THE FILM CREW

I believe it would be a reasonable assumption for me to say that many of you go to the cinema. That some of you may be aspiring movie critics or even be addicts of the celluloid art.

But how many of you stay till the final credits naming all those involved with the production has faded to black?

Not many, is a fair answer.

Yet every name listed on those credits gave their, perhaps menial talent, to the creation that you have just viewed.

Have you ever wondered what the 2nd unit 3rd assistant director or the SF make-up artist did? Or how the caterer got lunch to the whole crew and artists on the lower Alpine slopes in that James Bond chase?

I'll attempt to answer some of those questions.

The production of a movie is very similar to the mounting of a military campaign. The key word in both ventures is "Planning".

Let us assume that money has been raised and our movie has three executive producers, who have hired a director and secured the involvement of 2 "Box-Office" names to play the leading male and female characters. They have also got a guarantee to distribution of the finished product.

This latter requirement ensures that the public will see the film in a cinema and may also include DVD and television clauses.

This was the genius of George Lucas when he started work on the first Star Wars film. He made sure he controlled everything. Production, distribution and marketing, even of the spin-of industries which included games, T-shirts, and toys.

A stroke of genius.

However, in most movies most of the profits go to the distributor. The producers are next on the list, followed by possibly the director, depending on the clauses in his contract.

The crew and actors will see nothing, unless they have negotiated like Alec Guinness when he appeared as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie, where he asked for a small 2% of the gross takings paid to George Lucas.

 

His estate to this day has earned approximately $95 million, and poor old James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader made only $7000!!

A similar story can be seen in the phonemically successful film "The Full Monty".

The actors in this film only received a paltry amount of the film's massive takings of $250 million from a production budget of $3.5 million.

I apologize for the above diversion into the financial shenanigans of the movie industry.

I move back to my opening statement.

Who or what is Grip or Gaffer?

And who is the "Foleys Artist"?

Foley, the name, came from the first artist to add sound effects to a movie in post-production, a Mr Jack Donovan Foley. He did this in the Universal Pictures production of "The Jazz Singer" way back in 1915. He continued as a Foley Artist till his death in 1967.

I too, have worked as a Foley artist on a couple of feature films, treading on old disused quarter inch recording tape to sound like footsteps on grass, I’ve even opened and closed a few doors and once, using an effect I picked up in a radio studio way back in the seventies, chopped through a cabbage with an axe to replicate a beheading! Experience in the field of radio or as it was known, wireless, is a great advantage should you wish to pursue this career.

A Grip and a Gaffer are highly intricate jobs and a clear understanding of weights and balances along with a firm understanding on how to tie a good knot using either rope or plastic will stand you in good stead.

Their job is to rig up a camera in sometimes what seems to be an impossible location, under a car, on top of a car, inside a car, half way down a perpendicular cliff face, and even under water. The latter requires a highly specialized Grip who can swim, dive and sometimes snorkel.

A Greensman?

Go on have a guess.

Well he or she works on the “set” and is part of the set dressing department, which oversees the decorating of a film set, which includes the furnishings and all the other objects that will be seen in the film. They work closely with the production designer and coordinate with the art director and should an Academy Award be given, it is given jointly to both the production designer and the set decorator.

Now if any greenery is required i.e.: flowers plants, or even trees in steps the Greensman. He or she is a specialised set dresser dealing with the artistic arrangement or landscape design of plant material, sometimes real and sometimes artificial, and usually a combination of both. Depending on the scope of the greens work in a film, the greensman may report to the art director or may report directly to the production designer.

If say the location is a nursery, this department can move into double figures with a Greensmaster, greens supervisor, a foreperson, a leading hand, and several labourers.

Another department with numerous worker and a hierarchical structure is the costume department.

First there is the costume designer, who is responsible for all the clothing and costumes worn by all the actors that appear on screen. He or she will discuss with the production designer to achieve an overall tone of the film.

Once they have interpreted the various characters appearing and decided on the “look” they will have, in steps the costume buyer or Cutter, they may be called a fitter, a seamstress or a tailor. Some celebrity actors have favorite cutters, and larger productions may hire several and have them on set at the same time, particularly in period film projects that might have complicated or expensive extras wardrobe.

If a Hollywood star is in the film often a “key costumer” is employed on larger productions to manage the set costumers, and to handle the star's personal wardrobe needs.

A Costume standby person is present on set always. It is his/her responsibility to monitor the quality and continuity of the actors and actresses costumes before and during takes. He or she will also assist the actors and actresses with dressing.

I could go on and on through all the departments involved on a production, but suffice to say, on a large scale international well financed production the list of technicians involved could be over three hundred possibly four or five if modern green screen technology is used, and a lot of computer graphics are required in post-production.

So, apart from their names on that endless list that comes at the end of the movie, that hardly any of you stay behind and watch, what else do these poor technicians have?

Well, they certainly have a longer and a more secure life than your jobbing actor! Because work is almost always on offer in documentaries, animation movies, news reporting, TV series and soaps, and Commercials which are highly paid.

And finally, there is of course “The Wrap Party”!

Always a festive occasion which is paid for by The Producer/Producers who are always the guys who pocket the rewards

PLEASE COMMENT PLEASE 

Mr Cess Du est Monsieur Foxy

 Mr Cess Du est Monsieur Foxy

C’est va? Noblesse noblige. Comment allez vous? Bon soir. Bon jour. Je m’appelle Cess Poole. Je t’aime. Qui, qui, madame. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? Comme ce comme ca. Je ne sais quoi. Je suis un enfant terrible.

The last stock phrase I would live to regret.

I explain.

“Qui”, I thought with a few pigeon phrases in the foreign tongue of French at my disposal, I felt very confident when I was offered a small cameo role in a movie called “Crime de Monsieur Stil, Le”. I was sorely in need of confidence, as I would have to perform the whole role speaking French.

By the end of my four week shoot I had a new understanding and appreciation of the stock French phrase, Honni soit qui mal y pense -Evil be to him who evil thinks.

The movie script was freely adapted from the novel “Crime in the Gabon” by Georges Simenon, the creator of the famous detective of the fifties and sixties, Maigret.

Gabon was a French West African colony till independence came in August of 1960. An enterprising and delightful young lady our director, Ms. Claire Devers had set her heart on making the definitive French film on the political chaos that occurred during the mass exodus of the French colonial masters in the years just before Mr. Leon M’ba assumed the presidential office in 1961. The movie was of the political crime thriller genre and the basic story line was full of promise.

The Gabon was in a stable, if somewhat autocratic state at the time. Africa’s longest serving president, El  Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba was in power and was running a smooth dictatorial African ship. But as a civil war was raging next door in the Congo, the location chosen for this made-for-TV-epic was the Northern Cape of South Africa. Our base camp and lodgings were in the small town of Keimoes and all our set locations were within a two hundred-kilometre radius of the town.

This whole region of Orange River basin and the surrounding area is renowned for the growing of grapes, critus fruits, the delicious yellow clingstone peach and the production of many fine wines.

Some farmers even brewed their own marvelous illicit concoction known to the locals as Mampoer. This is the South African version of Moonshine or Irish Potcheen. The latter two being excellent tasty beverages, I was very eager to taste the local rendition.

Fire-water-extraordinaire is the best description I can give this potent medicinal drink. The medicine is made from the skins and off-cuts of the yellow clingstone peach and was of exceptional quality. So “Toddie” and I were in second heaven.

Forty-one kilometres to the west of Keimoes lies another small town called Kakamas, and to the East another one-horse town by the name of Pofadder. The name Kakamas is shrouded in mystery, with the most likely explanation of the derivation is that it comes from the Koranna Khoe words for "poor grazing".

And that the area certainly is.

The town of Pofadder was named after Klaas Pofadder, a bushman or Koi-Koi Captain of the area. Pofadder again is surrounded by “poor grazing” and is the centre of the local sheep trade, and is well known to geologists and mineralogists because of the many interesting geological deposits found there.

“Kak” or “Kuk” as it is pronounced in Afrikaans means shit. And “Pofadder” or “Puffadder” as I -  a rooinek would pronounce it, is one of the deadliest snakes in Africa. I supply all this information so that you will note, to put it mildly, we were barracked in the back of beyond!

Mademoiselle Dever was a fiery lady and the producer from France; George Campana seemed to be on the ball. However as always in our industry, money is always the bottom line. The only reason the movie was being shot in South Africa was not the coup in the Congo, it was because the local English speaking actors, who had been cast in all the supporting roles, would cost less than flying in genuine French thespians.

This as you can imagine, caused problems, strangely enough not on the monetary issues but on the creative issues. Not one us of could string a single sentence together in French!

We all had a smattering of French. We had either studied it at school as one of our foreign languages or had taken it at University. Dialogue coaching from a young French lady was the order of the day. We practiced and practiced but never seemed to improve. We were told that we had to speak in French so as to help the French actors in Paris who would dub, and post-sync, their voices.
 
Brilliant! I thought.

They are never going to use our voices. All they are interested in is that our lips make the right movements. So I quickly made my character a man of many gesticulations. When he was pensive, he would talk with his hand half covering his mouth. When he wild and angry he would move his hands so erratically that they would cross his face every two seconds. And when I was totally at a loss for words and up-shit-arse-creek without the proverbial paddle I would spin around turning my back to the camera.

My character developed in leaps and bounds. After a few days Ms. Devers had me sussed. “Ah, ah Monsieur Foxy is on the set, bon jour.”  was her morning greeting to me.

She had observed my interest in keeping most of my face out of shot during the previous night’s shoot. Scene soixtante neuf ( 69, no pun intended) was four pages long. That’s about three minutes of screen time. All the non-French speaking actors were in it. Some of us had fifteen lines, some only six or seven, I was in seventh heaven, I only had one and it was only six words long.

It was set in the country club bar, a small area of twenty square metres. Ms. Devers wanted to get the whole scene in one traveling hand-held-shot. This would require the greatest skill from all the actors and the camera crew. Shooting the scene in ten takes would have been excellent if we had been speaking in English.

At 4.45 am. the following morning, ten hours after we’d started, we wrapped the scene. It had taken us forty-one takes! This was a record for all of us working on the scene. The French expletive, “Merde!!!!” was ringing in our ears as we crawled off to bed.

As Ms. Devers greeted me at twelve noon the following day, I was full of the, joie de vivre, the joys of life.

I had a day off. “Bon jour, ma pleasure mademoiselle”, I replied handing her “Toddie” so she could have a sip. She knocked back a hefty gulp and went into an immediate seizure, gasping and coughing.

“What is this?” she asked in between bouts of panting convulsions.

“She is the evil Mampoer mademoiselle, the medicine of the fox, the creme de la creme, a gift from enfant terrible.” I replied.

“Honni soit qui mal y pense - Evil be to him who evil thinks Monsieur Foxy”, she answered as she walked away laughing in the African sun.

Lost on the Rhine

Lost on the Rhine

The sexual education of children particularly those approaching puberty has, and always will be, a hotly debated issue. The basic findings of all surveys on the subject come to a similar conclusion; it is sadly insufficient. However with today’s technology and access to the WWW today’s enquiring minds can easily gain access to this often taboo topic.

Unfortunately this access can lead to pedophilia, kidnapping and other even more horrifying conclusions.

My casual, slow and satisfying education way back in the nineteen-fifties was gained purely and simply by the act of observation and some strange graphic drawings on a blackboard during my biology classes.

It was during my time with Gypsy Rose Lee as her assistant that the full use of my eyes came into play. This was due to the fact that Rose Lee demanded that I scrutinize every possible punter, so that I could gather as much information about them as possible.

In the early mornings before the punters arrived I used to walk along the shore-line and the promenade of Blackpool. I would occasionally find a young couple “At-it”, as the sexual act was described at that time, under the iron girders of Blackpool’s north pier.

In my wanders during the height of the summer season just after high tide I used to find the debris and residue of sexual activity, an assorted supply of used rubber-jonnies. These useful contraceptive devices, made by a rubber company in which the Vatican had a share, came in all sorts of colours, shapes and sizes, but they were not what I was after. Apart from noting that they looked like dead jelly fish they held no interest for me.

I was on the look out for far more sellable items, like watches and jewelry which the sun-worshippers had lost the previous day. It was amazing as to what I would find amongst the broken sea-shells.

Some-days nothing, others a lucrative windfall, a rolex watch, a diamond ear-ring, a gold bangle. 

Gypsy Rose Lee had a contact in the fencing-trade, known as Larry the fingers. He was a forger by profession but also dealt in the trading of what he called “Lost-Merchandise”, thus bringing him in an extra income while staying just on the right side of the local constabulary.

I used him many years later when I was tracking down my biological father and he arranged the five passports I ended up with when I visited Munich after the 9/11 incident. You’ve presumably already read about that in the essay called “Passports”.

I digress, my apologies.

Sex at a tender age was the subject that I wished to enlighten you on.

Apart from the delicate, although at times robust handling of my private parts by some fan-dancer friends of my mother, who said. “It’s better than doing it yourself Cess. You could go blind!”

I was in theory, a virgin till the tender old age of sixteen, when all was revealed to me in a broom cupboard on board a tourist vessel cruising down the river Rhine in Germany.

I was there as I was playing Brutus in Mr Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. It was a National Youth Theatre modern dress production and we were on tour in the mining town of Recklinghausen, in what was called West Germany.

The theatre was newly built when the coal mining company of the town “Swapped coal for art” just after the Second World War hoping they could give something back to the community, and make the fact, that they supplied Mr Hitler with most of the energy for his war effort conveniently disappear. 

This was my second NYT tour to the continent.

The previous year I was playing Paris in Romeo & Juliet. I was only reminded of this fact when I received a copy, in the mid-eighties, of Simon Master’s book entitled, The National Youth Theatre. 

Although he does not comment on my acting in the tome, my ability to make a fast buck definitely caught his attention as he mentions me in the second to last chapter, “Cess Poole spent a good part of the Romeo and Juliet season getting up at seven in the morning, walking to the local public house, The Enterprise, to swab down the bars and clean the tables, all for a few shilling and a free breakfast.”

At the time Simon was totally unaware of my ulterior motive in securing this employment and Toddie remained full to the brim throughout that summer season.

When the NYT toured the country they visited supplied them with what was called “A liaison officer”. On the Reckinghausen tour this officer was a very young attractive lady called Heidi, who certainly wanted to show her young charges the beauties of the area and the Rhine valley.

It was our first free Sunday with no performance and we were taken on a barge and chugged along the Rhine from Strasbourg to Colonge. 

After a few slugs of Dutch courage from Toddie, I made my introduction, "Ich habe Deutsch in der Schule fünf Jahre lang lernen"

 

"Das ist sehr gut Cess, müssen Sie sehr hart studieren und dann werden Sie in der Lage, die großen Werke der Literatur der Deutschen lesen."

And on she gabbled like a Messerschmitt chasing a UK bomber  thinking that I would understand.

I didn’t and we continued the conversation in pigeon German and English.

She was studying English in her first year at university and certainly understood the underlying implications involved in taking steady sips from Toddie.

I knew that Toddies contents were taking effect when she started changing all her “Sie’s” to “Du’s”. The latter being the more friendly translation for “You”. It wasn’t long before we began kissing and exploring with wild youthful abandoned hands under her great overcoat and my army surplus combat jacket.

We thought we’d found a secluded little hide-a-way to the rear of the vessel under the tarpaulin that covered a small life boat, till we heard the voices of fellow thespians congregating next to the life boat.

The cruising barge had just passed the magnificent Gothic cathedral of Colonge and they all wanted to look at it for as long as possible, so had swarmed the full length of the vessel and had moved to the stern to catch a last glimpse.

A healthy pause and silence followed until the voices died away.

Heidi said, "Lassen wir in funfzehn Minuten Andocken werden. Wir müssen uns beeilen. Ich weiß von einem Besenkammer auf dem Oberdeck. Lass uns gehen"

I understood kamer, gehen and Lass for room, hurry and go, and surmized that we only had 15 minutes before we’d be disembarking. So off we crept trying to avoid the rest of our party, and made our way inside the smallest broom cupboard on the upper deck you can imagine.

So it was amongst oily rags, buckets, hose-pipes and mops that I lost my virginity.

Sordid is perhaps a good word to describe it, but it was also filled with adventure, fear, intrepidation, anxcious pleasure, sheer ectascy, and all the other adjectival words you can find to describe your own sexual exploits.

Heidi and I continued our fly-by-night relationship for the whole of the following week before we had to return to the UK. In those days when international phone calls were expensive the trendy thing to do as parting lovers was to become pen-pals.

I am certainly glad we did, and although our relationship fizzled out two years later, the exercise of putting pen to paper has helped me write these tales.

Whether or not I learnt anything as regards sex education is another matter, but the dextrous moveability I devised amongst the mops, buckets and brushes could certainly be published in the next edition of the Kama-Sutra.

High and not so dry in Poffadder

High-and-not-so-dry in Pofadder and Munich

Have you ever been left stranded whilst you were on holiday or perhaps even when you were contracted to perform a job or a mission in a foreign clime?

Well I have.

On more than four occasions I have been left to fend for myself with only “Toddie”, a friend or two, a Good Samaritan and my own wits, to help me disengage from the predicament in which I found myself.

I hope you remember by brief description of the area of “poor grazing” found in the upper regions of the Northern Cape in South Africa.  The one-horse, one-bar, one-shop, one-church, one-petrol station, 10-farmers, 20-locals, and one hundred fifty thousand sheep, town of Pofadder stays sun-burnt on my aging hard drive.

In the month of November the temperature hovers in the upper thirties and settles around forty-three degrees at noon, and that’s in the shade. It was a Sunday and ten local English-speaking actors were assembling for breakfast in the Pofadder Hotel. We were all nursing hangovers as the previous night had been our wrap party.  Bloody Marys were organised by yours truly and gently sipped as we partook of a large Boere breakfast. Boerwors, - that’s like a sausage, bacon, liver, spiced mince, fried eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. A lavish cholesterol packed meal fit for a Springbok front row forward.

We had been informed that we would be picked up at eleven o’clock and be driven to the nearest airport five hundred and fifty kilometres away at Uppington. Our flight back to civilisation in Egoli, the city of gold - Johannesburg, was booked for 5 p.m. and we were told that the drive would only take five hours.

Although this all happened in the early nineties the Sunday Gestapo observance laws of the Second World War remained securely locked in force in Pofadder. Had I not organised the purchase the previous morning, of a take-away supply of vodka, beer and wine we would have dryless-in-Pofadder, so to speak.

The Hotel owner, known affectionately as Oom Jan, was a good-hearted soul and was used to entertaining “uitlanders” – people from overseas. Although the bar was securely barricaded and completely off limits even to us guests he was happy to let us consume our beverages in the garden next to the swimming pool or on the well shaded patio. He also willingly served us with non-alcoholic mixers and gave us pots of herbal rooibos tea.

Iced rooibos with a splash of vodka and a twist of lemon is a beautifully refreshing drink and I heartily recommend it. Oom Jan told me that I was not the first visitor to imbibe of this delicious
beverage. He pointed to a photograph on the lobby wall. Nicki Lauder, Nigel Mansel and Michael Schummacher all linked arm in arm with glasses raised toasting the setting sun.

Oom Jan explained that they were regular visitors and that this photo was very valuable. All these formula-one drivers raced for different teams and to have Honda-Williams, Ferrari, and Jaguar personnel staying at his hotel at the same time was a strange occurrence.

 “Why”, I asked.

“The teams, they is coming here to test drive. They is using the airport runway.”

“What runway, I though the nearest airport was at Uppington?”

“Ja, she is!” he replied curtly and continued with a whisper, “But they is using the secret one!”

My ears pricked up, eager to hear yet another conspiracy theory, which were common urban legends circulating in the soon to be liberated apartheid South Africa.

He continued moving closer to my sun recliner so he could whisper in my ear. “We, us Nats, we have to be building it during the onslaught. The reds under the bed. The Yanks couldn’t be landing their Lockheed C-5 Galaxys at Waterkloof military base near Pretoria when we is up in Angola, right?”

I had no idea were Angola was never mind Pretoria and I’d never heard of a C-5 Galaxy, which sounded like cosmic chocolate bar, so I was soaking up every word.

“The Cubans man, they is up there! Thousands of the fuckas, and we is only eighty ks from Luanda! They is supplying old Savimbi with arms, the Yanks. They bring in everything, artillery, tanks, the works!”

I donned my John Le Care hat and poured him a drink. He beamed from ear to ear, knocked back a huge gulp, licked his lips and continued. “You see, Waterkloof, she is too high, on the Highveld, altitude is too high. Those big fuckers, the C-5s, they’s needing a lot of fuel for landings and take-offs, right?”

 I nodded in agreement trying to recall my A-level physics lessons in aero-dymanics.

“So we Boere maak a plan! We builds them a longer runway down here. They is nearer to the Angloan border and we is helping them fuck up the Cubans! And should the shit hit the fan, we’s got an brand new airport!”

 I think I got the picture.

 “So what happens at this runway now? A white- elephant?” seemed the obvious question.

 “Hell no man! They’s using it.” he said pointing to the photograph on the wall, “for their testing.”

“The formula-one teams?”  I asked.

“Ja, twice a year they comes in droves only for two or three days and we tries never to book them double. You know, to have two different teams at the same time. They don’t like that, ‘cause of espionage!”

 “Spying”, I enquired.

 “Ja, their trade secrets, close to the chest man”, he whispered as I refilled his glass. “They come in winter when she is cold and then in summer when its baaia varm like now. Test their cars at extreme temperatures.”

 “So what happened there?” I asked pointing to the photograph.

“Jerra man! That was Nigel, a Pom like you Cess, he discovered the rooibos and vodka and refused to leave. He had two chicks with him and he wanted to party like. Him and Nickie were great buddies and then Schooey arrived with his team and I had them all for two days! Lekker
times!”

Suddenly we were interrupted by a very disagreeable junior thespian in a near state of panic, who inadvertently knocked over my bottle of vodka and told us that it was quarter past two.

 “So what?” I said as I licked the spilt vodka off the tabletop. The poor young man broke into a soliloquy of a man demented.

“We’ve all been trying to reach them. We can’t get through. Nobody’s answering their phones, We’ve tried the assistant director, the transport manager, even the director and the grips and lighting department, they’ve gone! Everybody’s gone! There’s nobody in town, nobody!”

“Of course not son,” said Oom Jan trying to calm the young man down, “It’s Sunday, nobody moves on a Sunday in Pofadder, not even Schumacher!”

“They were meant to be taking us to the airport at eleven o’clock!!”

Oom Jan and I broke into uncontrollable laughter and I poured us another drink. “Join us.” I said to the young thespian, who seemed to be wetting his pants with agitation at the thought of being marooned in Pofadder. “I’ve even tried calling my agent!”

 I was about to say, “And what would that achieve?” but I thought better of it, as I did not want to disillusion the youngster as to the futility of agents at such a tender age.

Oom Jan sprang into Boere action. A true good Samaritan. “Tell your okes to load up my Kombi, I’lls drive you.”

We arrived at Uppington airport well in time to board our flight to Johannesburg. Oom Jan had donned the feet of his idol Mr. Shumacher. I was sorry that I had fallen asleep on the back seat of the Kombi and missed our low flying drive at two hundred and ninety kilometres an hour through the desert.

I’ll tell you about Munich next month. It was a bit drier but not much.

Jack & Jackie

It was rather late in my illustrious career that I finally began to grasp the full subtext of what Mr Aloysius Louder, my voice teacher at the Royal Academy, had meant when he told us that, “An actor is a Jack of All Trades and Master of None.”

There were ten of us in the class when he uttered these profound words.

We were lying on our backs staring up at the flaky, peeling ceiling. Humming gently and using our inter-costal diaphragmatic breathing technique and our lower rib cages, we were supposedly increasing our lower tonal resonance. I was musing on the fact as to why the George Bernard Shaw Trust, which financially supported the Academy at the time, could not afford a tin of paint.

Gently prodding me in the ribs with his highly polished patent leather shoe, Mr Louder disturbed my contemplation.

“Would you not agree, Mr Poole?”

“Most certainly, sir,” I replied. It seemed, at the time, the best answer to give. I was wrong.

“Why?” he asked.

My mind was still locked into the peeling paint and the large damp patch that surrounded it. I was about to say something about building and plumbers, but luckily my friend Toe-Jam Hamilton piped up, “’Cause we’ll be a bank manager one day, an earl the next and with a bit of luck an IRA bomber the following week!”

“Quite right, Mr Hamilton.” replied Mr Louder. “You will have to gather information about people in all walks of life. From Lords and Ladies to the most beggarly tramp. You’ll use that information when you play all the different characters that you are cast in. But you will never be a Lord or a Lady. Or, I hope, a tramp. Yes, a Jack of All Trades but a Master of None.”

Thirty-five years later I was again lying on my back when Mr Louder’s words of wisdom floated back into my grey matter.

On this occasion I was underneath the hand basin in a bathroom at the Rotterdam Hilton hotel. I had been in residence at the hotel for twelve weeks whilst I was playing the leading villain in a Jackie Chan picture. Whilst being an astute businessman, Mr Chan is a “Star” and has an inert kindness backed by a heart of gold. He is also a man of extraordinary talents. Not only does he design, choreograph and perform all his own stunts but, as and when the mood takes him, he takes over the job of the cameraman, the make-up artist, the wardrobe dresser and even the director. A “Man of Means” is Mr Chan. As he explained to me one day on the shoot, “Ah, Sir Cless, in American picture, producer he tell me what to do. In my picture I tell lem!”

Unfortunately he had not told his producer that I was also “a Man of Means with NO Means” and the per diem I received was minimal. It didn’t even cover the daily cost of refilling Toddie with the highly refreshing Dutch jenever gin I had grown partial to.

I was therefore forced to cater for myself in the cramped surrounds of my twenty-first-floor bedroom. Dining out on my meagre allowance was out of the question, so I shopped in the local markets for my protein and fresh veggies. I borrowed a small gas cooker from a friendly member of the crew, who also enjoyed his gin, and set up my own catering department in my room.

My days “off-set” greatly exceeded my days “on-set”, so I spent lengthy sojourns “on ’oliday”, as the 2nd assistant director, Ms Lee Wung Sue, aptly called my non-working days.

It was on my ’oliday days that I toured the city of Rotterdam on the marvellous tramway system using my “Plonkie”. A Plonkie is a strip card that could be purchased for a few guilder and it allowed you to take as many tram rides as you could manage within a specified time. I hopped from tram to tram, gaily inserting my Plonkie into the automatic machines placed neatly on the boarding platforms of all the trams. I would return to the hotel in the early evening feeling young at heart, but weary, exhausted and hungry.

With diverse cosmopolitan communities resident in the city, the outer suburbs of Rotterdam had a wide selection of grocery stores, selling produce from across the globe. One day I would return with yams, pigs’ trotters and a couple of chillies, and cook Jamaican; the next it would be pasta and veal knuckles and I’d don my Italian chef’s hat. Every day I felt like Floyd diving into a new culinary experience. My little gas cooker and small wok worked wonders.

The only problem arose at the start of my final week.

I used to fillet all my fish and meat and prepare all my vegetables in the bathroom, which also served as my laundry room. I mean, a man has to have clean socks and Y-fronts, doesn’t he? It was while I was delicately filleting some pig’s tripe that I noticed my problem. A blocked drain.

Eleven weeks’ worth of fluff from my woollen socks, bones from my eels, and gristle from my pork hocks had taken their toll on the functioning of my bathroom basin’s U-bend!

Mr Louder’s words were at the forefront of my brain as I loosened the U-bend with my Leatherman. In no time at all I had disposed of the offending items blocking the drain and reattached the bend. I stood up smiling, looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “I wonder if the multi-talented Mr Jackie Chan has ever played the part of a plumber.”

I asked him on set the very next day. He replied, “Ah, Sir Cless, no I lav not. I am Jackie Chan not Jack of all Tlades."

No Acting Required

The origins of the often-used expression “N.A.R.-ing” in my profession are many. It has been reported that John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, James Stewart and even the legendary Orson Wells coined the phrase.

Rumour has it that “The Duke” John Wayne, when he was offered a role, used to demand a full shooting script for his perusal. He would then retire to his ranch in Iowa and page through it notating each page that he thought would require no acting. Once he was satisfied that over sixty percent of the script could be “N.A.R.-ed” he would allow his agent to continue negotiations with the producer. Another rumour tells that Big John’s personal script of True Grit, with two thick black pencil lines and the large letters N.A.R. (no acting required) scrawled across every third page, was offered at a Sotheby’s auction shortly after his death.

My own experiences with a spot of “N.A.R.-ing” go back to the mid-seventies.

I was playing the lead in a made-for-TV period cowboy drama set in the early days of the gold rush in Australia. The scene involved the arrival of the leading villain, the leading lady and myself in a fictitious town called Muckinbuddin. We had already shot the following scene, which showed us climbing out of the stagecoach and entering the saloon. There were a few minor lines of dialogue in this sequence. As it was the first time the audience was introduced to the slick smooth-faced bank manager, who would fleece the unsuspecting inhabitants of their newly panned gold, several close-ups were required by the director. It was also the first time my love interest, Ms Henrietta Sweet, played by Miss Courtney Ashbourne, appeared in the story.

Miss Ashbourne was straight out of drama school and had secured this, her first TV role, after spending an evening on the casting couch with Herr Otto Geltmann, a German with Jewish connections in Australia and Bonn.

She was very nervous and the make-up and wardrobe departments fluttered around her, especially when her close-ups were being shot. Obviously Herr Geltmann had issued instructions, and the stylists wanted to make sure they would collect their weekly wages.

A late friend of mine and a fellow student of the Royal Academy, Mr Andrew Letagé, played the crooked bank manager, Mr Cyrus McFarlane. Andrew was a tall good-looking Anglicised Frenchman and, as he was a couple of years older than myself, I looked to him when I needed advice. His advice was always courteously given, and he was dutifully rewarded with a hastily taken sip from my Toddie.

In those days I had taken a liking to gin.

I had developed a marvellous adaptation of the pink gin cocktail. Working on twelve shots in Toddie, I added thirty-two dashes of Angostura Bitters, to gain the full effect of my cocktail. To help disguise the smell of alcohol from prying noses, I arranged with the continuity supervisor that I could store a jar of pickled onions in the side-sack of her ever-present camping stool.

I can not claim full credit for this delicious drink. A wonderful white-haired ex-Major in a Gurka regiment introduced me to it while I was filming a documentary in the Nilgri tea-laden mountains in India. Apparently the “Gin-onion” was a regular pre-noon drink for many officers in the British India Army.

I’m sorry, I digress.

We had started filming the two-minute in-town scene at eight in the morning and, because the stylists carefully rearranged every stray strand of Miss Ashbourne’s lacquer-encrusted hair before, after and sometimes during every take, we only wrapped the scene at three in the afternoon. By the time the whole sequence was in the can, Andrew and I had polished off the full contents of Toddie, and sucked and chewed ten pickled onions each.

The director then suddenly announced, “I need to get the preceding scene. A single long lens establishing shot. And I want to catch it as the sun sets over there.”

He pointed to a dirt track on the distant horizon. “How long to set up?” he asked.

The assistant director quickly conferred with the camera crew and the horse wranglers.

“An hour and a half,” he said. “It’ll take them that long to get the stagecoach over there. But I can send the actors with them to speed things up.”

“Good,” said the director.

I excused myself for three minutes, and darted off to refill Toddie, and replenish the supply of pickled onions from the caterer’s van.

One hour later Miss Ashbourne, Andrew and I were seated in the stagecoach atop a small hillock overlooking the town of Muckinbuddin. The camera with a long lens was positioned in the high street approximately a mile and a half away from us. The wrangler in charge of driving the stagecoach had been given a walkie-talkie so that he could receive instructions, and be given a cue to commence action. This was our only means of communication with the base camp.

The words “Stand by!” crackled through the walkie-talkie and suddenly Miss Ashbourne went into a state of apoplexy. The director, prior to our ascent up the mountain, had instructed her to look out of the stagecoach window and admire the breathtaking scenery.

“It’s the first time you’ve seen the place, and it’s going to be your home for the next thirteen episodes, that’s your motivation! OK? You got it?”

The poor girl, now in a state of near panic as the make-up department was over a mile away, turned to Andrew and said, “What about my hair? They haven’t checked it? Does it look all right?” 

Andrew calmly offered her my Toddie and I gently placed a pickled onion in the palm of her hand.

“Don’t worry, ma cherie,” gushed Andrew, “we’re doing a bit of “D.O.T.H.-ing”

 “What’s that?” She asked.

 “Dot-on-the-horizon acting, my dear. Dot on the horizon. Very similar to N.A.R.–ing.”

“Action!!”

As the sun set majestically in the background, the silhouetted stagecoach with its three pinprick dots peering drunkenly out the window weaved jerkily down the dusty track into Muckinbuddin.

Thank you, Major Maguire.