Planning a romantic getaway in the spring is the easiest thing in the world. In April, when the trees are springing back into life and birdsong fills the air, even the grimiest industrial town may feel like the perfect backdrop for a romantic experience.

But it is in winter that Paris proves it is truly the City of Love. Do you think Barcelona or even Monte Carlo can compete?

Paris offers more romance bang for your time and money than any other city on earth. On a cold and wet February afternoon, it is one of the few places that can make you think that this strangely faint and hazy thing called winter light can actually surpass the beauty of a summer’s day.

Although even in Paris, there is no escaping from a cold easterly wind – or is there?

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Paris Movie Walks identifies locations from about 100 Hollywood films. I had always thought I had pretty much covered virtually all Hollywood movies about Paris, give or take the odd roll of celluloid that is quietly decomposing somewhere in a MGM storage room. But far from it:

Since 1900, Hollywood has produced approximately 800 films that were set in Paris. 800!

That is one thing I learned from the recently opened exhibition “Paris vu par Hollywood” which will be shown in Paris City Hall until 15 December 2012 (entrance free, Mondays through Saturdays from 10 to 7).

Another thing is this great quote from the director Ernst Lubitsch who set more than a dozen movies in Paris without ever bringing one of his cameras there.

“There is Paramount-Paris and MGM-Paris, and of course the real Paris. Paramount’s is the most Parisian of all.”

I want to kick myself for not having found that quote myself, before writing the book – I certainly would have used it.

Or, better still, I would have used the version of the New York Times article about the exhibit:

. . . → Read More About Hollywood's Love Affair with Paris: Paris in Movies

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This video interview originally appeared in Omeleturismo

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This is the movie that got away: the only major Hollywood movie with a Parisian theme that I failed to include in the book. At the time, it was not available on DVD, not even in the US, so I had no choice but to give it a bye.

Later, I caught the final two minutes a couple of times by chance on TCM, and although it was too late to cover the film for the book, I looked frantically each time for the next repeat in the channel’s schedules – everything on TCM is repeated – only to find that it would be screened next on a Thursday morning three weeks hence at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Finally, I found the film, again by chance – on YouTube. I did not even know they were showing films on YouTube, but it seems it is a real paradise for lovers of old movies. (Check it out if you don’t believe me.)

Paris Blues is certainly an old movie (it was made in 1961) and, quite frankly, best enjoyed as a period piece.

Its main . . . → Read More About Hollywood's Love Affair with Paris: Paris Blues

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The idea of the artist as someone who spends his life in shabby circumstances, outwardly neglected and caring only for the purity of his art, to find fame only much later, preferably after his death, is one of the great Romantic myths. (It is, of course, the story of the ugly duckling in all but name.)

In truth, for every van Gogh, there are at least a dozen Picassos and Matisses whose geniuses are detected at a fairly early stage and who spend nearly all their lives in great material comfort.

Truth, however, is not something that myth has ever been greatly concerned with.

Circumstances do not come much shabbier than the old Beat Hotel on the Parisian Left Bank, and geniuses not much more self-conscious than William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg who lived there for a while in the late 1950s (together with Gregory Corso and some lesser lights of the “Beat” poetry scene).

A new documentary just released (read a review here) retraces their steps, refreshes their legends and restages some of their antics.

is the name of a . . . → Read More About Hollywood's Love Affair with Paris: The Beat Hotel

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Hugo Cabret, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, is set in Paris, but nearly the entire movie was shot on a studio stage, in the spirit of George Méliès, one might say, on whose life story much of the film is based. (The silent movie pioneer, a master of the “artificial”, the fantastic and surreal, really did operate a toy shop in the Gare de Montparnasse for several years after WWI.)

The puzzle is not so much why Scorsese preferred to recreate 1920s Paris in a studio but why he bothered to shoot on location at all, and then only for scenes that are of secondary importance to the narrative and that do not enrich or embroider the film’s visual impact in any meaningful way.

The two scenes in question were shot on Place Edouard VII – we can clearly see the king’s statue behind the two youthful protagonists – and, just fifty metres away, on Square de l’Opéra Louis Jouvet where Hugo and Isabelle sneak into a cinema.

Scorsese could easily enough have done for these two scenes what he did for . . . → Read More About Hollywood's Love Affair with Paris: Hugo Cabret

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For most of The Tourist’s 103 minutes, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck bravely struggles to commandeer the disparate elements of the film – the reworked script, the leading couple with little or no obvious personal chemistry, the glamorous locations – into a coherent whole.

I leave it to you to judge how well he ultimately succeeds, but one thing is for sure: the walk through Paris on which Angelina Jolie takes us at the beginning of the film, trying to shake off the police, has been very well laid out and does not violate the city’s geography.

This may be damning with faint praise, but praise it most certainly is. After all, everybody who is familiar with Paris knows films where people whose apartment has a view on the Eiffel Tower slip into their morning gown…

– Cut! –

…to buy a pair of croissants in a bakery underneath the Sacre Coeur (3 miles to the north).

Whatever you can say about The Tourist, no topographical logic was violated in the making of this film. After all, it is at least conceivable that a lady with an apartment at the Place . . . → Read More About Hollywood's Love Affair with Paris: The Tourist

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It is perched on a hill in Montmartre not unlike a garrison keeping an eye  on all below it.

Thus has it imposed itself as a symbol of Paris as much as La Dame de Fer and the Arc de Triomphe, always used for an establishing shot by every movie producer as the shortest way to tell viewers where the story is unfolding.

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Venice 1610:  Galileo finished refining a telescope he built to be able to observe the night sky. In the same year, he published his book The Starry Messenger where he shared his thoughts on what he had observed.

Rome 2011: With 500 lit candles, French artists Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, created “I Will Keep a Light Burning” to celebrate  the 400th year anniversary of Galileo’s achievement. The candles were arranged to recreate the starry sky that Galileo observed through the telescope he painstakingly put together on the night of 14 April 1611.

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