By Andrew Leavold
The noonday Fort Ilocandia sun was blinding on the top of the sand dune. I squinted and adjusted the brim of my already-soaked safari helmet, looking to the rest of the Philippines like a wet, tubby Doctor Livingstone.
My co-producer Daniel Palisa, in his Arab-looking scarf less like a tattooed Sancho Panza than a Polish Lawrence of Arabia, snapped my photo on his iPhone. Dani was an old drinking buddy and karaoke crony from Brisbane, having worked as a prosthetics artist and late-night cult film programmer at the Brisbane International Film Festival. In January 2008 he bought a ticket to Manila to join the Weng Weng hunt, and since getting his boots muddy in Manila’s trenches, we’ve been co-conspirators on every project since.
Big Jim Gaines was at the bottom of the dune with hand against his beret surveying the cracked, dried mud and that summer’s vain attempt to make the desert come alive.
Much of Ilocos Norte, north-west corner of Luzon island and highest tip of the Philippine archipelago, is sand dunes as far as the eye can see. Cirio H. Santiago directed most of his post-apocalypse actioners – Stryker (1983), Wheels Of Fire (1985), Equalizer 2000 (1986) – here, and Jim, veteran of countless kung fu and ‘Namsploitation movies, recalled filming Eternal Fist (1992) with Cynthia Khan on this very spot. “It’s a lot greener than I remember,” he said, casting a critical eye over the sporadic shrubs and dried caribou pats dotting the landscape like one of Cirio’s forgotten landmines.
It was hot. Damned, chicken-loving hot. You could boil a balut in the steam under this safari hat.
The mobile ring cut through the steam. “Ma’am is waiting for you. She has prepared lunch for you.”
We would love to come. Yes, we’re JUST getting into our jeepney right now, I lied. We’ll be ten minutes, I lied. And with that, we stopped halfway down the dune for another photo op, without failing to notice the massive shadow Imelda Marcos casts to this day over Ilocos Norte.
Former President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda understood the seductive power of the moving image.
In their prime, the Marcoses were the closest to royalty Philippines has ever experienced: a glamorous couple who swept into power in 1965 to become the most exalted, feared and despised figures in Filipino history, surviving 21 years of political assassinations, a Communist uprising, a civil war in the Muslim South and the dark days of Martial Law, before a popular uprising and comparatively bloodless coup banished them to exile in Hawaii.
The Marcos regime was in fact a failed attempt at forging a dynasty closer in spirit to the Roman Emperors. They instinctively embraced the international currency of culture, from art, opera, ballet, to the more populist and debased form of cinema, and the magnificently gauche temples the Marcoses built perched upon Manila Bay – the Cultural Centre of the Philippines and Folk Arts Theater, the doomed and now haunted Manila Film Centre covered in cracks and the decay of a mere 32 years – will no doubt outlast their staunchest critics.
More than President and First Lady, they were emperor and empress, their names carved in letters much larger than any hand-painted movie billboard.
I wondered more than a few times how in hell I’d managed to find myself in Ilocos Norte. It all started when Imelda’s former press secretary Sol Vanzi forwarded my list of questions for approval. It was a mad idea to secure footage of Mrs Marcos talking about Weng Weng. Incredibly, Imelda agreed to talk. You may need to prepare to go to Ilocos Norte, Ms Vanzi warned, as Mrs Marcos is celebrating her 83rd birthday that weekend.
First night back in Manila, and Dani and I were taking turns refereeing at Ringside, Makati’s dwarf boxing-themed bar, til 3.30am. The call from Ms Vanzi came at 5. At that moment I had no idea what country I was in, let alone who Sol Vanzi and Imelda Marcos were.
Days later we’d gathered our small crew: Big Jim, of course, plus our old kumpadre from Brisbane, Roy Arabejo – his banjo reggae number “I Love Weng Weng” is in The Search For Weng Weng’s end credits – and my translator since the first trip, Nina Dandan Evangelista. We figured the best case scenario was an hour with Imelda, and hopefully a soundbite about Weng Weng. At worst, we’d at least have a trip to the Deep North and a new bar story about our failed interview with Philippine Royalty.
After an hour over Luzon’s mountain ranges, our twin-propeller commercial plane flew over the sand dunes into the tiny Laoag International Airport. Exiting the one room baggage claim and Customs area, Jim suggested we commandeer a jeepney for the two day visit. Cel, a humorous chap in his sixties, immediately agreed, and the five of us drove over the bridge into the dusty provincial capital, population just over 100,000, in the back of the jeepney in style. We hung a right at the Governor’s Capitol Building, where Imee Marcos is currently in residence, past the ornate fountains opposite, past a beautiful old 18th Century church tower, past the two-story shopping centres each selling the same Chinese plastics, and onto our $8 a night hotel – a hotel, I must add, that resembles a birthday cake from a diabetic six year old’s worst nightmares, slatted with ribs of mauve and pink frosting inside and out, and with front counter staff dangerously close to slipping into a sugar coma.
The evening passed quickly and, aside from a few drinks at a cockfighting-themed beer joint called The Cockhouse (egg cartons on the ceilings, Adele numbers from a seven-piece covers band on stage), uneventfully. With morning the oppressive Ilocos Norte heat forced us to bunker down in the faux Fifties’ Diner in the hotel’s basement, and wait for word from Imelda’s people.
Over the bottles of banana ketchup I recognised a lone figure at a nearby table. The Governor of Ilocos Norte was dining on burgers within a bottle’s toss of her office.
Brilliant as ever. Can’t wait to read the full book. The documentary was superb.