Shooting the Sphinx (27 page)

 

AFTERWORD

I first went to Egypt in 2005 to shoot a helicopter shot of the Sphinx for the Hollywood action movie
Jumper
. I remember stepping off the plane behind an Egyptian/American family from Great Neck, Long Island: a mom, a dad, and their teenage daughter.

“I can't believe I'm in Egypt!” the teenager kept repeating in an accent as Jewish as any Bat Mitzvah girl from the Five Towns. “I can't believe I'm in Egypt!”

Neither could I.

“Wait, just wait till you drink the water from the Nile,” said the mother in the same Jewish accent. “Then you'll believe you're in Egypt.”

I remember that romantic feeling: I can't believe I'm in the Egypt of the pharaohs; the pyramids; the desert; the Nile; Ra, the Sun god; Osiris, the first mummy; Isis, the goddess of magic; the treasure of King Tut; Cleopatra, who had bewitched Mark Antony away from his allegiance to Caesar; the Sphinx's timeless riddle … but somehow I knew that my journey into that ancient mystical land would not be an easy one. It wasn't.

At this point in my filmmaking career, I had filmed in just one Middle-Eastern country: Israel. The Israelis seemed to have one guiding principle: Never ask for permission. Do whatever you set out to do until someone stops you. This, as I soon discovered, was not the Egyptian way.

Jumper,
the science fiction movie I was working on, told the story of a young man, played by Hayden Christensen, who could teleport, meaning “jump,” from place to place instantaneously.

Early in the story, he goes surfing on a huge “break” off the coast of Australia. To establish his “jumping” power for the audience, the script had him teleport from a surfboard on a massive wave in the Pacific Ocean to a beach chair perched on the head of the Sphinx.

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.