‘Parador’: Paul & Sonia & Richard & Raul

The savvy Brazilian drivers on Paul Mazursky’s “Moon Over Parador” don’t stop at the red light in the misery-laden slum a few hundred yards from the warehouse-turned-studio where the director is shooting his $19-million movie. They carom right through to minimize the risk to the throats and wallets of their norte Americano employer-passengers and get them all the more quickly to the setside tables laden with fresh papaya, pineapple, three types of melon and strong, strong Brazilian coffee.

It’s the clash of cultures you’d expect when a major American movie, in this case from Universal Pictures, shoots on location in one of the world’s most colorful--and poverty-ridden--countries.

The recently wrapped comedy--which stars Richard Dreyfuss, Raul Julia and Sonia Braga, to be released next spring--is ostensibly political: Dreyfuss plays an American actor who resembles a Latin American dictator, and when the real dictator suddenly dies he assumes the throne to avoid a revolution. Julia is the corrupt and ruthless Minister of the Interior who becomes an enemy when Dreyfuss introduces social reforms; Braga is the late dictator’s lovely mistress.

But Mazursky’s aim is satire and laughs, not messages. Inside the studio on the outskirts of Rio, the protected and controllable environment seems far, far removed from the real world--and Mazursky and company are downplaying the film’s political aspects.

True, Puerto Rican-born Raul Julia will mention in passing that he hopes that the “rainbow of people” in (albeit fictional) Parador “will move North Americans toward an understanding of how incredibly varied Latin America is.” But, he said, as he sipped from a crock of hearty chicken soup into which he had just squeezed two lime halves, he is more focused on playing “this power behind the thrown, this boss of everything, within the context of comedy.”

And Mazursky will admit that “of course we have some parallels in politics now where actors are running countries”--a pregnant pause--”in a sense.”

But he is quick to add that “the movie is as much about acting as it is about dictatorships.”

Today’s shooting was relaxed and convivial. Mazursky couldn’t have been more easygoing--or a better audience--as he watched a post-liaison and satin-pajama-clad Dreyfuss try to jump off a nine-foot-round revolving bed without braining himself. Or as he listened to Dreyfuss, finally terra-firma-ed, try to persuade an outraged and even more compromisingly clad (or unclad) Braga that though he’s not who she thought he was, their relationship is definitely worth pursuing.

But the shoot hasn’t all been so placid and sweet. Indeed, a dozen crew members are wearing T-shirts handed out by Mazursky that say “I’m Sorry If I Yelled at You.”

It’s a reference to several weeks ago--the time of the director’s high decibels--when the production was 400 miles away in Ouro Preto, a UNESCO-preserved 17th-Century gold, silver and diamond-mining town in the Minas Gerais Mountains. There, Mazursky was directing a carnival scene with 5,000 non-English speaking extras (among them 1,800 undulating students of six local samba schools), Sammy Davis Jr. singing “Begin the Beguine,” pyrotechnical displays in the “Paradoran” colors of turquoise and salmon pink, scores of vehicles, plus his principal cast.

“As a joke, I said it’s a David Lean comedy,” said Mazursky, who is best known for such ruefully funny studies of middle-class marriage and mores as “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “An Unmarried Woman” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” These are samplers compared to such Lean tapestries as “Lawrence of Arabia” and “A Passage to India.”

Mazursky always knew that “Parador” would be bigger than anything he’d attempted before. Even so, he was smoking cigarettes for the first time in 16 years when “confronted with the reality of all those people there, and you really have to shoot it. But you don’t want to lose the story,” he added, drawing on the Marlboro he had just lit. “You don’t want to lose the focus of what’s going on.”

This, as written by Mazursky and Leon Capetanos, is the story: Jack Aaron (Dreyfuss), an actor who’s achieved only a middling success as he approaches his middle years, has just finished a role in an American action film shot on location in the fictional Latin American country of Parador. His bags aren’t yet packed and the anxiety about being unemployed again has already set in when Parador’s military dictator suffers a fatal heart attack.

Fearful of revolt, Parador’s all-powerful Latino-Teutonic interior minister (a blond Raul Julia) strong-arms Jack into impersonating the dictator. (The dictator bears a certain physical resemblance to Jack because he, too, is played by Richard Dreyfuss). Jack soon begins to relish the role’s hedonistic possibilities, as in the bedroom scenes with Braga. And also its altruistic ones, as when he initiates much-needed social reforms. The reforms eventually threaten the power of the interior minister, and Jack’s life is once again at risk as he engineers his escape from Parador.

Considering the aesthetic, logistical and legalistic challenges of creating Parador on screen, it’s a wonder that Mazursky wasn’t yelling--for admission to the madhouse--long before he began shooting.

According to Mazursky, he and Capetanos invented Parador as a story setting after their April, 1986, travels through Guatemala, Salvador, Trinidad and Jamaica, and additional research on “all the Latin American dictatorships.” The country, he said, could be “Paraguay or Ecuador or whatever you want it to be.” Indeed, the dictator’s up-from-the-people mistress, whose name, Madonna, is a joke with about three levels to it, evokes Argentina’s Evita Peron. And the script’s running gag about an oligarchy of 14 families (recently reduced to eight) recalls both El Salvador and pre-revolutionary Mexico.

At the same time, Mazursky and Pato Guzman, the Chilean-born production designer/co-producer who also was along on the southern swing, began to think about where to shoot the movie. “I didn’t want to make it in Guatemala, I didn’t want to make it in Salvador,” said the director, “because those places have a . . . reality.” After exposure in the film “Salvador” and the nightly news, this reality is both familiar and not exactly risible. Rejected, too, was Mexico, “because I needed a plaza where a dictator could make speeches and the plazas in Mexico all have trees in them.

“Finally,” Mazursky recalled, “someone told me that there was a place in Brazil, a town called Ouro Preto, that had a great plaza.”

As a country, Brazil also had a sea coast and, more specifically, the tropical, 16th-Century Bahia port of Salvador. (Mazursky had decided that Parador should be a Caribbean island). Furthermore, Brazil had a mixed population, noticeable in the crew of blacks, Indians and Caucasians, the latter mostly of Spanish and/or German origin. (Mazursky, influenced to some degree by the contemporary paintings of Colombian Fernando Botero, wanted his extras to be “tricolor.”) And there was a pool of skilled Brazilian film technicians. (This was a practical as well as an economic necessity.)

Yet, according to co-producer Geoffrey Taylor, “there were at least half a dozen times when we were told that this (filming in Brazil) was not going to be possible. The nature of Brazil is an obstructive place. They make it so exhausting and so difficult.”

On a simple one-to-one level, after enlisting the cooperation of the 60-odd merchants whose businesses border the plaza in Ouro Preto, there was still a major obstacle to filming there: the director of the museum the company wanted to use as the exterior of the dictator’s palace. The eventual carrot? “He is in three scenes,” laughed Taylor. “Everybody wants to be an actor, you know.”

On an official level, securing the needed unanimous permission of the 25-member council of Concine, the national film agency, remained a problem even after the required co-production agreement was struck with a Brazilian company. The local company was that of Hector Babenco, director of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” who, somewhat ironically, is putting the finishing touches on his U.S.-shot (Albany, N.Y.) Jack Nicholson-Meryl Streep “Ironweed.”

In addition, MCA-Universal’s local TV-distribution entity was expanded to include a locally registered production company, MCA Films do Brasil Limitada.

If Taylor read the situation correctly, Concine’s reluctance seemed to center on fears that Brazilian labor would be exploited. Which is another irony, considering that law requires that foreign productions pay Brazilian film workers 200% of their local salaries. (This still puts wages considerably below Hollywood rates.)

As well, law dictated that the working hours of hundreds of crafts people assisting local art director Marcos Flaksman in making the statuary, flags, drinking mugs, newspapers, license plates and even, it turned out, the custom-built favella or slum that collectively spell “Parador.” Although they could work only eight-hour days, an overtime provision allows two more hours but, after that, said Taylor, who has a law degree, “technically, you’re illegal. And labor suits here are like torts suits in the States. They don’t have ambulance chasers, they have labor suits.”

Since American film units, including this one, commonly work longer than 10 hours a day, unit production manager John Broderick was asked how such suits have been avoided. “You’ve been in Brazil three days?” Broderick queried the reporter. Bribes? he was asked. “You’ve been in Brazil three days?” he repeated, then added, “There’s the Brazilian ways of doing things”--and went back to signing his name the necessary 17 times on a Brazilian technician’s time statement.

There was general praise, however, for the competence of “Parador’s” Brazilian crew. And there were none of the anticipated objections to the script from the three Brazilian army officials who pored over it, three times each, apparently looking for specific references to the two decades of military government in Brazil that ended only two years ago.

The military’s cooperation--they eventually provided jeeps, tanks and trucks, squadrons of extras and two colonel-advisers--may have helped secure Concine’s approval, and it likely had a pragmatic aspect.

Taylor suggested that the military saw “Parador” as an opportunity to establish a connection with the local film-making community, which, as in many countries, tends to be left-leaning and anti-militaristic. “Both the colonels and the Brazilian crew,” he reported, “said they learned so much, they liked each other.

“The colonels would say, ‘I had no idea that people could be like you guys and not be military people,’ and the crew member said the same thing.”

Mazursky began his professional life as an actor (Stanley Kubrick’s 1953 debut feature “Fear and Desire,” “The Blackboard Jungle” in 1955, cabaret-revue work). As a film maker, he dealt with actors and acting directly in the autobiographical 1976 “Next Stop, Greenwich Village.” The subject was treated obliquely in a quartet of L.A.-set films (“Bob & Carol,” “Alex in Wonderland,” “Blume in Love” and “Down and Out”) whose characters adopt new life styles as consciously and monomaniacally as an actor attacking a new script.

“An actor is a desperate person,” Mazursky said with sympathy. “When an actor’s not playing a part, he’s not 100% whole--they’re happiest when they’re working. Tell an actor he’s got a job in three months, he’s OK for those three months. But two days before the job ends, he’s already beginning to feel the anxiety. And Richard Dreyfuss really does this very well.”

Dreyfuss won a Oscar in 1977 for playing a struggling actor in “The Goodbye Girl.” And his own well-documented, substance abuse-related struggles of 1982-85, when he was virtually unemployable in movies, came to an end when Mazursky hired him for “Down and Out.” Since then he has not stopped working, playing in “Tin Men,” “Stakeout,” “Nuts” and now “Parador,” in which he actually plays several parts.

“There’s Jack, there’s the real dictator, then there’s Jack playing the dictator,” said Dreyfuss. He forgot to mention the character that Jack is briefly seen playing in the film-within-the-film and--shades of “Stakeout’s” drag scene--the peasant-bloused senora Jack-as-dictator impersonates at one point to save his skin. “It’s crowded, it’s getting crowded,” Dreyfuss said, rapping at his skull with his knuckles, “I feel as if too many people have gotten off the elevator. That’s the biggest (challenge), the differences of the guise, the differences between who they are.”

The apparent differences between the actors working with Dreyfuss in “Moon Over Parador” couldn’t be more marked.

Julia comes to the project via the New York stage and such films as Mazursky’s “Tempest” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Braga from Brazilian prime-time TV soaps, the title role in “Spider Woman” and Robert Redford’s upcoming “The Milagro Beanfield War.” The United States is represented by comedy vets Jonathan Winters and Polly Holliday, who play American expatriates in the film, and by Sammy Davis Jr. and Dick Cavett, who play themselves.

The palace staff is portrayed by Germans Rene Kollendorf (Visconti’s “The Damned”) and Marianne Sagebrecht (last year’s “Sugarbaby”) and two Spaniards you never expected to see in the same movie: perennial Luis Bunuel leading man Fernando Rey, and Charo of the nightclub circuit and the fractured English. (The upstairs maid she plays is so sexually “ abailavle ,” she noted, “she remind me of my Chihuahua.”) Fifteen Brazilians in addition to Braga have speaking roles.

Though Dreyfuss said he was more struck by the similarities than the dissimilarities between himself and his various co-workers, Braga may be more on the money with her metaphor of acting as a mountain.

“We all must climb it,” said the brand-new skiing enthusiast, “but some walk and some take the lift.” Braga, no slowpoke, takes the lift. Maybe that’s because she is, like her “Parador” character, “instinctively political.” (By political she must mean “democratic.” Scores of crew people, including her own wardrobe-department-seamstress mother, not to mention the visiting journalist, receive this Spider Woman’s kisses each morning and evening. And though Braga is Brazil’s biggest and most recognizable female star, her idea of a “beautiful” Saturday off is mixing with the people at one of Rio’s samba schools that also serves as a social club/dance hall.) Or maybe it’s because, like her fellow Brazilian actors, Braga is unused to pre-production rehearsal.

“They come in and give you the performance in five minutes,” Mazursky said of the Brazilians. “Richard does it for you. Raul starts slower . . . and then I shout ‘Energy! Energy!” and he does it and it’s brilliant.”

Cast members talked variously on Mazursky’s affability, his patience, his originality of approach and his flexibility, attributing these qualities to Mazursky’s having been an actor. (Well, except Dreyfuss. He called it an “overblown idea”: “I don’t deal with him as an actor, I deal with him as a director.”)

Mazursky suggested that his flexibility has limits. Spontaneous as his movies may sound and look, he not only generally follows his own dictum that “improvisation is for rehearsal, it’s not for shooting,” but he presketches every scene in his films. And, partly concurring with Dreyfuss, he said: “I don’t get confused, when I’m directing, that I’m an actor.”

But the non-concurring part of him, he reported sheepishly, “sometimes . . . gets jealous of actors in my movies.” (He once admitted to a journalist that he thought of playing the Alan Bates part in “An Unmarried Woman” instead of the much smaller role he did do.) And, he said, “when you make your first movie, your only experience up to then is movies you worked in--in my case, as an actor. . . . So I just approached it--directing--as an actor.

“I still remember and am obsessed by the anxiety of the actor, the actor’s dilemma of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What do I do next?’ ” he elaborated, smoking another of the Marlboros he vowed to give up when shooting was completed.

“In some ways, (“Moon Over Parador”) seems very different from my other things, less personal. But in other ways, it’s more personal. Because it’s about actors, it’s about role-playing, it’s about how egotistical, how superficial an actor can be at times when--I mean, actors want you to love them.”