Topic: Oddities
Marketing Using Dislocation
The French have this thing with Hollywood. It's not for no reason the most popular chewing gum over there is "Hollywood." At this site you can get back issues of the trash pin-up magazine Paris Hollywood (Beauté de Paris Hollywood and Les Folies de Paris et Hollywood). That was published bi-monthly over there from 1947 through 1973. Here's a cover from 1950. The book on that is Paris-Hollywood: Serge Jacques. At this site you can buy French posters for American Movies, like this one (of course). There used to be a junk jewelry store on Rue des Rennes call Sunset Boulevard - perhaps it's still there. The place that sells "California clothes" in the little square on Boulevard St-Germain across from the centuries-old church where Descartes is buried may be gone. But casually mentioning you're visiting from Hollywood works wonders in Paris. But we don't have much use for the French. We quite regularly remake their movies (see Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema), but the cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys meme has overwhelmed things. We're supposed to be mad at them all. Hollywood's Johnny Depp may be a wonderful actor, but he married that Frenchwoman, Vanessa Paradis, and settled in the hills east of Avignon to raise his kids and relax. He's seldom at his home here, just down Sunset, at Sweetzer, just above the boulevard. How odd of him.
Now, as you can see with this poster on Hollywood Boulevard, in the middle of all the souvenir shops, tattoo parlors and general junk, the French are coming here to Hollywood. Préparez vous ça va déchirer! Get ready for what? That would be these folks (you might want turn off your speakers). We're talking "urban fashion." It seems the young French who dress like scruffy barely-employed American twenty-somethings to make some sort of point in Paris will be selling their version of our own crap here, to us. Go figure.
The poster is sure to confuse the tourists visiting here from Iowa. They may worry this is something political. We worry about the French. We should, of course.