It was 1988 and my father was shooting “The Serpeant and the Rainbow” in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was a miserable shoot. At any given time most of the crew were sick with typhoid, dengue fever, or diphtheria. More than a third of the crew elected to leave the country early, forgoing the rest of their salary. Some got too sick to continue working; others couldn’t cope with the reality of daily Haitian life. A supporting actor left the country after seeing a half-exposed corpse. The rain had washed the soil from his shallow grave, revealing the dead young man buried in his baby-blue Sunday suit.
Others left for more personal reasons. The key grip, for instance, had a thing with a local beauty, who happened to be the daughter of a voodoo priest. One drunken night the happy couple was blessed by the old priest in a simple ceremony. There was much drinking and dancing and lovemaking. The next afternoon when the poor grip groggily came back to reality, his beloved informed him that they were now married and tied together for eternity. The grip went out of his mind and tried to break it off. The words “You’ll never escape me.” were the last he heard from her as he boarded the next plane back to Los Angeles. Upon arrival he got onto his motorcycle and was promptly run over by all 9 left wheels of a careless semi.
But my dad stuck it out, dealing with problems as best a young producer could. He replaced the crew with Haitian workers, and tried to keep everybody happy. Their time in Haiti was winding down, and they only had one large-scale scene to shoot before they could pack it up and finish in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic.
The aforementioned scene featured a true Haitian tradition. Thousands of Haitians parade from the city up, up, and deep into the mountains. The ceremony starts out looking very catholic, with people carrying shrines and flowers and great big blue Blessed Mothers. But as the thousands of singing families proceed deeper into the mountains, it slowly shifts to the other Haitian religion. Voodoo. The religion that came from Africa with the slaves and collided with the local Caribbean cults. In the mountains the Haitians dance and chant and beat on drums for hours and hours. The dancers become entranced, and then possessed by gods. Men eat coals and glass and stick needles into their eyes. Chickens are slaughtered and their blood is smeared on bare chests.
Wanting to capture this miraculous progression, the crew set up recruitment tables and budgeted for one thousand marchers. Each Haitian extra would be given a voucher, which they would turn in at the end of the day for five dollars. The vouchers ran out by the end of the morning.
Five dollars in Haiti was a big deal in 1988, when the average income was less than a hundred dollars per year. The extras told their friends about the financial opportunity, and those friends had told other friends, and by the next morning fifteen thousand extras showed up for the parade. They shot the scene, and it was very beautiful. But when it came time to pay up, and only one in fifteen extras had their vouchers, they got mad.
The Haitians started rioting, and suddenly there was a machete, shovel, pitchfork or lead pipe in every hand. The crew retreated to the police station and barricaded themselves in. There were only eighteen cops in the station, and they were terrified that if they used their weapons, everyone would be swarmed and slaughtered. My father used the phone to call the base production office and screamed above the cacophony outside to empty the movie vault and take the cash by helicopter to the police station. It was a good thing he called when he did, because the mob outside cut the phone line before he hung up. The rioters didn’t want the police to call the army; hundreds would probably die.
The mob was starting to break through the barred windows, so everyone hurried up to the roof. Just in time, the helicopter arrived flying low. The production coordinator dropped a duffel bag filled with fifty-eight thousand dollars to my father, who began throwing handfuls of money into the seething crowd that had completely surrounded the building. The rioters’ attention shifted from attacking the crew to attacking each other to get at the money. Slowly, very slowly the violent crowd began to disperse.