by Tom Vitale
“Will you excuse Uncle Dudu and I for just a moment to discuss some business?” Zamir asked, leaving me sitting alone with Miss Transylvania in an awkward silence. She was staring at me with an unblinking intensity. I hated meeting strangers, especially good-looking ones.
“They say you are a wealthy and important American television director,” Miss Transylvania said, sliding a little closer to me.
“No, no. Actually, this is my first job,” I said with a nervous laugh. “Umm… how old are you, by the way?”
Miss Transylvania smiled shyly and put her hand on my leg. “You look like my favorite actor, Cliff Owen.”
“I have to get back to the shoot,” I said, nearly knocking the table over as I hastily stood up.
ZAMIR CALLED IT AN EARLY night, but everyone, including Tony, ventured together into the shadows of the Translyvanian forest until we found a spot that offered a stunning mountain panorama. A distant howling floated on the night air, surely belonging to a dog but lupine enough to inspire a tingle of fear. Beneath the moon’s brilliant glow we drank beer, smoked, laughed about the absurdity of the party, and Tony told ghost stories.
After a couple of beers I excused myself from the group and wandered off looking for a good spot to take a piss. Buoyed up by the mountain air mentholated with pine, I breathed in the moment and smiled. Soon I came across a small clearing, where I nearly tripped over a shovel. It was stuck in the ground next to a pile of dirt and a large hole. As I tried to make sense of what looked suspiciously like a freshly dug grave, I heard a rustling from the darkness. I stood frozen as the crunching, scraping sound came closer and closer. My mind raced with images of a wolf or a mummy, or worst of all whoever had dug the hole, but instead Miss Transylvania emerged from the darkness, her face pure white in the moonlight.
“Oh, it’s you!” I said, relieved. “Look at this, I just found a fucking grave!”
“Why are you trying to escape me, my dearest deer?” she said, presumably making reference to my costume as she moved closer and leaned toward me.
“What are you doing?” I cried, recoiling in terror, convinced she was about to extend her fangs and bite my neck.
“Wah! You almost make me fall in the grave!” she said reproachfully. “I only want to kiss you.”
“I think I need to go back to my friends,” I said.
“No!” Miss Transylvania pouted and started backing toward the hole. “Kiss me or I will fall into the grave.”
“Be careful!” I said.
“Kiss me,” she said, continuing to back away, apparently confident in her charms.
“Seriously! I’m not going to stop you!”
“You must kiss me before I fall into th—” With a shriek and thump, Miss Transylvania fell backward into the grave.
Romania alternated between amazing, bizarre, serious, chaotic, fantastic, surreal, and tragicomic. By the end of the episode, Zamir was so hopped up on booze and pain killers he was barely coherent and unable to do much of anything. Worse, Tony had run out of patience, and it was dawning on me that losing control of the shoot was probably not a good business model.
A fitting end to the trip, on the last day Zamir took me aside for a private conversation.
“Tomski, I’m sorry…” Zamir said, a note of sympathy creeping around in his voice. “Unfortunately, you have committed what is considered a serious crime in Romania… Miss Transylvania is pregnant… and she is underage. Uncle Dudu is furious… I’m afraid this is going to be very expensive for you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Zamir… I’m gay.”
“Oh… shit…” Zamir said, seemingly disappointed. I lit a cigarette and shook my head.
THE ROMANIA EDIT WAS BITTERSWEET. I wasn’t on the schedule going forward, and based on how the shoot had gone, I didn’t expect that to change. If this was going to be both my first and last episode, I reasoned, I’d better make it as good as possible. Jesse, the editor, and I worked pretty much night and day, seven days a week. We took a pretty simple approach and opted to just show it how it was. Romania had been a perfect storm. Despite Zamir’s fall from grace, it being my first show, the Romanian Tourism Bureau meddling so aggressively, and the campy nature of a Dracula-themed downward spiral, everything somehow came together. Truth had been stranger than fiction, and it was hilarious. At least I hoped it was. After the first cut went to Tony, I got called into Chris and Lydia’s office.
“Pack your bags,” Chris said. “You’re going to Colombia.”
I could have jumped for joy. Apparently Tony had decided I’d be sticking around.
“I was dreading watching that first cut assuming it was going to be some plodding attempt to pretend Romania had been a normal episode,” Tony later explained. “Finally I worked up the nerve, put in the DVD, and my jaw dropped. Jesus, you were relentless, going right for the jugular again and again! Your hate for the place comes through brilliantly! A strong point of view is always a good thing! Bravo!”
Despite what happened there, I hadn’t hated Romania at all, just the opposite. But this was no time to argue. Turning out what Tony instantly declared a “comedy classic” had cemented my role as director.
I didn’t expect what happened next, though in retrospect I should have seen it coming. A massive scandal erupted when the Romania episode was broadcast, generating the most comments ever on the Travel Channel website. Romania’s largest newspaper wrote a scathing article casting Tony as Public Enemy Number One, and both the network and ZPZ had to issue statements.
I’d learned a valuable lesson. Romania showed me, for the first time, that people actually watched the show, and—much to my surprise—seemed to take it seriously. I did some soul searching, thought about what I wanted to do with my career. I reasoned that while I was traveling the world having fun, I had a responsibility to do better. Punching down was a bully move regardless of how funny, true, or deserving it might be.
On the next shoot in Colombia, I bent over backward to avoid the same mistakes. However, I was unprepared for how famous Tony was in Latin America. I found myself turning down overtures from captains of industry, offers of yachts, and invitations to estates. I even managed to demur repeated requests from the first lady to fly on the presidential jet to a private island. Colombia turned out to be a fantastic trip, and we succeeded in finding the real “roots” scenes we missed out on in Romania. Our last night, Tony hosted a wrap party in his luxurious Cartagena hotel room and screened the Romania episode. I beamed with pride watching Tony smile and laugh uproariously nearly the whole time.
THERE WAS ANOTHER IMPORTANT LESSON to come out of Romania, one with perhaps the farthest-reaching implications. Back in Transylvania, furious at me for subjecting him to the Halloween party, Tony had offered a bargain. He’d consider the score settled if I let Zach get a shot of me chained up in the “breakfast nook of the damned.” Of course, for some reason there was a fully stocked medieval dungeon just past the dining room buffet.
From the beginning, I recognized in myself a willingness—a desire, even—to do whatever it took to make a good show and make Tony happy. And this being my first time directing, I had more control, responsibility, and more opportunity to succeed as well as provoke, fail, and humiliate myself. So I climbed into the stocks, and everything was fine… until Tony entered the room.
“Wait! This wasn’t part of the deal!” I said, desperately trying to wriggle free. I could tell by the look on his face this wasn’t going to end well. It turned out that, unlike the rest of the hotel, the heavy wooden stocks were very realistic, and I was trapped. Tony was wearing a black suit and, just like in Reservoir Dogs, he removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.
“Ooohhh, this is a good one,” Tony said, perusing a rack of torture implements on the wall, including denailing tongs and a morning star. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him pick up a terrifying pitchfork-like thing with a row of sharp metal spikes on the end. “Do you speak Spanish? Have you ever heard the words papi chulo?�
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“You’ve had too much to drink,” I said. “And that’s a real weapon!”
“Here we go, one… two… three…” Tony whacked me with the pitchfork so hard the end broke off. The cameraman and producer—somehow oblivious to my cries of pain—doubled over laughing. “You know, I think we’ve learned something here today,” Tony said, turning to the camera. “Making cheeseball television does not come without cost.”
I think more than a punishment, the real lesson Tony wanted to impart was my understanding—however briefly—of what he felt, to truly appreciate the dehumanizing indignity and torture of being on camera.
Whether intentionally or not, Tony had also demonstrated that a certain amount of suffering was part of the magic recipe. I wasn’t sure which one of us had opened Pandora’s Box, but there was no going back, and Romania marked a significant turn in our relationship.
As I would learn, the more shameful the situation, the more entertaining, as well as painful for the both of us. It was a bizarre pattern of mutually assured torture that would last throughout the course of our relationship. Over the next twenty-five episodes of No Reservations, twenty Layovers, and thirty-nine Parts Unknowns, the stakes escalated while we played our increasingly intense game of tit for tat.
The ignoble usually found its way to us whether we liked it or not. However, I figured since the cow was already out of the barn, I was justified in instigating the occasional miniature escalation, especially if it was good for the show. I got away with some stunts, others I didn’t.
Allow me to unburden my conscience. I’d knowingly withheld information relating to a karaoke machine on skis that would be accompanying us on the ice fishing scene in Manchuria as well as a troupe of Greek circle dancers at the sheep roast on the island of Crete. There was a disastrous Haitian voodoo ceremony and Tony eating an endangered Vietnamese Java mouse-deer. Those were both accidents, but definitely my fault. In Amsterdam we conspired for the bar to break into Dutch folk song in unison, which totally freaked Tony out because he’d just got really stoned. Tony requested a vintage Ferrari to drive along the Amalfi Coast, but I rented him a Smart Car instead. I didn’t just know about the pink stretch limo transport beat in Tijuana, I’d actively arranged it. Same goes for the monkey jockeys that raced on greyhounds. I hired a Punjabi dance troupe to pose as waiters then break into a Bollywood number halfway through Tony’s meal. In Penang I swapped his trishaw for one bedecked in plastic flowers and spinning Christmas lights that Tony described as looking like Liberace’s coffin. Adding insult to treachery, I chose to end that shoot day at the one hawker center in Georgetown hosting a seniors’ country-western line-dancing night. For a scene in Korea where Tony was competing in a video game competition, I tricked him into choosing Little Red Riding Hood as an avatar. Her only power was love, and Tony was quickly smited by fire-breathing dragons. I once paid off a priest to deliver a narratively useful sermon, and in Sri Lanka I built a fake restaurant. I’d even been carrying an inflatable rubber chicken in my bag waiting for just the right moment. The only thing worse than risking personal disaster was a mediocre episode. Although our methods may have been somewhat unorthodox, it almost always made for great TV.
Chapter Four
HEART OF DARKNESS
CASUALLY ATTIRED IN A KHAKI LINEN SHIRT, CLARK DESERT BOOTS, AND his trademark Persol sunglasses, Tony made trekking through war-torn Congo look effortless.
“This is useful information, pretty much the best news I’ve heard all day,” he said at the conclusion of our morning security briefing. “I didn’t know you had a morbid fear of snakes and serpents, Tom. You know they prefer to bite the head off the penis, so if you were to expose yourself when walking through the underbrush, they’ll probably go for that first.”
We’d just been informed that highly venomous black mamba snakes were actually gray in color as well as a significant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tony’s biggest takeaway was that after ten years he’d finally discovered my fear of snakes. I’d grown accustomed to suppressing a myriad of inconvenient phobias while on shoots, but I absolutely drew the line at snakes. And now, in addition to “health and safety” concerns, such as the ever-present threat of armed rebel groups, I had to worry about Tony weaponizing his newfound information. Which is why I was somewhere down the Congo River worrying about rubber snakes.
TO CALL DOING A SHOW in the Congo Tony’s “obsessive dream project” was a gross understatement. He always said you tend to see your life as a book or movie, and for Tony that story—if there had to be just one—was Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. The book, set in the Belgian Congo, and its cinematic reinterpretation Apocalypse Now, about the Vietnam War, had been recurring motifs throughout Tony’s work right from the beginning. Pretty much every river trip we ever filmed contained a Kurtz reference or some kind of homage to the theme of descending into madness deep in the jungle.
“Congo should be Africa’s richest country; instead it’s one of the world’s great historical injustices,” Tony said. “Nobody even knows there was a fucking holocaust here. Ten million people—half the country—killed. If the Congolese didn’t meet quota, the Belgians would cut off a hand to inspire productivity among the workforce. That’s the thing about Heart of Darkness, ‘agents’ like Conrad were working for King Leopold, raiding, slaughtering, enslaving the population for ivory and rubber. It was unbelievably brutal, and it was all just business as usual.”
Much to Tony’s delight CNN was all too happy to finance the big-ticket destinations on his bucket list, and so far in the first season of Parts Unknown we were checking off a good number. But filming in the Democratic Republic of Congo—one of the most dangerous and politically unstable countries in Africa, if not the entire world—was going to be a challenge. For nearly two decades, countless armed rebel groups and splinter factions backed by neighboring countries had been waging a brutal civil war against federal authority in the resource-rich Eastern DRC. Five million people had been killed and four million more displaced, making Congo the bloodiest conflict since World War II. The current instability stemmed from a period of political assassination and dictators, which in turn was a legacy of the unimaginably ruthless Belgian colonial rule.
As with any episode, the first step was to find the right local fixer. But everyone we spoke to said it couldn’t be done. One photojournalist with a camera? Risky but doable. Full-on Parts Unknown–sized film crew and accompanying infrastructure including half a million dollars’ worth of film gear? No way in hell. So impossible that an undertaking of this style was not only inadvisable, nobody had even attempted it, at least since the 1990s when rebels burned, raped, and pillaged their way across the country.
“Hell yeah, we can do that!” said a gravelly voice at the other end of a long-distance phone call. “Just stay away from the cannibals. When I filmed that shit a crowd of five hundred began stoning me. I barely made it out alive. But this is why you should hire me: I have a really good handle on how to operate here. You’ll be in safe hands, by Congo standards at least.” Originally from upstate New York, Dan had chosen to spend his mid-thirties embedded with alternating Congolese military and rebel groups while filming a documentary about the heaviest fighting the Congo had seen in years. Dan’s time in Congo had left him with shrapnel wounds, a little hearing loss from an anti-aircraft round, some insect eggs growing in his foot, and a gallows sense of humor. I wasn’t certain where he fell on the spectrum between brave and foolhardy, but in spite of some personality quirks, it was clear he was no idiot. As I would learn, Dan and his friend, collaborator, and right-hand man, Horeb, were probably the only people alive who had just the right combination of skills to get our show through the Congo.
But before we could retrace Conrad’s journey down the Congo River, we had to get there. The fastest way to do it, and really the only way, given our time constraints, was to fly into Rwanda, enter Congo through Goma—at the epicenter of the fighting—then fly t
o Kisangani and hook up with the Congo River there. Despite finished shows giving the impression we were in the farthest flung corners of the globe, with all the gear and a crew that could approach twenty-five with local hires included, the production wasn’t as mobile as you might think, and we often tried to make it look farther out from an airport and nice hotel than we were. Thing was, the Congo wasn’t just far out. It might as well have been the other side of the moon.
This shoot was going to have to be different; there’d be no thirty cases of film equipment or two-hour setups for a food insert shot. We were going to rough it on this one—smaller, leaner, with an alternate crew of burly survivalists, just two cameramen, a producer, and me. I wasn’t quite sure where I fit in with the rest of the team, but I’d got us through some tough locations before and I had, perhaps, the unhealthy habit of putting the show above my own well-being or sanity. It was a trait Tony appreciated. The way I looked at it was, yes, there were sacrifices, risks, and Tony could be difficult—often making crazy, unrealistic demands—but I’d been given one hell of a golden ticket, and I was going to make the most of the opportunity. So I bought a fancy pair of snake-proof boots and packed my suitcase. Crazy or not, we were going to the Congo.
Landing in Rwanda, I watched nervously as machine-gun-bearing soldiers in fatigues rifled through our luggage looking for prohibited items. Walkie-talkies were at the top of the list, and I was smuggling fifteen of them in my suitcase. “Walkies are a big no-no,” Dan had warned. “Just one can be used to command a battalion of four hundred rebels, so governments here are all hard-core about that shit.” I found this an impressive statistic, as I had trouble using them to command just two cameramen. There was a commotion when one of the soldiers found the producer Moose’s huge stash of high-protein energy bars. Worried about food options in the Congo, before leaving New York, Moose had gone to his local camping retailer and filled a shopping cart with every last energy bar and freeze-dried field ration in the store. The cashier had asked with a somewhat worried expression, “Is there something you know that I don’t?” Apparently, plastic bags were also prohibited in Rwanda, and the ban was taken seriously. We waited while each of the energy bars was opened and tossed into a government-issue burlap sack before the whole sticky mess got stuffed back in Moose’s bag.