Shooting the Sphinx

by Avram Noble Ludwig

  The magic of special effects made it possible to shoot Hayden sitting in a beach chair on a life-sized model of the top of the head of the Sphinx on a back lot in Tijuana, Mexico, but before we made the model and shot Hayden, I had to take a technical team to Cairo to shoot a shot of the real Sphinx—in a helicopter. Then we could combine the two shots inside a computer and—presto!—it would look like Hayden was sitting on top of the actual Sphinx.

  I needed a local Egyptian producer, and several months before I went to Egypt, I called Cairo-based production companies. I got the first response from a young Egyptian producer who had done a TV show at the pyramids for Fox, the same American studio making Jumper. By the time the older, more established producers had called me back, the first producer had already submitted a budget and a sensible bid. In the film business time is money, so I hired the young producer and his company right away.

  In Egypt, when you make a movie, you must hire an Egyptian production company whether you want to or not. That company, not your movie, technically “owns” permission to shoot. That company must apply for permits from the Ministry of the Interior, the Crew Guild, and the Actors Guild. Then you have to start paying several thousand dollars in permitting fees. You also have to pay each union a thousand-dollar fee for each crewmember or actor you bring into Egypt. The permitting process takes six weeks. You have to translate your script into Arabic and give copies to the officials and censors who have to approve the content of the script before you shoot a single frame. All these hoops you have to jump through present all kinds of opportunities for corruption to flourish.

  And while shooting, you need to hire a social censor to babysit your shoot to make sure you’re not filming anything “immoral” or “anti-Islamic.” I was, however, told it was a typical practice to pay the censor not to show up. Or more accurately, whether he shows up is his own business, but you have to pay him anyway. I never saw the censor who was supposed to oversee Jumper.

  The Egyptian Air Force offered us a very old large Soviet helicopter. I wanted to try to rent an American aircraft from any local Egyptian charter company. I found a charter company called Petroleum Air Services. I went in for a meeting. The head of the company was a retired Air Force general who, much to my amusement, looked like a taller, younger, handsomer movie-star version of the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. The general told me that he had retired two years prior as chief of staff of the Egyptian Air Force. President Mubarak had also been chief of staff. I was about to make a presentation to the general when he stopped me and joked, “I’m really just a figurehead here. Let me bring in my number-two man who really runs the company.”

  I explained to both men what I wanted to do, and they were sympathetic, but they still refused to rent me a helicopter on their assumption that the Egyptian Air Force would want to control any helicopter flight over the nation’s most iconic of antiquities. They did tell me about their company and gave me brochures that listed a very large number of aircraft for a charter company. Back in the States, that kind of company would own a couple of helicopters. They had about thirty. This company could transport men and equipment from Cairo International Airport to oil fields all over the Middle East.

  “How can you afford to have so many aircraft? Who owns this place?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’re owned by the American oil companies,” they answered. Of course, that made perfect sense. How better to gain access to the top of the Egyptian military elite than to hire a former chief of staff?

  The former Air Force commander was right. We would have to shoot from an Egyptian Air Force helicopter in order to fly it around the head of the Sphinx, and we would need the personal sign-off from the defense minister, Field Marshal Tantawi, chairman of the Supreme Military Council. And since we had to work with the Air Force, a military censor would have to look over our shoulders at every shot to make sure that we did not film any of the base we took off from or aircraft stationed there.

  After six weeks, we received all the permits that we needed to film except the signature of the defense minister. A week before our requested shoot date, we had given up on being able to shoot the shot. We wouldn’t have enough time to prepare. The next day Field Marshal Tantawi approved our application. Almost as portrayed in the novel, I went into overdrive to get ready.

  The SpaceCam, a rare and expensive gyrostablized camera that mounts on the front or side of a helicopter, is based in Los Angeles. Overnight, the cameramen had to prep, pack, and ship the seventeen cases to New York. There was no time to ship the cases to Egypt as airfreight, so I had to fly with the seventeen massive pieces of luggage to Cairo International. With a wagon full of heavy black cases in tow, I followed my Egyptian/American friends with the Jewish accents from Great Neck up to the customs desk. The customs inspectors confiscated the SpaceCam.

  A young woman from the Press Ministry was there with a letter of authorization to help me clear customs. Vociferously, she argued for customs to return the SpaceCam, but to no avail. The customs inspectors piled up the cases beside a storeroom of confiscated luggage under the watchful eye of a portrait of President Hosni Mubarak.

  I spent days trying to reclaim the SpaceCam. I waited on lines. I saw minor officials. I paid small fees to process applications in Arabic that I could not understand. A strange Kafkaesque bureaucracy had cropped up in Egypt. I saw vestiges of British colonialism mated with Soviet bureaucracy. Both systems had died, relegated to the ash heap of history, but somehow both had resurrected and recombined in Egypt due to the deep institutional and not so contradictory roots of colonialism and socialist Pan-Arabism that run deep into the modern Egyptian governmental psyche.

  My technical crew arrived from America. Our shoot date came and went without our camera. We bided our time and did what other work we could, taking still photos at the pyramids and in the vast sand dunes of the Western desert.

  During this time, I had one of the strangest meetings of my life. As recounted in the novel, I went to see the head of customs at Cairo International Airport, a general. I drank mint tea and waited in a chair in front of his desk for half an hour while an Egyptian soap opera droned in the background on an old Russian black-and-white TV. The general looked up from his paperwork from time to time and smiled at me. I smiled back; not a word was exchanged. After half an hour, he looked up and said, “Do you like George Bush?”

  Was he testing me? I didn’t want to give the wrong answer. I studied the man. The customs general sported a Saddam-style moustache. I wondered if he wanted me to insult Bush. But I didn’t think that was what he was looking for. After all, there was the ubiquitous portrait of President Hosni Mubarak right behind him on the wall.

  I thought hard for a moment and said: “I think Bush made a mistake going into Iraq, a big mistake.”

  The general smiled a wide and delighted smile. “You are good man. I give you your camera.” I knew I had come up with the perfect answer. Then he added: “Saddam is great man.”

  At that time, by 2005, Bush’s quick and easy invasion of Iraq had just devolved from a “Mission Accomplished” into the quagmire we’re still stuck in as I write these words a decade later. As a number of Egyptians told me, “What America does in Afghanistan is your own business, but Iraq is too close to us.” The image of Saddam dragged from a hole in the ground, unkempt and unshorn, mumbling to himself, may have planted a seed in the back of every Arab’s mind that an all-powerful strong man can be toppled. Saddam was, after all, simply human.

  The Iraq War stirred the Arab consciousness, and certainly stirred an Islamic reaction. That Saddam was gone may have excited other possibilities in other countries, but American troops, bombs, drones, raids, and the images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were all an affront to Arab and Islamic dignity. As I was told at Cairo University when I noticed hundreds of girls covering their hair with the hijab, the head scarf, but wearing very tight sexy jeans, “Before you invaded Iraq, five percent of the coeds wore the hijab, now ninety-five percent of
them do.”

  After my meeting with the customs general, I went down to customs and told them that their chief had said that I could have my camera. They didn’t know what to do. They kept me there for another three hours identifying every piece of equipment in every case on a manifest. I finished that process and still they wouldn’t give me the camera until, finally, a man came into the tiny storage room and handed the customs official a newspaper, presumably with some small tip for the customs inspectors tucked between the pages. Then, at last, they gave me my SpaceCam.

  In Egypt I learned that government baksheesh was systemic. By underpaying government bureaucrats and police, the social norm became that the government paid them to show up, but bribes paid them to do their jobs. If you couldn’t afford a bribe, you couldn’t get something done. For instance, a large enough bribe could secure a university degree, a practice that makes all degrees suspect and puts incompetent people into positions they are not qualified to fill. The result of this kind of activity is a general lowering of the standards of competence. When police live off bribes they soon become thieves, taking people’s money during a routine traffic stop or casual encounter. If someone complained, the police would beat them—in some notable cases, to death.

  Access to the regime is another form of corruption. If you had a friend who had a friend who knew the right official, you could get something done. If not, you couldn’t. Monopolies were created for friends of the president’s children. When entire industries can be controlled or dominated by cronies of the regime, no one will challenge them. As Ayn Rand said to Mike Wallace in 1959: business using government to prevent competition, “is the worst of all economic phenomenon.”

  Patronage is not new or unique to the Middle East. Before globalization, before the Industrial Revolution, patronage was the norm of economic organization. The tribe, the clan was everything. How far away or close to the leader one was determined wealth and social status. Efficiency and management science abhors bribery and is in conflict with ancient tribal systems of baksheesh. It simply adds an unnecessary cost to doing business in the Middle East.

  For most international companies, extensive bribery, often in violation of their own country’s laws, means becoming a lawbreaker, risking heavy fines, even jail time. Top oil companies have routinely paid multimillion-dollar fines for making illegal kickbacks in order to purchase oil. U.S. businessmen pay “fixers” who then bribe oil officials in these countries. High-profit businesses such as the oil industry will accept that risk as the price of doing business or hire foreign subcontractors who legally shield them from the risk. The ubiquitous baksheesh, however, gives an unfair advantage to those willing to be corrupt even as it places a burden upon them. This is, perhaps, the foremost reason that region hasn’t advanced as fast and as far as the industrialized world despite the vast oil revenues throughout the region.

  I had never thought about baksheesh before going to Egypt. I had no experience with bribery in the United States, not that it doesn’t occur here. We certainly have soft-core forms of bribery that everyone is familiar with: junkets, “swag,” “the red carpet treatment,” big donor political fund-raising, the “revolving door” between government regulators and the industries they are supposed to regulate, but retail bribery on a small scale for a government official to do their job was not something I had any experience with. Looking back on it, I was given many opportunities to pay a bribe. I was left alone for long stretches of time with various Egyptian officials in their offices, neither of us saying a word.

  We did have to reapply to Defense Minister Tantawi for another flight date around the head of the Sphinx. We were given another date a week later. If that expedited date was on account of any money changing hands, I never knew and never asked.

  We did fly our historic mission in three sorties over six hours. In each sortie, we would refuel and load our camera at the air force base adjacent to Cairo International Airport, fly over downtown Cairo to the Necropolis in Giza, and make two dozen passes orbiting the Sphinx. We tried several different flight paths, but the most successful, the one that ultimately ended up in the film, started low down in the valley near the Sphinx. We’d fly low just in front of it, then climb up passing the tops of the pyramids in a line.

  After our first sortie, we realized we were flying too high to get the shot in a good way and went to the squadron commander to complain. Our Egyptian producer yelled angrily until the commander consented to let the pilots fly lower. On our next sortie, the pilots flew so low that the helicopter, a massive Soviet Mi-17, about the size of a bus, kicked up a cyclone of dust. The tourists around the Sphinx below us fled in pandemonium as we cast an upside-down mushroom cloud of sand and dust in our downdraft. Inadvertently, we chased hundreds of tourists every which way as we climbed up to the plateau of Giza and the vast desert beyond. Tourists took cover in the bus parking lot, only to find themselves trapped between the buses as our 60 mph rotor wash blew a torrent of desert sandstorm into their faces.

  The following day, the Supreme Military Council forbade anyone to fly around the Sphinx in a helicopter ever again, but that shot orbiting the Sphinx became the centerpiece of the marketing of the film—on the poster, in the trailer, and in TV commercials.

  I returned to Egypt in 2009 to prep the Middle-Eastern shoot for the movie, Fair Game. Our movie told the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent who had been “outed” by Dick Cheney to punish her husband for revealing that Saddam Hussein was not building a nuclear bomb. This publicly contradicted the opposite claim by Bush in a State of the Union address, his justification to the American people for going to war in Iraq.

  In the three years since I’d last been to Egypt, I sensed a palpable mood change in the country. The Egyptians in the production company I was working with seemed impatient with the police and the minor officials we encountered on our trip to scout Cairo International Airport. Every time an official said no to a small request, the location manager argued and officials backed down. We were supposed to shoot at the University of Cairo on a Thursday. Our schedule was set. The actors Naomi Watts, who played Valerie Plame, and Sean Penn, who played her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, were on the way to Egypt when suddenly we were told that we couldn’t shoot. Fearing that some bribe would be asked for, I began to press the location manager, who had shot there many times before to find out what was going on.

  We were offered Friday, the day after, to shoot instead. No bribe was asked for. It seemed that Cairo University would have a special guest: President Obama was coming to the university to make an historic speech to the youth of the Arab world. Our movie could wait a day.

  Obama’s visit made an impression on the Egyptians we worked with. Obama was the complete antithesis of Bush, who himself was the son of a president. Bush had walked out of power voluntarily, a point that was not lost on the Egyptians. Their president, Hosni Mubarak, had been in power for almost thirty years.

  Over breakfast one day, I saw an item in the paper. In an effort to discourage corruption, the Egyptian government had raised the pay of every civil servant by ten percent. Then I saw another item in the paper about a man pulled over in his car by two policemen. They took his cell phone and a hundred and sixty-five Egyptian pounds, about thirty-five dollars. The next day the man went to the police station to complain. The day after that, the two policemen came to his apartment and threw him out his window to his death. The police were sentenced to two years in prison. I doubt they actually served that much time, if any.

  Due to disagreements well described in the novel, we switched production companies, not an easy thing to do in Egypt. The complex permitting procedure made that a nightmare and a “permitting fee” had to be paid to the crew guild to switch the permit over to the new production company.

  One of the strangest sensations I’ve ever had was on the night I had my final conversation with the original Egyptian producer. We had paid him a large amount of money that had not yet been spent on the film. I aske
d for a meeting to demand the money back. He refused to meet me in his office, which we had always done before. I wondered why. He insisted that we meet out at his country club late at night where we could sit under the watchful eye of an armed guard at the front door and a night porter who could witness us together. He would only sit in sight of this guard.

  He was nervous. He refused to return the money to the production, but he was very frightened. I realized that he was physically frightened of me. I believe that he was prepared for me to kidnap him or kill him over the money. Witnessing this fear was so bizarre to me. I’m one of the least threatening people I know. I’ve never even punched anyone in my life. Why was he afraid? Was it because I was American? Had Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. raids in the middle of the night, the extrajudicial killings, targeted assassinations, the drones in Yemen and Pakistan, and the mistakes, the dead civilians, women and children and parents in wedding parties and funerals, made me a source of terror? Had the War on Terror made me an object of fear? I believe so.

  This novel is based on personal experiences, but it is a fictional account. I had no affairs with coworkers or Egyptian revolutionaries. No one was murdered because of the movies I made. The revolution did not interrupt our filming. The hope of the Arab Spring in Egypt was a great source of inspiration and the spark that rekindled my memories of doing business in Cairo that led me to write this story in the first place.

  You can taste fear when you see it, smell it even. For me it was an intoxicating moment, but one to back away from, for sure. Yet, I can now see how seductive it becomes, when one is presented with the easy temptation to solve a problem by paying money to a pesky policeman or a customs official or even a general, whether it’s simply to get an official to just do his job on time, or to make some troublesome person disappear.