Reality Collides With Art in Philippines : Court Order Halts Work on TV Film

As tens of thousands of Filipinos danced to Donna Summer, prayed to the Virgin Mary and gawked at fireworks, sky lasers and confetti-spewing helicopters Thursday in a daylong celebration of the 1986 “People Power Revolution,” Chris Albrecht and Hal McElroy were not having a good day.

The two film executives scurried helplessly from room to room in Manila’s opulent Mandarin Hotel, trying to save their $12-million international production, a six-hour television miniseries lionizing, and depending upon, the very event that the Filipino people were celebrating a few miles away.

The rebellion eventually drove Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile in Hawaii and led Corazon Aquino to be installed as president.

Contrary to what Albrecht and McElroy had carefully and critically planned for so many months, art did not imitate reality on the streets of Manila on Thursday. Rather, reality caught up with the artists.

The one day alone cost the joint project of Home Box Office, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and McElroy-McElroy Productions $250,000, not to mention a great creative opportunity. That in turn jeopardized the future of what the producers hope will be one of television’s more creative and ambitious ventures.

On the eve of the Manila anniversary celebration that would have given the film makers all those spontaneous, unpaid extras as a live backdrop for a re-creation of the February, 1986, revolt at the very spot where it happened, one of the leaders of that rebellion managed to secure a court injunction temporarily barring the company from continuing its 36 days of on-location filming here.

Former defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, who remains an influential opposition senator, argued in seeking Wednesday’s injunction that the mini-series violates his privacy by commercializing what he now says he views as a private moment.

“This is a man who has taken a moment in history of which all of the Filipino people can be proud and made it into his own,” said Albrecht, senior vice president for original programming at Home Box Office, which is paying for half of the production. “Because of one person’s self-interest, this whole project may now have to be revamped.

“I feel like we’re a tiny ball in a political Ping-Pong match.”

Added McElroy, whose Australia-based production company has been in Manila for nearly a month organizing the docudrama, “Today is an absolutely irretrievable occasion. What he has done is to deprive us of the chance, and deprived all of the Filipino people of the chance, to have the Filipinos again stand as heroes before the world.”

In another sense, though, what Enrile, one of many now-fallen heroes of the 1986 rebellion, also did was to illustrate graphically the vagaries of making movies in the Philippines, notwithstanding a national policy of encouraging foreign and domestic motion-picture production here.

Because of that policy, more than a dozen foreign and 100 local films are produced each year here, thriving on cheap, English-speaking labor yet returning millions of dollars in salaries and rentals to a poor Third-World country desperately in need of jobs.

The foreign films range in quality from such B-grade efforts as Cannon Films’ Chuck Norris epics, “Delta Force” and the endless “Missing in Action” series, to award-caliber productions such as “Platoon,” “Apocalypse Now” and, assuming it ever reaches the TV screen, the ongoing Australian-American miniseries on the revolt.

The results of the past efforts have had mixed reviews, both from the film makers and the Philippine government.

During the filming last August of “Missing in Action III,” the government was the big loser. A $5-million Sikorsky helicopter gunship, a vital weapon in the government’s struggle to put down an all-too-real Communist insurgency in the Philippine countryside, crashed in Manila Bay while rented out to Cannon. A half-dozen key Philippine Air Force men were killed in the crash, which triggered a series of still-unresolved lawsuits.

In the days following the crash, the Philippine press was sharply critical of a government policy that makes it easy for film makers to rent military hardware, close off main streets and take over government buildings. Many local film producers in Manila feared that the incident would lead to the end of movie-making here.

But the controversy finally faded, and it was just a few months later that Home Box Office, McElroy-McElroy and the British television firm Zenith Corp. closed their final deal to produce the ambitious miniseries on location.

For Hal McElroy, the decision to return to the Philippines for an on-location shoot brought back less-than-pleasant memories, reflecting the dangers awaiting producers who do business here.

Although it dealt with the bloody 1965 Indonesian coup, McElroy’s last award-winning hit, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” was filmed on location in the Philippines in 1982--until disaster struck.

At a New York dinner in honor of President Corazon Aquino during her triumphant state visit in 1986, the movie’s co-star, Sigourney Weaver, described what went wrong on that occasion, forcing the crew to finish the film in Australia.

“While shooting in one of the poorest neighborhoods on the outskirts of Manila, we unwittingly became a focus for the anger and frustration of local residents,” Weaver recalled. “Death threats followed in those final two weeks and, in the end, we were forced to cut short our shooting in Manila.

“I am confident that under Mrs. Aquino’s leadership, though, the creative exchange between our countries can flourish, not only for us but for the world.”

If only it were true, HBO’s Albrecht thought on Thursday, 17 months after Weaver’s speech. Staring down at his blown opportunities from his 17th-floor hotel room here Thursday morning, he said, “Here, the U.S., English and Australians have all gotten together to spend millions of dollars in this country to give the world, hopefully, a very loving portrayal of what went on here, and now, one man is cheating the world of that.”

But Albrecht did not blame the Aquino government for his production’s temporary misfortune.

“This guy is a throwback to the days when these people could do whatever they wanted,” he said of Enrile, who had served as defense minister under Marcos before rebelling against him. Regarding the president, Albrecht added, “We have got her blessing.”

Indeed, the production not only has Aquino’s blessing, but also that of Philippine Defense Secretary Fidel V. Ramos, who stood side-by-side with Enrile in starting the February 1986 rebellion.

Nevertheless, the docudrama had encountered problems before. In fact, Wednesday’s injunction was the second time in as many weeks that the 254-member crew’s miniseries production, led by award-winning American director Robert Markowitz, was officially stopped from filming.

For months, McElroy recalled during a recent interview, he had been trying to meet with Ramos to coordinate his production with the Philippine police and military and to sign rental agreements for necessary props and extras, such as the actual helicopters, tanks and soldiers who joined in the revolt.

Faced with the prospect of hundreds of thousands of dollars in production delays, the crew began filming anyway. However, after they re-created a riot, complete with fire trucks, fake riot troops, water cannons and gunfire, at an intersection a half-mile from Aquino’s home, negative comment in the local press pushed Ramos into ordering a meeting with the crew at his defense headquarters.

McElroy opened the meeting by describing just what, exactly, the joint project was all about.

Using the working title, “The Four-Day Revolution”--a new title will be selected before it is scheduled to air on Home Box Office on three successive nights in October--the miniseries will use actual television footage, a fictional subplot and the re-creation of the events in Philippine history between the assassination of Aquino’s husband, Benigno, in August, 1983, and the 1986 revolt to tell “the extraordinary story of what the Filipino people did as the world watched,” McElroy told Ramos.

The fictional plot, he explained, will focus on the characters of a television reporter, played by Gary Busey, and his estranged Australian photographer wife, portrayed by Rebecca Gilling. Busey’s character falls in love with a Filipina socialite while covering the events in Manila, and his wife, who is also on assignment in Manila, has a romance with one of the Philippine military officers eventually involved in the coup.

McElroy stressed, however, that the fictional plot takes up less than 25% of the story; the rest is devoted to either real footage or re-creations, using at least 70 top Filipino actors and actresses.

In the end, Ramos not only approved the film but pledged the full support of the armed forces’ equipment and men.

After losing just two days, McElroy-McElroy and Home Box Office were back in business, and filming began in a major way on thoroughfares and in government buildings throughout Manila. As recently as Wednesday, in fact, the crew’s three 35-mm cameras followed four military helicopter gunships, two tanks and scores of soldiers as they re-created the dramatic, key defection of Air Force troops to the rebel group Feb. 24, 1986, in the heart of Manila’s national police headquarters at Camp Crame.

“But tomorrow is really the big day,” said a hopeful Albrecht on Wednesday afternoon, as he watched the dramatic re-creation unfold on the set. “Thursday is the key day . . . That is the point where we put the fake into the real--place our fictional characters into a real situation--and do what we really haven’t got a name for yet.”

Enter Enrile.

From the outset, Enrile had sent letters to McElroy objecting to the screenplay. The screenplay was written by David Williamson, Australia’s foremost playwright, whose credits include “Gallipoli” and “The Year of Living Dangerously,” and contained input from American professor Alfred McCoy, a recognized Philippine scholar.

Enrile threatened to file an injunction to bar the filming if his name were used in the production, McElroy recalled. So, McElroy decided to use a fictitious name for the ex-defense minister, Jose de Leon--the only one of more than 70 real characters named in the film to be shielded by an alias.

It didn’t stop the injunction. Enrile simply waited until the day before the project’s most important scene to file for the court order, and he did so late enough to prevent the production’s lawyers from convening a hearing to get it lifted.

Enrile claimed that the filming was a “continuing violation of the plaintiff’s right to privacy and (that) tortuous meddling with his private life is disturbing his peace of mind and causing him mental anguish and serious anxiety.”

“If we would have done this movie somewhere else, we could have used everybody’s real name --and insulted the Filipino people in the process by having to use Thais as actors,” Albrecht said. “We’ve been trying to respect and glorify the Filipino people’s dignity and do justice to the story by filming it here where the history was made.”

For the project’s veteran director, Robert Markowitz, the injunction was particularly tragic.

“The Filipino actors are the most disciplined I have ever found,” he said. “They don’t make deals here. They make movies. I am going to feel great sadness to leave here.”

According to Albrecht, that could happen as soon as next week, if the court rules against the production in a hearing scheduled for today.

“We will finish this movie one way or another--somewhere,” he said. “But I would doubt very seriously if we’ll finish the whole schedule we had planned in the Philippines.

“From here on, I fear, it’ll be a nightmare.”