Paris Was My First Travel Film

By Robin D. Williams

This Is Paris was my very first film and my latest was MAYDAY Tugs of War, which is about the tugmen of WWII and most of them were from East Yorkshire.

You hear stories of how much the British hate the French. You learn they are enemies in the absolute.  I met a French historian over a cup of coffee on the Champs-Élysée who told me that the Parisii were a Celtic people from England.  I exploded into laughter so loud that my voice echoed all they way from the Arc du Triomphe to the Hôtel des Invalides on the Left Bank. 

And guess where the Parisii were from?  You got it.  East Yorkshire.  The Parisii tribe in Gaul (France) is strongly suspected of being the same people of East Yorkshire because of their similar burial customs.  Their kingdom in East Yorkshire was called Parisiorum.  If you look closely at that word you will see the name PARIS staring at you. 

Every morning I would be up at dawn, and loading film into my 16mm Bolex, and heading downstairs to my huge cup of coffee in the café near the apartment I rented for this film project.

I would drool over the fresh chocolate eclairs being loaded into the glass display case, hoping they would be there for me when I returned in the early evening.

Then I hit the traffic flow in my rental car and headed into the heart of the city to begin patching this film story together.  

I made it back to my apartment after a full day of filming beautiful French models at a fashion show at the designer’s villa near the Bois de Boulogne. I had been permitted to wander with my camera and capture behind the scenes of a French fashion show. 

The chocolate éclairs were all sold out so I quickly showered and went back into the Left Bank to dine in a small café on the most delicious food on earth. Man, was I glad I picked Paris to be my first film.

The Del Mar of France is out in the Bois de Boulogne, and I managed to get myself right down on the piste so I could get great head-on shots when the horses came around the turn.

 Once, when I started to load my camera in the shade of a hedge, I was stopped by a gendarme, apparently because the area was off-limits. I did it anyway, hoping he would notice that shade was better than sunlight when loading a film camera.  He did and left me alone so I could work. A great policeman. I loved him.

Later, I left the racecourse to get free of the crowds, and noticed something strange about several cars parked in the shade along the curbing.  They were all moving as if shaken by an invisible being. 

My curiosity finally got the best of me, (it took about one tenth of a second), and I peered inside one of the bobbing cars and almost collapsed. I don’t want this story to take on another societal slant, but think of the Greek muse Erato, and you will understand.

I finished filming the races and went back to my apartment to get ready for another great dinner in the Left Bank.

I looked out the window and saw something out of the ordinary.  A large yellow front loader monster was actually “speeding” around the block gouging out the sides of parked cars as it veered back and forth in the street.

I saw it miss some young students by inches.  I was too far up to be heard when I shouted and no cops were in sight.  It kept going around and around the block.  Finally, I saw men with the barber’s apron still tied to their necks and shaving cream all over their faces, chasing the machine down the street.

 The next time around they managed to leap onto the monster and were pummeling the driver with their fists.  Crash!  It climbed over a couple of cars with its wheels and came to a stop. 

A police wagon had arrived and the gendarmes swarmed over the cab and the show was over.  Hundreds of cars had been damaged and the drunken driver was hauled away.  Unlike in the United States, no crowd gathered. 

The men returned to the barbershop and the police van drove away and the street returned to normal.  I will never understand the French. 

On each intersection every single morning were wrecked automobiles sitting on the sidewalk.  I found out that there was no speed limit in Paris, and cars crash at intersections every night.

Another cultural trait of the French can be seen on the Boulevard Peripherique, which is the “ring road” built where the defensive walls of Paris once stood. 

When I returned to film Lindbergh’s Flight to Paris I used this road to drive around to the side of the city where my hotel was located. I found a scene of French life that you don’t find anywhere else.

 This ingenious highway can allow you to shoot around Paris making the whole circuit of the city in just 26 minutes at a speed limit of 80 kilometers per hour.  The catch?  It is constantly jammed and you can never get more that 10 km per hour on that famous theater of asphalt. 

The old markets of Les Halles were gone, but I still managed to find the original onion soup joints still in place in their original setting. Hemmingway’s table was still there with his name on it and so was the favorite table of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

 Paris will explode your mind if you permit it to happen.  It gives you unlimited cultural literacy. Good old Napoleon is magnificent in his sarcophagus in the Hôtel des Invalides and when you tune into his life, you tune into a vast array of great stories.

Paris will guide you to more topics than any other city on earth.  All I need do is walk from the Musée du Louvre where I travel through my favorite Greek Islands of Melos (Venus de Milo) to Samothraki (Winged Victory of Samothrace) to the Arc de Triomphe (Napoleon’s conquests of Europe) and my mind is so full I will be working another 10 years before the ideas are exhausted and I need a Parisian re-charge. 

If cities were named after worldly events Paris would be equivalent to The Seven Days of Creation.  Ooops, guard my car while I run in that boulangerie.  There are éclairs still in the case!

PS: I showed This Is Paris on the travel film circuit for more than 10 years before it ran its course.  I managed to capture all the historical accounts that I had been curious about as well as the nuance of Parisian life. 

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