Trivia / Les Filles d'à côté

• Copiously Credited Creator: Jean-Luc Azoulay liked to be heavily credited for his shows, generally under his alias of Jean-François Porry. Apparently, among other achievements, he wrote all 326 scripts for every episode.
• Creator Breakdown: The circumstances in which Hélène Le Moignic left the show, after 135 episodes, would qualify. Intense pressure of work - it was noted that to meet the intense and demanding production schedule, filming would often carry on into the early hours of the following morning - combined with arguments with at least one other cast member and then the director, followed by her walking off the show at 4:00am with an episode still unfinished and the director demanding still more takes. She did not return. Accounts vary, but Le Moignic never returned to acting. ^note some accounts said that she tried but found it impossible to get other jobs. It is known she eventually took a job as a care worker to old people and sank, possibly gratefully, into obscurity, before re-emerging into the limelight in May 2018 following a breakdown in which she destroyed fixtures at her marital home and savagely beat her partner in the head with a broken table. A court in Versailles gave her a two-month suspended sentence on the proviso she seeks psychiatric help.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Cécile Auclert (Fanny) and Hélène Le Moignic (Magalie) did not get on at all. A murderously intense production schedule, forced by a distant autocratic producer intent on milking a cash cow for all he could get, took its toll. (There were 170 episodes made in a fifteen-month period. That's three shows a week.) Both of them despised the producer Jean-Luc Azoulay. Le Moignic described the production company as a rotten apple with a worm (Azoulay) at its centre, a man obsessed on making money rather than entertainment, who sucked the life and any sense of job satisfaction out of the acting and creative process. She also implied her co-star Auclert was a spoilt brat who failed to grasp they were on a production line, not an acting job, where like it or not a whole episode had to be finished in a day. Hélène Le Moignic no longer works as an actress. She attributes this to having been a Girl Next Door for a long soul-destroying year. She describes her time on the show as "a curse" and since leaving has never been in touch with anyone connected with it. Her account of her time on LFDC is here; text in French.
  • Cécile Auclert has not apparently spoken on her time on the show or on any clashes with other people involved. She has spoken about her"dissappointment" at being written out of TV shows, abruptly and without explanation, as well as of broken promises made by producers and directors. She too no longer works or has any desire to work in TV, preferring: "Je vis en ermite à Marseille dans 33 mètres carrés. Mais au moins, je suis libre."^note  "I live as a hermit in 33 square yards of Marseilles but what the hell, I'm free".
  • Supporting actress Dan Simkovitch (Georgette Bellefeuille) described the principal actress Christianne Jean (Claire) as bring cold and distant but always polite. She notes a gulf between the core cast and the supporting actors, and said it took Hélène Le Moignic (Magalie) the best part of three months even to say "hello" to her. "There was something wrong about her" she said. Simkovitch says pay and working conditions were appaling, and alleges that after an accident on set (involving a negligiently assembled set and insecured props) requiring medical attention and which put her in a wheelchair for a short period, her pay was docked for non-attendence and the producers gave her an ultimatum - come in to do your job, even in a wheelchair, or you are sacked. No asking after her health and certainly no sick pay - just "work or be sacked". She was employed by the day and had no long-term contract or job security, and strongly feels she was exploited - especially since she was having difficulties with the Social Security administration and needed the work to satisfy the bureaucracy. She also highlighted the insane production schedule - four days a week, notionally from 8:00 am to 10:00pm but often longer, for four days a week, together with the fact she often did not receive her script until the very last minute - as factors that made the show such a treadmill. She also feels she was singled out for workplace bullying because of her trade union membership and left-wing politics - not liked at all by Azoulay, and that this resulted in her sacking. In an interview, she likened the AB production studios to a concentration camp for actors and described dreams about the studios being surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. She is also in dispute with AB over royalties and residuals owing to her from video and DVD releases, as well as from re-runs on national TV, and has not received a centime.
  • It appears Thierry Redler, who played the abominable Marc, was the only inversion to this, as he was universally liked by all his co-stars. Nobody appears to have a bad word to say about him and his young costar Vincent Latorre (who played Claire's brattish son) was especially appreciative of how Redler put himself out to be supportive, friendly, and something of a mentor to the young teenage boy on set. Latorre descibes Redler as unselfish and one who thought of his own needs last of all. Dan Simkovitch also spoke warmly of both him and Gérard Vives (Gérard).
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor; The role ending misdemeanour for one actress wasn't asking for more money or being excessively Prima Donna on set. (opinions vary). Cécile Auclert (Fanny) was exhausted by the workload, and was deliberately dropped from the show after pleading for a let-up in the insane production schedule. She was followed very quickly by Hélène le Moignic (Magalie) who had simply had enough and walked out. While the door was held open for Auclert to return - she did so, briefly, before the end of the run - le Moignic was never offered the chance to return; her account is that the show completely severed its association with her after the last pay cheque and even those of her former co-stars who were sympathetic to her were ordered not to make contact. ^note Later in the series, Thierry Redler (Marc) dropped out of the show. Like Auclert, the option was kept open for him to return, which he did in the successor show. Dan Simkovitch maintains (above) she was fired for being a trade union member and for trying to unionise other actors and crew members to protest against the working conditions at AB studios. AB used the excuse that she was also working on another TV series for a different production company and this was not something they encouraged in their employees, who were expected to be under sole contract to AB.
• Screwed by the Network: The event that finally killed the show stone-dead - as well as other long-runners on French TV, including long-standing Saturday Morning Kids’ Show Club Dorothée - was the fact that French broadcasting channel TF1 abruptly severed all contracts and connections with AB Productions in 1997 for reasons which have not been publicly explained. This effectively made Jean-Luc Azoulay into an Un-person and ended Les Nouvelles Filles D'à Coté after 156 episodes, as well as all other AB shows on TF1.
• Technology Marches On: A big pointer to this show dating from the middle 1990's is the unbelievably massive size of the mobile phones used by the characters. Fanny is seen to reach intro her bag and bring out a massive brick with an extending aerial, reminiscent of a World War II walkie-talkie. If nothing else reminds you this is 1994-95... this does.