BEFORE: Looking back, this has really been the summer of "hot"-themed movies, even through some of the films in the documentary chain. Between Apollo 11 launching from Florida in July 1967 to that shooter on the university tower on a hot Texas day, from another look at climate change via Al Gore to trips made through the jungle and down the Amazon and Congo rivers. Even Spider-Man went on a summer vacation that was somehow also a class trip. But today the focus is on Paris, I assume during the summer if it's sizzling - yes, this is set just before Bastille Day, which is July 14. I wish I'd known that before scheduling it, but I don't think I could have moved it a full 12 days - so I'm celebrating France's holiday today, just a bit late.
Mel Ferrer carries over from "Knights of the Round Table" to make a cameo in this film starring his then-wife, Audrey Hepburn.
THE PLOT: The sprightly young assistant of a Hollywood screenwriter helps him over his writer's block by acting out his fantasies of possible plots.
AFTER: Normally I can't stand films that focus on writer characters who are stuck making their screenplays, it's an all-too-common trope that usually doesn't produce anything exciting or interesting. But I'm prepared to make an exception for "Paris When It Sizzles", because it really kind of goes somewhere with it, the process of making the "film within a film" is a bit scattershot, but ultimately it seems to produce something worth watching, at least until it doesn't at the end. But for the most part, this is a cut above the usual "writer's block" film, as a romance develops between the screenwriter and his typist, that also influences the story - or perhaps the story influences the romance, it's tough to say.
I've been in the situation of typing up screenplays for people - my first day as a college intern in a real (but small) production studio, one of the company's two directors was getting ready for a pitch meeting, and no one had yet typed up the script - so I was tasked with doing it, despite a lack of experience in following the screenplay form. But I was a fast typist, and I have been since high-school - I took typing class during a summer course, at a time when nobody knew yet how much influence computers would have in our lives. Typing back then was seen as sort of a lower-class skill, they taught it in the "business" part of my high-school, where the C-level students took courses. My, how things have changed. Still, I remember that day where the director had taken a shower, and was standing behind me in a bathrobe, yelling "Type faster! Type faster!" Welcome to the film business, young man.
A couple years before that, on my first day of Film Criticism class at NYU, they showed us "Duck Amuck", the famous Chuck Jones cartoon where Daffy Duck is constantly tormented by an unseen animator, who keeps changing the background scene, or his costume, even removing his beak with an eraser so he can't speak. It could be the most meta-cartoon ever made, it starts with Daffy breaking the fourth wall and him and the audience being AWARE that it's a cartoon, and it progresses from there. But it has so many great gags that are based around the language of film (I think that was even the NYU course title, or perhaps the title of the textbook we had to read, "The Language of Film".). Daffy not only talks to the animator and the audience, but he somehow jars the film frame loose, he has issues with the film's sound effects, the story, the scenery, etc. and just can't get on the same page with whoever's in charge of the animation. We've all felt that at one point or another, even in the narrative of our own lives - why can't we control the plot, the scenery, and why does the director (if there is one...) keep putting us in such awkward situations? And life is like a movie - when that title comes that says "The End", inside we may want to scream like Daffy Duck and make the film go on for a few more scenes. (Wow. deep...)
So, by showing us the different scenarios as they're being written on the fly, and with both the screenwriter and his typist serving as the stand-ins for the characters, there's something of a "Duck Amuck" situation here, the characters are frequently fully aware that they ARE characters in a story, there are a ton of internal references that use the language of film (dissolves to show the passage of time, rewinding to go back and change something, reminding minor characters that they are not very important) to start with a premise and then take it to a very crazy, madcap place. The film-within-the-film is called "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower", and while that's the kind of title that grabs your attention, it's also an impossible feat, and the writer KNOWS that, but he's stuck for this very reason, he's pitched an idea that he has no idea how to pull off. But then the characters in the inner film also point out that you can't steal the Eiffel Tower, so this becomes the name of a film-within-the-film INSIDE of the film-within-the-film, and the inner film is so bad that the film's producer is glad when the negatives are taken hostage, and he even offers to pay the thief to destroy them!
Now, a couple of things, because the writer hires the typist to be someone to live with him in his hotel room for the weekend, and that's a little on the creepy side. Then he gets really familiar with her very quickly, and maybe you could get away with that in the 1960's, but there's behavior here that would be frowned upon in our current decade. This is almost Harvey Weinstein-like behavior, inviting a woman to your hotel room to work closely together on a deadline, and then smelling her hair or lying down next to her after a couple of drinks. There are references to the characters going to bed together and then doing something innocent like playing parcheesi, but in the framing story you really have to wonder what the screenwriter's intentions were. And in real life, apparently, William Holden and Audrey Hepburn were ex-lovers, they'd had an affair when making "Sabrina" together years before, and putting them back together in a romantic acting situation was probably therefore a bad idea. According to the host on TCM (I recorded this during that Audrey Hepburn tribute they did early last year) when you add in Holden's alcoholism on top of all that, it was a recipe for disaster.
After a couple of diversions into movie genres that don't really fit with the main story, like a musical dance number and a spoof of vampire horror, they finally come up with a passable ending at a costume party, where Audrey's husband Mel Ferrer is dressed as Dr. Jekyll, then Mr. Hyde. Someone dressed as Charlie Chaplin is waiting for someone to fall on a banana peel, and others who look like the Marx Brothers are running around frantically, just like they probably would act at a party. But by the time of the ending, there were so many transitions back and forth between the framing device and the film-within-a-film, I had a little trouble trying to remember if I was watching the writer and the typist, or their alter-egos, Rick and Gaby. Also I couldn't remember if Maurice was really Philippe, or if it was the other way around.
But along the way, we learn that "Frankenstein" and "My Fair Lady" are really the same story, only one ends well and the other doesn't. And that's another in-joke, making reference to another film that Hepburn was in. They also play the song from "Funny Face" and they mention "Breakfast at Tiffany's", so now I wonder if there were any other subtle references that I missed.
In the real world, I work with two animators, who have entirely different approaches to screenwriting. For one of them, the script is everything, and she spent months writing and re-writing the script, because she uses that as an exact road map to putting together the finished film. I spent several days working on it, using a cheap version of a real screenwriting program, to make sure all the formatting was correct, and now, two years later, the dialogue is recorded and the film is half done, but the script is still the reference point.
The other animator works more on the fly, and wants to allow some room for actors to improvise their dialogue, so the script is more of a rough breakdown - he prefers to work more with storyboards and hope that the dialogue is somehow going to come together during recording. On his last feature, the script was actually the LAST thing I worked on during production, which probably sounds a bit odd to anyone familiar with filmmaking, but we only needed a final script to be sent to our foreign distributor so they could work on making French subtitles. And for his latest feature, I worked hard on 6 or 7 versions of an outline, I basically turned it into a rough script, only to find later that any dialogue from that script that didn't appear on the storyboards was suddenly being discarded. Instead we've got a dialogue list now with a lot of empty sections, and again, there's that belief that somehow, during the recording process, it's all going to come together. I tend to equate his process with jumping out of an airplane and knitting a parachute on the way down. A lot of my work on that script was done in vain, but I have to keep reminding myself that I get paid by the hour - so if I have to re-do it all, I'll still come out on top.
Also starring Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "A Nun's Story"), William Holden (last seen in "damien: Omen II"), Gregoire Aslan (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Raymond Bussieres, Tony Curtis (last seen in "Who Was That Lady?"), Noel Coward (last seen in "The Italian Job"), Marlene Dietrich (last seen in "Stage Fright"), Christian Duvaleix, Michel Thomass, Dominique Boschero, Evi Marandi, Orestis Ganakis, Henri Garcin.
RATING: 6 out of 10 spies in trenchcoats
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