Shooting the Sphinx (28 page)
Read Shooting the Sphinx Online
Authors: Avram Noble Ludwig
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 filmâon 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 asked 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.
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A
VRAM
N
OBLE
L
UDWIG
is a film producer, a director, and a playwright. Born into a theatrical family, he has produced more than a dozen films and serves on the board of directors of the Actors Studio in New York.
Shooting the Sphinx
is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates
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CONTENTS
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
SHOOTING THE SPHINX
Copyright © 2016 by Avram Noble Ludwig
All rights reserved.
Cover photos by Bigstock @plus99 (sphinx) and @Vladimir Drozdin (helicopter)
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
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is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8113-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7798-6 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466877986
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First Edition: June 2016