How do you Sing a Pore?
Anne Lynes Pebworth
THE COMMERCIAL
Because of its exotic flavor, many movie and television companies came to Singapore and we expatriate ladies seldom lost an opportunity to be extras when a cattle call went out. I only made one commercial and that experience was enough to last the rest of my life.
The film I was in was either a bona fide commercial or a scene in an X-rated movie. We were told it would run a minute in movie commercials and thirty seconds on television. I'll never know since it was for a Dutch brand of clove cigarettes and cigarette commercials are banned both in Singapore and the United States; we were told this epic was supposed to be shown in Europe and Japan. The principals in our little playlet -- the waiter, pretty leading lady and handsome leading man -- and film crew were from Great Britain, but the rest of us were recuited locally. The younger girls were made up to look like bar girls and we older expatriate types were supposed to represent tourists, making us feel like housemothers to a bevy of bimboes. It didn't help either to have one of the film crew tell us "tourists" to wear our most gaudy jewelry and look tacky so we'd look like typical tourists from Middle America. I said it for Midwesterners everywhere when I told him to bite his tongue.
The fronts of three shophouses on a quay (pronounced "key") along the Singapore River were decorated to represent a sleazy bar with the bar in the center and tables on either side. The more normal tourists (of which I was one) sat to the left, while on the right were characters straight out of Casablanca. How they ever dug up that many portly Sidney Greenstreets on the island is a mystery. For more atmosphere, and to create the effect of a market place, there were eight pushcarts of local produce and six crates of live chickens on the street by our tables. Of course we had to wear the same clothes every day. By the third day, the produce, chickens, and cast, were getting a bit ripe in the tropical heat.
Waiting to be filmed for anything has to be the most boring occupation there is. This is because something is always breaking down so hours are wasted waiting for the light to be right or whatever broke to be fixed. In our case it was the smoke machine. The smoke with sunlight filtering through gave a hazy effort to our bar set. When it worked, that is. Their machine gave so much trouble that on the second day of filming, the production crew borrowed a machine used by the Ministry of the Environment to spray the drainage ditches. This was unfortunate because there was still a residue of insecticide inside the machine so we ran out of the bar coughing and falling into the drainage ditch. Not terrific for a cigarette commercial. At both ends of the spectrum was the unflappable Peter Lorre character who continued playing his endless games of Solitaire while the tears streamed down his cheeks, to the very flappable rented bird in a cage who went bonkers every time the smoke blew through anyway. Finally, on the third day, relief came in the form of a machine flown in from Hong Kong.
We thought the crew would have had a much more interesting commercial if they had turned the camera around to face the street. For instance, there was a large barrel of rain water on the sidewalk by the shophouses in which the neighbors dipped to wash dishes, fruit, their hands, laundry, or themselves. One man stopped to wash his shirt and another man stripped to his undershorts and took a sponge bath.
At one of the tables on our side of the bar was a Chinese lady with two young girls. It seems she was the first wife of a man with four wives -- one of the girls was hers and the other belonged to one of her husband's other wives. After the crew had finished filming our side of the set, we spent the last afternoon playing Singapore Gin. Even that was altogether backward and weird, since the players seemed to make up their own rules as we played. The players were First Wife, "Peter," one of the Malay bar girls whom we suspected was a transvestite (as one of our "tacky" tourists remarked, "Would a woman have an Adam's apple like that?") and me. Now I know how Alice felt playing croquet with the Queen. At any moment, I expected one of the players to scream, "Off with her head."
A couple of months later, Tom and I had the opportunity of going to Tokyo for a couple of days. Obviously we didn't spend much time watching television, but we not only didn't see the commercial, but no trace of that brand of cigarettes either.
Hmmm...
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