Is Paris Burning?

• Academy Awards

  United States, 1967

  Oscar Nomination in the Best Art Direction in a Black & White Film category : Marc Frédérix, Pierre Guffroy, Willy Holt
  

  

Production

The film is based on the best-selling book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre and was directed by René Clément, from a screenplay by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola. The music is by Maurice Jarre. Jarre's music for "The Paris Waltz" later had words added by Maurice Vidalin and became a patriotic anthem sung by Mireille Mathieu under the title Paris en colère.

Is Paris Burning? stars Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Gert Fröbe, Orson Welles, Anthony Perkins, Robert Stack, Charles Boyer, Yves Montand, Leslie Caron, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Simone Signoret, and Alain Delon. It was filmed in 180 sites. Claude Rich plays two parts: General Leclerc, with a moustache, and Lt Pierre de la Fouchardière, without a moustache. He is credited at the end only with the part of Leclerc. His role as the young lieutenant is not by chance; Claude Rich, as a teenager, was watching soldiers in the street when the real-life Pierre de la Fouchardière called him into a building to protect him.

The film is almost entirely in black and white, presumably to better blend the documentary stock footage that is included in the film (the film was shot in black and white mainly because, although the French authorities would allow swastika flags to be displayed on public buildings for key shots, they would not permit those flags to be in their original red color; as a result, green swastika flags were used, which photographed adequately in black and white but would have been entirely the wrong color), but the closing credits feature aerial shots of Paris in color. The entire film was shot on location in Paris.

Source : Wikipedia