My Love Affair With a Guide

The publicity executive in the Paris headquarters of magazine-publishing-giant Hachette Filipacci was not surprised to hear from an American journalist. Not at first, anyway.

“You want to do a story on Paris Match, yes,” she said, mentioning the magazine celebrated for its compelling photography. No, I didn’t want to do a story on Paris Match. And no, I didn’t want to do a story about Premiere, their influential film magazine. I wanted to do a story about Pariscope.

A moment of silence ensued, followed by a single unavoidably skeptical word: “Pariscope?”

Yes, Pariscope.

Impossible to subscribe to, difficult to find outside of Paris, more of a guide than a magazine, but a publication that allows the greenest tourist, even one who hasn’t mastered the French language, to experience one of the world’s greatest cultural centers with the depth and aplomb of a native. A publication, in short, whose ability to open an otherwise inaccessible cultural cornucopia encourages partisans to treat it with reverence bordering on worship and awe.

People, for instance, like my colleague Larry Kardish, senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art’s department of film and video in New York, who considers it “as much a part of Paris as the Eiffel Tower, one of the things that makes me mad about the city.” And people like me.

Without Pariscope as my Baedeker, I never would have visited a French antiquarian book fair or a magnificent gallery show of African art, heard cutting-edge jazz at a smoky club or enjoyed an English-language performance of Dublin’s Gate Theater. Without this peerless guide to a city without equal, I never would have known and loved Paris as much as I do.

I discovered Pariscope on my first trip to France in 1971, when I had some trepidation about the language. A college friend had told me that on his first trip, he’d asked for directions in a cafe and a Frenchman at the bar had turned and spit in his face. But when I saw this inexpensive (three francs, about 50 cents), pocket-sized weekly rundown of the city’s events at a kiosk, its nearly 300 tightly packed pages held together by two of the hardest-working staples in show business, I knew everything was going to be all right.

Now, as then, Pariscope has two key things going for it: an almost fiendish comprehensiveness and a determination to make everything it mentions accessible by listing not only addresses and phone numbers, but--and this is critical--the name of the nearest Metro stop. Armed with a Pariscope and an indexed street map, a visitor has both a simple and foolproof way to get anywhere in the city without having to risk expectoration abuse for subpar pronunciation.

Although Pariscope is written in French (with the exception of one small section), its listings are so concise that they are easy to use without extensive knowledge of the language. Even deciphering its internal abbreviations can be kind of fun. “V.O.,” for version originale, meaning a listed film is subtitled rather than dubbed, is easy; “tlj (sf Mar),” next to museum names, meaning tour les jours sauf Mardi (open every day except Tuesday), takes just a bit more time.

Though the French are more tolerant of nonnative speakers these days, Pariscope, if anything, has become more wide-ranging and inclusive. There is a section for children’s activities; the racier “Paris La Nuit” (which lists clubs, bars, discos and spectacles erotiques ); a quite helpful six-page English-language insert put together by Time Out magazine; as well as a list of the city’s FM radio stations. Most of Pariscope’s space, however, is devoted to its six key sections:

Theater. More than 200 plays organized alphabetically and broken down into categories by type of theater, covering everything from tiny storefronts to huge spectacles such as Crazy Horse and the Folies-Bergere. If you want to see Shakespeare performed in French, it’s listed here. So are the latest sensations and revivals of favorite writers such as Sacha Guitry and Jacques Prevert. One friend says that, if not for Pariscope, he never would have come upon a rare staging of a play by the 17th century giant Corneille, performed in unmodernized French.

Music. Classical, world music, dance, opera, jazz-rock, variety shows, it’s all here. You can find what’s playing in Paris’ ancient churches (home to many of the city’s most interesting concerts), where I once discovered a rousing English-language gospel performance not by barnstorming American artists but by French-speaking natives of the Caribbean.

Arts. Pariscope contains listings of more than 300 art galleries and museums, as well as art conferences that are open to the public. My wife and I now own a scene of 1930s Paris by photographer Marcel Bovis, whom we never would have known about if Pariscope had not led us to a small gallery showing his work.

Gastronomy. Hundreds of establishments are featured, listed by arrondissement (Paris’ numbered districts) and by cuisine categories ranging from Armenian and Iranian to Tex-Mex and vegetarian. There are also lists of restaurants that are open Sunday (many are traditionally closed), restaurants with outdoor terraces, restaurants open after midnight and restaurants open 24 hours.

Guide. A catch-all section for those interested in public lectures, auctions, go-carts, boat rides, swimming pools, paint ball parks and more.

Despite all of these good things, Pariscope is best known and admired for the sixth category, its cinema section. The best guide to the best movie-going city in the world, it’s such an important part of the magazine that it’s given its own nearly 100-page “Cinescope” section in the middle of each issue, with separate color covers.

As the cover attests, some 300 different films occupy the city’s screens every week (L.A., by comparison, usually manages 75 to 100), and the magazine deals with them in a categorized and cross-referenced system that enables you to find both where a film you want to see is playing and what’s playing in a theater near you.

Capsule summaries of each film are listed under several general categories: new that week, first run, revival, festivals, films for children and cinematheque screenings. The films are listed again in the “Genres” section, with shorter descriptions, and divided among 22 categories, from adventures to Westerns.

Each film is listed alongside a theater name and number from 1 to 110. The numbers refer to specific theaters in one of Paris’ 20 arrondissements, located in the Salles de Paris section. You’ll find addresses, admission prices and show times, which include notations about how many minutes will be taken up by the French tradition of on-screen commercials.

As for the movie lists, most-read is the critics’ section, where 11 of France’s top reviewers provide ratings from zero to three stars for both first-run films and revivals. This is followed by the Hit Parade du Public, which lists Paris’ top-grossing films of the previous week. And there’s even a list for night owls of screenings at 11 p.m. or later.

This kind of depth is a source of pride to the Pariscope brain trust. “It’s a completely exhaustive guide, you have everything, everything,” says Christine Lenoir, the magazine’s publisher.

After the initial shock had worn off, that Hachette Filipacci publicity executive had been quite helpful. No sooner had I arrived in Paris than I found myself at the source, so to speak, chatting with Lenoir, editor Yves Gaudez and associate publisher Nicolas Pruvost at the company’s impressive glass-and-stone headquarters just outside Paris’ city limits, getting all kinds of inside dope about Pariscope.

I hadn’t realized what a long history a guide to Paris had. A similar publication was founded in 1923 by a man named Charles de St Cyr. It was revived in 1939 and then revived again after the war under the name Une Semaine de Paris (A Week in Paris), making it one of the earliest city magazines of its kind in the world.

This publication was gradually going downhill when Daniel Filipacci launched Pariscope as a rival, large-sized guide in 1966. Two years later, Filipacci bought Une Semaine and merged the two into the small format we know today.

Pariscope comes out every Wednesday morning, and attempting to get a jump on things by trying to buy a copy Tuesday night will get you a look of disbelief from your local kiosk operator. “It’s very Cartesian,” says MOMA film curator Kardish. “You can’t get it earlier, and they won’t sell it to you once the week is over.”

By government mandate, Wednesday is the day that movie programs change. Consequently, the magazine’s film section is the last of the sections to go to press. Monday afternoons between 1 and 3 is the deadline for all theaters in the city to send in their new schedules.

On Monday nights, Pariscope is printed in a plant two hours west of Paris. It is the only establishment in all of France that is able to handle the magazine’s stapled format. “No other printer wants to invest in these old machines,” says associate publisher Pruvost, adding, “The magazine is so thick, it’s hard to cut. Each week we break blades.”

Still, the thought of having a non-pocket-sized, non-stapled Pariscope is considered heresy. Publisher Lenoir holds up a mock-up bound like a paperback book as an experiment and says, with justifiable contempt, “It’s not Pariscope.” End of story.

Kardish, who also loves Pariscope as is, admits that there was one year when he went to France and didn’t buy a single issue. “My wife and I were vacationing in the Camargue and I was going to go cold turkey, not think about movies at all,” he explains. The result? “It was very difficult. I liked the Camargue, but I would have been better off if I had had Pariscope with me.”