I’m guessing he thought I was easy game as just the week before he’d witnessed me being felt up. The public grope came courtesy of a lovely little man we all knew as ‘Wheelie’. The poor guy had no legs and made his way around town on a wooden board with wheels, using his hands to paddle along the road. Whenever we came across him in our car, the drivers would speed up and veer towards him. He would simply laugh and wave and call out, ‘Darling! Darling!’ (which I gather he assumed was my name) while we pulled over, and then he’d scuttle up to collect a couple of bucks through the car window.
Then, just on the previous Wednesday, we arrived home to find Wheelie parked outside the gate to my guest house—I was guessing the begging business had hit a bit of a slump that day and he wanted to be certain of a windfall. After I slipped him some cash, he thanked his ‘darling’ and held his arms out for a hug. I thought that was kind of sweet and leant down to embrace him. The clinch was just getting to that stage where it had become a little lengthy and awkward when he suddenly released his grip on me, quickly reached around and gave my breasts two short sharp tweaks.
Even now, I’m not quite sure how I should have reacted. In the immediate aftermath, all I could think of was that the unfortunate fellow probably hadn’t copped a handful of bosom in quite some time and I’m not a miserly person by nature. I was also uneasy about publicly berating a legless beggar for chancing a bit of grab and tickle with a shameless foreigner. So I just smiled as I backed away towards the gate, keenly conscious of my grinning security guard, who was now sporting a rather disconcertingly lascivious glint in his eye.
I decided to let slide the attempts at hanky-panky in the back of the jeep on the way to Jalalabad. Hey, after the ‘make out’ session with Wheelie he’d seen the week before, he no doubt thought he was in with a shot. So, rather than make a fuss and risk getting the security guard sacked, I leaned forward awkwardly for the entire trip, ‘captivated’ by the conversations happening in front.
We stopped along the way to take the obligatory ‘war junk’ photos—we perched on abandoned tanks, with the security guards’ guns slung casually across us—and arrived at the location in high spirits. The euphoria lasted approximately eight minutes. I immediately consulted with our director and head cameraman, who both confessed to having no idea what Luther’s shooting plan meant, so, with the assistance of Willy, we hastily simplified it to ensure basic coverage. Essential to the scene was getting a shot where everything was in frame—the fighting in the valley, the choppers descending on the hill and the commandos running down it. If we didn’t have that, then we might as well have been shooting it all separately.
We were stationed about twenty minutes from town, so our eighty extras all had to be ferried to the site by bus. Muffy and I initially considered this a blessing because it meant they couldn’t possibly run away from the set, but we had cause to reconsider this when, during its very first run, the bus became bogged, smack-bang in the middle of the location. It took us an hour to get the bus moving again and, by the time we had bussed in all the extras, we were running hopelessly behind schedule. The choppers were arriving at 3pm, an arrangement that was non-negotiable, and by noon it became a manic race to get the cast fed, rehearsed and ready for action before the first landing took place.
The scenario was a bloody battle, so we had to find a handful of extras to cop imaginary bullets and take a fall. We had come with our fancy-pants, special-effects make-up—water bottles full of home-made blood together with the last of our professional latex for shaping bullet holes. We just needed to find a few suitable bodies for close-ups.
My experience had taught me that Afghan actors don’t do ‘dying’ well, and this bunch did nothing to dispel that notion. Muffy and Aleem lined up extra after extra in front of me to take a ‘bullet’ from my upraised finger. They either folded to the ground like dying swans, or clutched their chests (despite being shot in the head) and staggered around for an inordinate amount of time, or just stood stock-still and stared at me.
I’d smile and thank them in their native Pashto before hissing, ‘Rubbish—be gone!’ to Aleem in English. In Kabul I would have shown them how to take a hit myself, but my security guards were particularly twitchy, to the point where they would sternly shake their heads if I dared to roll back a centimetre of sleeve. So I called in our assistant director to give them a demo. He wasn’t brilliant, but it gave them the gist of it; with just two hours to go, we had found our men.
The next thirty minutes saw our director explaining to the extras and the recently arrived police officers (running approximately two hours late) exactly what they had to do. First the villagers had to get ready for battle. Then the bad guys would turn up and a big fight would ensue. The police would then arrive and find themselves outnumbered, before the choppers descended just in the nick of time.
The final hour was spent scrabbling around for close shots of the villagers preparing to fight—sharpening axes, loading fake guns and praying to Allah—and getting footage of the bad guys and police arriving in their cars. By the time we received the call from our co-director on the flight to say that they were well and truly on their way, we had simply run out of time to rehearse the battle. So, as the first of the choppers appeared on the bend of the river, we just shoved the extras into position and told them to fight.
It was mind-blowingly terrifying. Axes and sticks and fists went flying. Muffy and I simply clung to each other; both of us having literally lost our voices by that stage from yelling so much, we barked out croaky exclamations of alarm. They may not have been so hot at dying, but these men could really scrap.
The crane and wide shots were totally unusable as the diligent Ahmad was in frame. He had raced up to the top of the hill, on his own initiative, to wave the choppers down (despite there being huge red crosses marked out on the summit). It also didn’t help that somehow the commandos failed to disgorge.
As the choppers ascended into the sky and circled us for a second landing, we all scrambled on to the battlefield to inspect the damage. One guy, smiling, held up a thumb that looked freakishly out of kilter with the rest of his hand. Another man proudly showed me the plum-coloured egg already forming on his forehead. I instructed Aleem to gather up the wounded and take them off set. He was to apologise to them profusely and guarantee that they would still get paid. But none of them wanted to leave—they were having too much ‘fun’.
The second take saw our hardy extras fight with even greater ferocity. I looked away as an axe came precariously close to one man’s head . . . and groaned as the commandos alighted from the choppers and ran in perfect formation down the wrong side of the hill.
Our props were in pretty bad shape by this stage and, as the choppers circled for their final descent, we foraged about for sticks and stones to replace our broken plastic guns. The final take was a triumph. The extras fought like firebrands, the cops arrived on cue and the commandos disembarked and followed the game plan.
Muffy and I were too focused on the action and the order of events to notice where the cameramen had positioned themselves for the final enactment. On reviewing the footage the next day, we realised that all of them, with the exception of the crane operator, were on top of the hill, mercifully hidden from view but exclusively trained on the choppers. We came away from the shoot with just one lonely wide shot that took in the entire scene, courtesy of our crane operator (who I suspect would have also raced up to film the impressive-looking helicopters if he could have got there in time).
Luther’s appraisal of our work the next morning was typically pleasant, constructive and supportive:
Guten Morgen,
I saw the material in the editing with the editor together. Sorry, but there are so many mistakes, I can’t believe it. There is one point I don’t understand. The director inform the cameramen before shooting to ignore my camera script. Please let me know why, now we have the chaos.
Cheers Luther
‘Cheers’—really? Muffy com
posed a brilliantly abrasive reply but, on assurances from Christof that he was totally on our side and would deal with Luther himself, it was never sent.
That afternoon, when I visited the suite to check on our editor’s progress, he enthusiastically and correctly pointed out that you could actually see the director’s head jutting above a sand dune. He had only just spotted it, so we agreed to keep the information to ourselves. And, as far as we were both concerned, said head was just a big, brown rock. Which happened to move now and then.
As Muffy and I pulled into work, Aleem and Sayed were waiting at the end of the driveway. I was greeted with hugs and delighted smiles and, as news of my arrival filtered through the ranks, I had most of the drama department trailing me upstairs to my office to view the contents of the blue velvet box I had in my possession. I felt like a mother arriving home from hospital after just giving birth, but the ‘baby’ belonged to all of us, as I had just returned from Korea where I attended the Seoul International Drama Awards to accept the Special Jury Prize for Eagle Four.
It was an amazing three days of five-star accommodation, fine dining, business-class flights (a personal first!), and red-carpet strolling. But the real boat-floater for me was watching my team this particular August morning, proudly passing around the heavy marble trophy, a very public acknowledgement of the excellent efforts they had all put into making the show.
Saad directed us to enter the competition earlier in 2011 and we dutifully did so, not really expecting a result. Back in May, Muffy sent off our little bundle of DVDs, complete with their neatly hand-written labels. Then, in July, we received news that we had won an award.
We were initially sceptical about the significance of the ‘Special Jury Prize’, and Muffy and I secretly harboured suspicions that it could very well be the ‘Good on You for Trying’ trophy. But, after conferring with the organisers, we learnt that, out of two hundred and four entries from thirty-seven countries, our show had made it through the initial cull. The jury ultimately didn’t deem us worthy of first prize in our category, but they had all agreed that we deserved recognition for our outstanding work.
Our success had the tang of honey, particularly as the show had initially been so badly maligned by our own people.
We’d just been winding down production on Eagle Four when Christof was appointed general manager of our company, and the mother ship in Dubai instructed him to approve episode one of the series before we showed it to the client.
Christof confessed to knowing very little about drama production, so he called in his octogenarian compatriot, Luther (who was in town directing the telecast of a music concert) to evaluate our work. We hadn’t met Luther at that stage; he wasn’t yet working for our company and he’d been in Afghanistan for approximately five days.
To say that Luther savaged us would be an enormous understatement. He tut-tutted and tch-ed his way through the thirty-minute show, continually pausing the program to patronise us.
‘Where is your depth of field?’
‘Why is the light so bad?’
‘Is that all the coverage you have?! Ha!’
We were genuinely floored by his assessment and, for each ignorant contention he raised, we felt we had a perfectly valid comeback. We tried to tactfully explain that we were under-resourced, understaffed and time poor, and that we believed our crew had done an exceptional job considering what we had to work with. We finished off the session by gently urging him to cast aside his exacting, western artistic sensibilities, because this show was the best drama serial he was ever going to see in Afghanistan, if not the entire region.
Despite not ever having seen any other Afghan drama serials, he highly doubted our claim. All our reasoning and assurances seemed to be falling on deaf ears—in this case, on his extremely hairy deaf ears. I think it was at about this point in the discussion that Lynchy offered up the most cogent comment of the day. ‘You’re just a bloody dickhead, mate.’
Unsurprisingly, Lynchy’s verdict didn’t hold much sway. Luther’s final verdict, that the show was not fit for broadcast, delivered to management in Dubai with the full backing of Christof (who himself had only been with the company a month), came as a huge blow to us. Worse still, it was an incredible insult to our young local team, who had worked so hard to pull it off; our Afghan director, Sayed, who had been in the meeting with us, walked away from the encounter a shattered man.
By close of business that day both Lynchy and Damien were ready to resign, and I certainly wouldn’t have blamed either of them if they’d done just that. We headed back to our guest house and unwound by indulging in a horrifically bigoted display of goose-stepping and barking at one another in varying degrees of dodgy German; our collective mood became as shambolic as our accents as we drifted from rage to disbelief to indifference.
After sucking back our combined body weight in beers, we managed to calm down a little. What finally saw us all off to bed that night with dopey, sleepy grins and inebriated giggles was Muffy’s Facebook status update: Who the fuck is Luther????
I received a ‘What the hell is going on with E4, Trudi?’ phone call from Saad the following day. It took a fair bit of arguing, as well as persuading him to actually come to Kabul to view the ‘unworthy’ episode, before we convinced him that Luther was mistaken.
Needless to say, the client was delighted with our presentation and the series attracted a huge audience. There is no ratings system in Afghanistan, but it was easy to gauge when a show was a success. Having around one thousand Afghan colleagues, who were unashamedly vocal about what they and their families did and did not like, we quickly got a sense as to whether a program was working or not. With Eagle Four, I would often enter the edit suite to find groups of people huddled around the monitor, catching their first glimpse of the upcoming episode. Our actors reported that they were constantly being stopped on the street by members of the general public wanting to snap selfies with a ‘star’. Actual police officers would also pull them up, either calling them ‘brother’ and congratulating them on their work, or joking that they were showing up the ANP by setting the policing bar way too high.
When the kids living in our street found out we were responsible for making the show, we became celebrities as well. One day, when I brought home caps and T-shirts bearing the Eagle Four logo to distribute amongst them, I was literally mobbed and had to be hauled inside the guest house by my security guard.
The show also attracted quite a bit of international press and Maria Abi-Habib, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, quoted a twelve-year-old boy as saying: ‘The police on the show are great. They care for the people and defuse bombs. The show makes me want to be a policeman.’ She further reported that, when she asked the boy whether real-life Afghan policemen made him want to join up, he paused for a moment before replying ‘No.’
And now we had a prestigious award to reaffirm our unwavering faith in the program.
I was in a meeting with Saad, discussing a new project, when he told me about our success in Seoul; he invited me to go and accept the award on behalf of the company. The day on which he broke this news to me was 31 July, my birthday, and the celebrations that night relegated the personal passing of another year to a mere footnote. We headed to the Gandamak bar where Muffy and I spent most of the evening crowing about our win.
I think I mentioned that I would be flying business class about 487 times that night, but, alas, I was playing to a jaded audience. My friends—a mix of journalists, security contractors and various consultants for major companies—frequently fly business, and they thought my excitement about turning left on the plane rather cute, if not a little pathetic. For the women in our group, however, it was all about the dress, the shoes and the hair, and I would most certainly need a few days in Dubai to get my styling sorted before heading to Korea.
Once Gandamak closed its doors for the night, a group of us headed back to the home of one of my journo mates, Hamish, so as to prolong the party. By 3am we were
all shedding pants, tops and undergarment whatnots, and plunging into his pool. I’m not sure how long I was in there, but I know I was the first one out; as I stepped up onto the ledge, I promptly slipped over on the water-slicked tiles, slithering over the side of the pool and landing on my back on a concrete path below it.
I didn’t pass out (a question I was asked at least five times by my worried-looking friends, who now hovered over me), and I wiggled my arms and legs to prove that I hadn’t broken anything. I knew what day it was—it was the day after my birthday! Duh!
But the routine where they held up fingers for me to count was a serious cause for concern. ‘Four!’ I incorrectly answered. ‘Two!’ was my erroneous second attempt. It was then that I realised I didn’t have my glasses on—the truth was I couldn’t really see a thing.
They finally agreed that I could sit up. But it was then that they noticed the puddle of blood staining the cement where my head had been—I had split it clean open.
Darling Fred, who ran security at the house, gently sterilised the wound and bandaged my head. Afterwards, all the pool party guests took turns signing the bandage, adding witty and endearing little comments like: ‘I’m a loser’, ‘Don’t try this at home’ and ‘It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to’. We then all sat around and devised a plausible story as to how I had come to injure myself. My suggested scenario, that I fell getting out of the pool, was immediately howled down.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 14