I have photos up from the first two days of the screenwriters’ trip to Paris.
Day One
We arrived at 5:30 in the morning, and after meeting our hosts, promptly got on police boats to see the city from the Seine, including a trip under La Bastille and a welcome lunch on a barge.
The afternoon included a visit with the deputy mayor of Paris and the Paris film commission.
Day Two
We started at 5 a.m., meeting up with chefs from the Ducasse restaurants to visit Rungis, the largest food market in the world.
A sprawling campus of related businesses, it’s where all the restaurants in Paris buy their food every morning.
I don’t eat mammals, but visiting the meat warehouse was fascinating. With blood, fat and bone, everything still resembled the original animal. Our meat guide talked about veal very calmly, explaining his qualms while showing the differences.
After a breakfast with oysters, wine and foul-smelling but apparently delicious charcutterie, we headed back into the city for lunch with SACD, the equivalent of the Writers Guild. And more wine.
Then it was off to visit the control tower of the French railway system at Gare St.-Lazard, learning how the TGV trains are managed, and asking a bunch of questions that would seem well, unsettling if we weren’t action writers. (“So, if someone got stabbed on a train…”, “If you were to bomb three different lines…”)
For dinner, we ate at Beniot, where the chef cooked up the food we picked out in the morning. We were joined by American journalists and executives from Film France.