HOLLYWOODLAND : Oui, the People...

Their first j’accuse appeared in Variety.

Calling themselves the Hollywood Association of French Actors, they publicly chided director rob Reiner for casting an American as the French head of state in “An American President.”

Degaulle!

The leader of France strangling the language of Flaubert?!

“This is not acceptable,” huffs HAFA founder Jean-Paul Vignon. “There are very few of us making a living in Hollywood, because they give parts to those who fake a French accent.”

Granted, the part of the French president was the smallest of cameos. But many capable French actors would have killed for it, Vignon says. Besides, the oversight indicates an underlying problem. French Americans are the last minority considered safe to ridicule. While bending over backward to portray other cultures fairly, Hollywood is slower than escargot about casting aside French stereotypes.

“We don’t all play accordions,” Vignon says.”We’re not all rude and obnoxious.”

A journeyman film actor and nightclub singer, as well as a veteran of 33 Merv Griffin shows, Vignon is a closet vaudevillian who likes to slip in and out of his Maurice Chevalier voice as if it were an old straw hat. But it’s an act, he pleads, “I leally don’t tock like zees.”

Sitting at the Bistro Garden--a Studio City boite where the pianist knows “April in Paris” and the maitre d’ thankfully speaks you-know-what--Vignon orders Campari and soda (“My mother was Italian”) and discusses the birth of his association, which unhappily coincided with the French government’s decision to detonate a nuclear bomb near Tahiti.

Along with the chronic anonymity endured by all starving actors, Vignon and his French friends also detected a nagging PR problem related to their nationality. A union is the only answer, Vognon urged the group. Liberte, egalite , publicity....But many were timid about taking on Reiner. After much debate--and several spirited wine-and-cheese parties--the actors voted for Vignon’s union but opted to cushion their brash public “memo” by sending the director an exquisite bottle of 1983 Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. “We are not millionaires,” Vignon says “but this was a very nice bottle.”

Reiner didn’t respond to the ad in Variety or the free Bordeaux.

But Vignon and his group are pressing forward anyway, sending every major casting agent in town a flier with the head shots of all 23 association members. Proudly, Vignon produces the flier, which looks like a page torn out from the yearbook of Catherine Deneuve High School. Upon closer examination, there are several hommes sprinkled among the femmes . But still. How many groups can boast charter members with names like Pavla Ustinov (daughter of Peter), Lydie Denier and Hedwige de Mouroux?

Diana Frank, a 28-year-old association member who studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute and appears in German feature films, agrees with Vignon that something more than intellectual laziness keeps Hollywood from seeking French actors. There may be a not-so-subtle prejudice at work.

Mind you, she doesn’t blame Americans for their biases. She, to, has been treated badly by Parisian writers and cabdrivers. “They do not hate you,” she says sadly. “They hate themselves.”

On second thought, she adds, sounding suddenly less miserable: “They hate everybody.”