“Paris . . . As You’ve Never Seen It Before!!!”: The Promotion of Hollywood Foreign Productions in the Postwar Era

This article examines the marketing of postwar Hollywood foreign productions by asking why authentic locations were fore-grounded in the promotional campaigns for films that were shot overseas from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. It argues that as with new color and widescreen technologies, film companies emphasized the realism and spectacle of foreign locations and the work of global production to attract a diminishing domestic audience that was gravitating to television and new leisure-time activities, while also appealing to increasingly important foreign markets. As a secondary concern, this article stresses that the discourse of foreign location shooting in these campaigns sheds light on changes in Hollywood production and promotional practices and in the self-image that the US film industry was manufacturing in an era of transition