by Tom Vitale
We met at an upscale restaurant in the northern suburbs of Rome. The dining room was a late Monday afternoon of still white tablecloths, that dead zone between lunch and dinner. Asia was already there waiting for me behind a pair of dark, oversize sunglasses. She was ghostly pale, a stark contrast to jet black hair. She looked thinner than I remembered—rail thin and somehow smaller too.
“Tom, it’s so good to see you,” she said, her deep, gravelly voice bigger than her frame.
When the waiter arrived, I declined food and asked for a bottle of Talisker. I was here to get Asia to confess she’d killed Tony, and I had a plan. I poured myself a drink. Asia circled for a moment, then took the bait.
“Nobody will talk to me, I’m completely cut off from everyone in Anthony’s life,” she said, emptying her glass. “I have no idea what’s going on. I read in the newspapers about his will, where’s the rest of the money?”
“Rest of the money?” I repeated, pouring us another. “I don’t think there is more money. Tony always spent more than he saved.”
“Well, what about the book he was working on?” She held out her glass.
“I don’t know anything about what he was writing,” I said, downing another drink.
“He was always complaining, especially at the end, about his writer’s block,” Asia said. “It started when we were in Hong Kong. It mortified him, he felt he had to write this book, but he couldn’t finish it. He said he was haunted by ‘the great blank white page staring him in the face.’”
“SHE’S AN AMAZINGLY TALENTED ACTOR, brilliant director, and smoking hot,” Tony said, finishing his cigarette. “She’s like the Angelina Jolie of Italy… Her father is Dario Argento.” He waited for a flicker of recognition on my face. “The famous Italian horror director?” I stood there with a stunned goldfish expression. The words coming rapid-fire out of Tony’s mouth had no meaning to me. “Never mind.” He rolled his eyes and continued. “Asia has agreed to help with the Rome show; it’s going to be fantastic. She’s a treasure trove of inspiration and ideas and is going to set up the entire shoot.”
Okay, that was great. But at the moment, we were filming in Argentina, and I had a lot to worry about before I could start thinking about Rome. We’d been in production for fourteen years, and the job was getting harder. Dealing with ever escalating logistics, variables in the field, and unhelpful bullshit from the office was taking a serious toll. In addition to Argentina, I was behind schedule on the Manila edit, and two weeks after Rome, we had a super top-secret—tell nobody, or it will not happen—shoot in Vietnam with President Obama.
“Wow, that sounds really exciting,” I said, too wound up to appear genuinely enthuasistic. “How did you and Asia meet?”
“We haven’t met,” Tony said. “We started direct messaging through Twitter.”
Hadn’t met yet? Well, that was a red flag. I shuddered at the realization that the next several months of my life would be hinging on the strength and reliability of a Twitter relationship.
“How do you know you’re not getting catfished?” I asked.
“I want you to keep me copied on all correspondence,” Tony said, ignoring my question. “Everything, I mean everything.”
Copy Tony on every email? It kept getting better. Micromanaging pre-production to this extent wasn’t just unusual, it was insane. Anytime Tony paid special attention to a location or scene it spelled trouble. Putting the show together required a million little details, and it had pretty much become my survival strategy to keep Tony Bourdain as far away from the nuts, bolts, and gnashing gears of the machine as telegenically possible. The big picture was where Tony did best. Choosing episode themes and outlining his critical artistic direction, his intense involvement in the edit that ultimately defined the show, all that was what made each episode an intensely personal expression. Tony’s knowledge of literature and film was encyclopedic, and we often riffed on a cinematic reference for each episode. But as the bar rose, these references placed increasingly outrageous and logistically challenging demands on the crew, resulting in extreme stress, though pretty much without exception a relentlessly improved TV show.
“So, I’m thinking Bertolucci’s The Conformist as the style of cinematography for Rome,” Tony said. Gears started turning in my head. A film shot in the 1970s, set in the 1930s with a powerful anti-Mussolini, anti-fascist message mirrored by the use of super-wide-screen anamorphic cinematography and a cold, brutalist, dehumanizing architectural landscape. Seemed like a perfectly straightforward reference for a food show being shot in 2016. Really, though, I knew I wasn’t being fair. To Tony, the more important the episode, the more important the style, and for this one he definitely had a plan. There would be no Colosseum or picturesque cobblestone piazzas this time.
“Start gathering archival footage of Mussolini and fascist-era Rome that specifically evokes the current Trump campaign and political mood at home,” Tony said. Trump wasn’t even the official Republican nominee at the time, but Tony was already concerned by the comparisons. “It’s fascinating and so timely. I’ve been reading up on fascism and it’s coming back, big time. I think there’s even a clip where Mussolini says, ‘Make Italy great again.’”
Speaking faster than I could write, Tony instructed me to begin assembling a list of possible brutalist filming locations on the outskirts of Rome, “with an emphasis on examples of fascist architecture, remnants of monuments, bland suburbs subtly drawing a mostly unspoken line to present-day Trumpism.”
By this point I’d been to Italy many times. It’s a lovely place to visit, has, in my opinion, some of the best food in the world, and is without question one of the most difficult places to make this show. And now with Tony’s focus on details and his obvious desire to impress Asia, this was going to be a whole new level.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was that we would be shooting anamorphic. We’d be using Arri Alexa cameras and anamorphic lenses to get an authentic, extreme widescreen aspect ratio that would recreate Tony’s Bertolucci-inspired vision for the episode. But it meant spending roughly an additional $38,000 in equipment rentals (which would eventually spiral to a $90,000 cost overrun) and lugging massive studio-size cameras all over Rome while trying to make the episode look like a scripted film, even though we had no script or shot list. It wasn’t just the mammoth cameras we had to contend with. Filming anamorphic required additional equipment, lighting, a dolly and track, and a massive local Italian film crew to haul and operate it all. It would look cool, if we could pull it off.
Tony’s ethic of relentlessly pushing the envelope—the very drive responsible for getting us where we were—had reached such a fever pitch, it felt like the pace was becoming unsustainable. Flexibility and margin for error were shrinking by the episode.
If it hadn’t been for Jeff, I think I would have lost my mind long before we ever touched down in Rome. He negotiated equipment, and managed fixers, logistics, and the local crew with seeming ease. These were logistical and diplomatic challenges that would have killed a lesser producer.
We didn’t have an assistant director to run the production—someone to make sure we were on schedule, that everyone was where they were supposed to be, and they all got fed on time—which was normally a necessity when dealing with a crew this size. The qualified locals we’d hired were all used to studio-style, union-approved conditions, including regular coffee breaks. When they realized they needed to work between the hours of one p.m. and three p.m., the local team essentially went on a food strike and flat out refused to allow lunch to be rescheduled.
“We make a show about lunch,” Jeff patiently explained. “We’re all going to have to work through lunch.” Eventually everyone came to an understanding that involved a food break every three hours. The enormous equipment box truck immediately blocked the hotel freight entrance. Our film permit didn’t include “traffic obstruction,” and I could tell we were going to have an issue on whatever narrow Roman street we were supposed to film.<
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With the giant camera setup for Rome, success hinged on the good action wandering into a rigid and narrow field of view. Which was pretty much the opposite of how the real world worked.
Setting up inside the restaurant—for our first scene, our equipment footprint was so large it took over a third of the dining room—there was no chance of fitting into the background as usual. I was terrified at what Tony would say when he arrived, but not only did he not mind, he seemed impressed.
“Nice lenses, are those rentals or do we own those?” Tony asked, sitting down for a solo meal to camera. “Apparently we blew out our equipment budget for the entire year.” He smiled at the camera proudly. “Wow, look at the size of that fuckin’ tripod. Are we blocking the bathrooms? We’re terrible people. No one in this restaurant can pee without going through us.”
The restaurant owner brought out some raviolis, which Tony declared delicious. “I wanna die here already, and I might yet,” he said, enjoying himself very much.
Total Murphy’s law. Whenever I was at my wit’s end, Tony would show up chipper as a Girl Scout selling cookies.
FOURTH DAY OF FILMING IN Rome was a big one, our first scene with Asia. Tony came to location early and was looking nervous. Asia arrived exactly on time and gracefully exited from the rear of a chauffeured Mercedes in what looked like a slow-motion shot. There was something about Asia that made her feel larger than life. Dressed in all black with a bob of black hair and bright red lipstick, she was stunning, vaguely reminiscent of Greta Garbo.
“Hello, Asia, I’m Tom,” I said. “Thank you so much for doing this.”
“My pleasure. How goes the shoot?” Asia asked, her voice surprisingly deep and raspy.
“It’s been somewhere between a little and a lot hectic,” I said. “But Rome is always a good time.”
“When everything under the heavens is in chaos, the situation is perfect.” Asia smiled.
For the scene she’d chosen a simple Roman family-run restaurant from her childhood located in the ancient part of the city, the sort of place where the customers wear pearls or mustaches and the house nonna prepares fresh fettuccine by hand. We’d been sure to set up early so we were ready to start filming right away. The scene was mostly unremarkable at first, starting off a little rocky, but by the end of the meal Tony and Asia were practically finishing each other’s sentences.
“You guys can go wide,” Tony said, signaling the meal was over.
“Okay, thank you very much,” I said. “After wides you guys are done for the day.” Clearly, even I wasn’t stupid enough to prod Tony for content today. Turned out the restaurant was too small, and the cameras were too big to fit a lens that could get a wide shot. Fortunately, Tony and Asia continued talking and didn’t seem to notice.
“I have reasonable expectations for happiness, I think,” Tony said. “Three minutes here or there… I mean, I’m sitting there and I think, God, everything is really beautiful, this is a great moment, I’m really going to enjoy it, because it’s going to be two or three minutes.”
“How about serene?” Asia asked.
“Never,” Tony answered. “Happy is one thing, but serene…”
“Happy and sad are the same thing,” Asia said.
“You know, this really fucking sucks, but when I’m thinking, ‘That’s a good shot,’ I’m happiest when life is kind of like a film…”
“You’re happy with the illusion, because film is an illusion,” Asia said.
“Yeah, I am,” Tony said.
“I know, me too, I understand,” Asia said. “But then I thought, this is really wrong. This is no way to live, when you’re a grown-up. With this illusion. Does that make me bad? What is bad? What is good? Are you a bad person?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said, thinking. “A bad person is a person who hurts other people, either deliberately, or just because they don’t really think about other people, and yeah, that was me for a long time.”
“Me too,” Asia said.
“I mean, there was a lot of collateral damage,” Tony said. “To be my friend was not necessarily going to work out for you.”
“Everybody wants to fuck people over,” Asia said. “They do, they really do.”
“You know, I’m coming around on that,” Tony said. “I think, actually, that it’s not that. It’s the people who act in their perceived self-interest, and I think most people do the best they can, and a lot of times that means they’re going to fuck you over. And you know, it’s on me if I have unreasonable expectations of people, which I do.”
“I do too,” Asia said. “From everyone.”
After a few more glasses of wine, Tony and Asia walked off together, continuing their conversation. I watched while Zach’s camera captured them disappearing into the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off the cobblestones.
I WATCHED ASIA KNOCK BACK another Talisker. We’d put a sizable dent in the bottle by this point, and we were both feeling the effects.
“After we filmed that first scene at my fettuccine place, he brought me to the English cemetery. We sat on the bench by Keats’s grave and drank wine and we spoke about our families,” Asia said.
Fitting, I thought, that Tony’s relationship with Asia both began and ended with death.
“You broke up with him repeatedly,” I said. “It crushed him each time that happened… I knew him for sixteen years. He felt like he’d finally met someone worthy of him, and it made him cuckoo. It made him crazy.”
“Like why? How?” Asia asked.
“Like happy and nice,” I said. “He was supposed to be mean. That was his job. But after he met you, he got fucking nice. In retrospect, I should have realized that was a big-ass fucking warning sign that something was really wrong.”
“Even before we met, Anthony told me so much about you,” Asia said. “He told me you live alone, out of the city in that strange house with all the cats. He wrote this lengthy thing, his admiration and love for you. He told me how you were lonely too and he wanted you to move into his building. He told me things about your craft and your art that maybe he never told you.”
“There’s no place to say goodbye to him,” I said, overcome with emotion and a wave of booze. “If I can’t say goodbye, then how am I going to move on?” I asked through tears.
“We’re never going to move on or get on with it,” Asia said. “There will never be a goodbye to him. I have to live with it. Thirty times a day, everything I see reminds me of him, everything I do relates to him. We will always be like this.”
ON THE LAST DAY OF the Rome shoot, we started off with a solo scene. Tony sat at an outdoor café in the Mussolini-built Garbatella neighborhood, constructed in the 1930s in what was then the suburbs of Rome. Originally intended as a fascist design for model living, the ochre middle-class housing flats built around communal gardens were still inhabited by working-class families, many of whom may well have lived there since the neighborhood’s inception. There was a sole remaining Roman ruin in the center of the square, where the unassuming café was located: a stump of a pillar with a carving of Romulus and Remus. A mixture of historic Italian and Art Deco architecture, everything seemed both timeless and faded. The locals seemed unaffected by the presence of our cameras. The unassuming location was a perfect fit with our aim to film a scene on the outskirts of the city that reflected the darker side of twentieth-century Roman history.
Tony was quite happy with how the shoot had gone. Even more, it was clear from the beginning that he was in love with Asia.
“All right. A traditional Roman breakfast. There’s no dignified way to eat this,” Tony said, playfully taking a bite of his bomba, essentially an Italian jelly donut. “Oh, that’s going straight to my hips. Oh fuck, that’s good. I’m gonna eat the fuck out of this thing… I gotta get a real job.”
“We’re going to the Angry Cousin restaurant after this for crew meal; it’s nearby,” I said when we wrapped the scene.
“Oh, really? I could use a coup
le bowls of pasta, maybe some carbonara, a nice bottle of wine,” Tony said.
Ever since we filmed at the hole-in-the-wall trattoria years before—when the whole dining room erupted into a fight—the Angry Cousin was my favorite restaurant in the world. Our legacy fixer Sara had introduced us to Mama, Papa, and Margareta (the “angry cousin”), who were all like family. I’d gone back every time I’d been to Rome since we first filmed there for No Reservations.
Located in a basement, the restaurant occupied what was once an auto garage in a grand, if faded, Art Deco building. Mama was perpetually perched by the cash register; Papa was frequently napping at his lounge recliner that looked like it belonged in a private residence. The walls were covered with pictures of famous actors and their prize-winning Scottish terrier. The familiar and comforting aroma of tomato ragù accosted the senses as soon as you walked in. Tattered and outdated, the refrigeration unit had fake walnut seventies-era laminate, and the kitchen was the size of a postage stamp. It was utterly lacking in pretense. It felt like stepping into someone’s well lived-in home, and I loved it.
The food was good, but it wasn’t that. It was the memories. On one of our many previous trips to Rome, Tony, seeing how exhausting the shoots had been, how the travel was starting to grate rather than feel like an opportunity, perhaps sensing I needed a pep talk, took me to the Angry Cousin.