And looking both sad and amused at the same time.
See? I am so ready for this.
My only fear about the project was that I’d be there as the American guy, the American writer, the guy who writes Le Sit Com. (Which, by the way, sounds like “Le Zit Comb.”)
My French partners have made a string of complicated, arty films and television shows, the kind where you often don’t know why the people on the screen who are kissing are also fighting, and what the story is about, and when it’s actually over.
As a proud writer of Le Zit Comb, I prefer a linear narrative with a simple story structure and characters who behave with psychological consistency, plus laughs.
So, in our first creative meeting, I braced myself for a lot of polite condescension from the French producers and a lot of creative demands that would make my simple project more ambiguous, more arty, more French.
I expected notes like: Can the story be less conclusive? Can this character have a greater sense of “surrealism”? Can the romantic heroine be depressed for mysterious, unexplained reasons? We think the main character here, on page three, should die. The child character needs to be eroticized.
You know, French.
Now, I speak a little French, and I understand it pretty well, but in the meeting, which was entirely in French, I was about six seconds behind. My brain translator was a bit slow that morning, but I wasn’t worried, really, because I thought I had the notes already figured out: less American, more French.
So, when I heard the phrase “plus aimable,” I sort of snapped to attention.
“Plus aimable” means “more likable,” which is something every writer in Hollywood hears all the time from studio executives. American studios and networks are obsessed with making sure the main characters are likable and appealing.
And then the word “bucle” kept cropping up, which means, basically, “buttoned up.” They wanted the story to be wrapped up in each episode using the traditional storytelling structure of the typical American Zit Comb.
So, the headlines from the meeting in Paris were: Make the characters more likable, and make sure the story is wrapped up at the end.
Which are notes I’ve heard before. In Los Angeles. I guess it really is a global marketplace. Producers sound exactly the same, all over the globe.
After the meeting, I walked around feeling disoriented and out of place. It wasn’t until I sat at a cafe and an old lady in an expensive scarf glared at me for no reason that I truly felt like I was in Paris.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
