Foreword:

A Fly on the Wall

This book evolved out of jottings made both to amuse myself and to assist unreliable memory if I were ever called on to recount the story of filming Moscow Heat on location in Russia in 2003, as well as the events preceding its Moscow premiere a year later and its subsequent international release.
After expanding these notes into a longer form, I was surprised at how much the resulting narrative presented a study in contrasts. It was about the city observed as the capital of communism thirty years ago, and as it is now in its renewed capitalist incarnation, with my experience of the Soviet era set against that of contemporary times. It was about Russia as much as about Moscow.

Not least these pages highlight two ways of working that came into contact, and occasional conflict, in the lively arena of a movie set. Sparks were struck, sometimes producing merely noxious, obscuring smoke, but often an attractive, illuminating flame. American ways of filmmaking are contrasted with those of my Russian hosts, charting both where these differences converged to provide delightful fellowship and mutual understanding and where they diverged, causing misunderstandings and recriminations.

It’s also a comparison between myself as a young actor, out to conquer the world, making a beachhead at the Moscow Film Festival in 1973, and my later, perhaps wiser, self where every new role was placed in the larger context of accumulated experience.

My viewpoint was that of a privileged fly on the wall, for the most part feasting contentedly on the riches found in abundance and at other times buzzing indignantly when swatted by fate. Flies, at least, are renowned for their extraordinary vision, and I have tried to see as much as I could. With glimpses back to the turbulent past and forward to the uncertain future, I have set these observations in as wide a perspective as possible. Moscow Heat captures not only a fast-paced story but also a moment in time, although I realize that, as much as I have tried to bottle up this zeitgeist, much remains elusive or hidden in plain sight.

The book concerns both this particular film and my experience of movies in general, but I would like to think it might appeal as much to the student of human nature as to the cinephile.

Each film project encapsulates a brief lifetime, different from any that precedes it or any that will follow. It has a print of uniqueness as if, each time one goes before the camera, inherent genes are rearranged to produce something at the same time familiar, yet strikingly different.

This was certainly the case with Moscow Heat, an essentially Russian film made in English with a mixed cast and crew of natives and Americans, with a few other nationalities thrown in to enliven the already volatile mixture. Whenever I see it, the movie unleashes vivid memories of a damp summer when the world heaved a collective sigh of relief that it had so far survived the new threat of rogue nuclear terrorism—a key plot element of our film—and held its breath that this situation would persist and, if international understanding continued to evolve, actually improve.

Russia is still the mysterious enigma of Winston Churchill’s famous description, all the more puzzling as, on the surface, we all seem so similar. The arts, however, are one of the few things that we do have in common, where we speak the same language, albeit with charmingly different accents.

Today events in Russia are too important to be ignored. Once the czar coughed and only Russia caught a cold. Today the whole world is prey to infection. I hope at least that these accumulated observations will give some measure of illumination and, at the same time—what our film essentially aims to provide—entertainment.

Los Angeles
May 2005

Nobody Knows Anything
Paper is patient—you can put anything on it.
—RUSSIAN PROVERB

I heard it through the grapevine. Word of a feature film to be made in Russia, in English, began to filter through in the early summer of 2003. Called Moscow Heat, it was but one item on a list of movies slated for imminent production. “A retired diplomat and a police detective, seeking justice, pursue a gunrunner to Moscow,” a précis of the plot promisingly announced. “When the detective is wounded and the diplomat is arrested and assigned to a Russian policeman for deportation, he becomes an unlikely accomplice as they exact their revenge upon a black market arms dealer. Shooting from late July/early August in Moscow.”

Although warming immediately to this fish-out-of-water scenario, I harbored concerns about the grapevine’s reliability. In the early 1970s, for example, talk of a film version of the stage musical Cabaret was similarly bruited about London. I investigated, only to find that they were looking for a “Michael York type” for the Herr Issyvoo role! Asking my agent if he thought I could possibly pass as such an individual, my persistence was rewarded, as that film provided one of my happiest professional experiences.

In the case of the Russian movie, no such preconceived identity was requested, although the diplomat was specified as a Briton based in the United States. This made it even more appealing because it reflected my own experience of being raised in England but, for the past thirty years, living in Hollywood—or Gollywood, as the Russians style it, the delightful result of the foreign h sound being rendered as g.

A request to read the screenplay resulted in its eventual arrival bearing the handsome, historically charged double eagle logo of Czar Pictures. The fact that the production company was based in Moscow made the project even more alluring. The script brought with it a welcome whiff of foreign romance and travel, of adventure and discovery, with a heady overtone of vintage John le Carré. Opening any script for the first time is fraught with consequence. It could change one’s life—or it could merely be another unremarkable stop along one’s unpredictable career path.

A cursory perusal revealed a scenario that was strong on character as well as action. After a brief prelude in America, the bulk of the story took place in Moscow. A press release attached to the script elaborated further: “A criminal gang of weapons dealers in the US kills a policeman. His partner Rudy asks the father of the murdered cop—Roger Chambers, a retired British secret service agent—to help him find the killers, who are hiding in Russia. Disguised as tourists, the two of them take off for Russia.”

I must confess to being easily seduced by locations. Any movie that is set in foreign parts will send my pulse racing. As a result, I have filmed all over the world, relishing this peripatetic aspect of the work—even when stranded for months in some improbable, inhospitable place. I regard it as a privilege to know such countries as India, Australia, Brazil, and, yes, even the United States from being “on location.”

In this I am fortunate to be married to a wife, Pat, who shares the same enthusiasm for fresh fields and pastures new. She was the travel editor of Glamour magazine in that civilized interim before deregulation and international terror turned travel into a mass-marketed, sardine-canned endurance feat. I like to think my job has given her present work as a freelance fine art photographer an extra dimension and scope. Ever since we married in 1968, we have embraced this gadabout life. Our digs have included castles in Ireland, mansions in Texas, ryokans in Japan, boats in the Caribbean, and enough hotel rooms to make a Michelin Guide inspector giddy.
Not every actor feels this way. I recall our incredulity at a leading lady with whom I was once filming in India, who declined an invitation to accompany us to see the local sights. Her husband was being sent out with a movie camera, she explained, so that she could view them in comfort back home in England.

Russia has always exerted a strong appeal, and not just because I grew up in its ominous shadow during the Cold War. Fascinated as a schoolboy by our monolithic enemy, I briefly subscribed to a newspaper—no doubt freely distributed—that trumpeted the glorious Soviet achievements that were crowned by the world-encircling triumph of Sputnik. We heard the signal on our little transistor radios and feared the realization of something hitherto confined to our comic books—a conquest from space. Such paranoia was fed by reading the latest James Bond novel, From Russia with Love, where Ian Fleming’s debonair Englishman saves the world from unspeakable horrors dealt by his nemesis, SMERSH, the dreaded Soviet organ of vengeance.

A study of Russian literature engendered further curiosity about this passionate, complex people; my discovery of their theater and cinema only strengthened this attraction. The British have always revered Anton Chekhov as an unofficial countryman, just as Russians claim William Shakespeare as theirs. Charlie Chaplin, pioneering the same new medium, declared Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin to be the best film in the world, and it happened to be one of the first silent movies I ever saw.

Later I caught up with Eisenstein’s heroic epic about the warrior prince Alexander Nevsky, who coincidentally shared the same name as one of Moscow Heat’s Russian producers and lead actors. My window on the East was opened wider with such masterpieces as Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, and Grigori Kozintzev’s great film versions of Hamlet and King Lear. These last two were translated by Boris Pasternak; his Dr. Zhivago, both the epic novel and the Hollywood epic, also made an indelible impression.

So when I was first asked to visit Russia in 1971, the invitation, with its strange Cyrillic script and stamp, had a talismanic significance. There was no question of not accepting, even though my visit was inconvenient and rushed. I simply had to go. In the same way, I had traveled to apartheid-riven South Africa when it was unfashionable, nay unacceptable, to do so. I wanted to see it for myself rather than recycle conventional, secondhand truths. Now I had a similar powerful sense that in doing so, I was crossing a line to feast with enemies. Curiously, on arrival in Moscow, I experienced another overwhelming sensation—that of having been there before. Perhaps it is not without significance that I am frequently mistaken for being Russian. The English writer Alan Bennett once sent me a postcard of some Russian steelworkers in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century—and there I am staring out of it.

I have also filmed extensively in countries that were formerly part of the Communist bloc, such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The old Yugoslavia was a popular and inexpensive film location boasting a variety of scenery, although many considered working there the cinematic equivalent of being sent to the gulag. There was a mischievous myth among British actors during the 1970s that if cast in such a film, you could contact a Yugoslavs Anonymous hotline and be talked out of it!
There was also another story—this time true—about a film made in Russia with a large number of limey actors. Garrisoned in rather primitive circumstances on the remote steppe, they had their morale saved by one of the company who had been a prisoner of war in World War II. He organized them as if they were in a prison camp, with each inmate assigned specific duties, thereby establishing an esprit de corps that got everyone through until eventual liberation.

Although my family lacked immediate connections with Russia, apart from a Derbyshire ancestor, James Higginbottom, who gained fame in St. Petersburg as an engraver, I had the good fortune to meet several of its more interesting citizens. In particular, while filming The Taming of the Shrew in Rome in 1966, I was introduced to Rudolf Nureyev, then the wild boy darling of the ballet world, having made his famous “leap to the West” from Leningrad’s Kirov Company five years before. There was a superficial resemblance between us, and the following year, I was asked to return to Rome to audition for the role of a certain defecting Russian ballet dancer. This blatant exploitation of the Nureyev legend came to nothing—yet another among the ghostly legion of unmade film projects—and I was rather relieved. Decades later, Roger Vadim, himself of Russian extraction, asked me to play another equally charismatic artist. This time it was Ilya, a passionate musician who took as much pleasure in conducting love affairs as orchestras.

Instinct, as much as anything, plays a major role in the choice of roles. After all, there is no blueprint for an acting career, no set path through the jungle. The famous adage that in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything” has a disconcerting yet comforting ring of truth, so that the outcome of any venture (even stellar and expensive ones) is as much in doubt as the fate awaiting the most modest independent film. So, requesting my agent to pursue an offer for Moscow Heat, I left in mid-July for a few days in the redwood forests north of San Francisco, having been invited to stay in a cabin there with friends.

I spent the flight to Oakland reviewing the film script again, my initial positive reaction being confirmed. It had the potential to be more than the sum of its parts, and ideas for it, I found, were flowing freely. “Is that the new Austin Powers film?” the young girl sitting next to me inquired through a thicket of braces. It reminded me how the first script in this shagadelic saga had given little hint of its stupendous potential. But there had been something about it that made me sign on to play that other diplomatic Brit, Basil Exposition, and in this case instinct served me well.

Calling my agent from the airport, I learned of his reaction. Similarly impressed, he gave me the telephone number of the film’s director, Jeff Celentano, whom I agreed to call for further discussion. Then I drove over the Bay, through neat suburbs and up through vineyards and forests to enter the green fastness of redwood groves. Our encampment was by the Russian River, another good omen. Once there, cell phones became signal-less, so all further deal making was done through the occasional pay phone call. Being unable to leave a callback number, I rather hoped this involuntary hard-to-get tactic might raise any financial offer then being negotiated.
On my return to LA, I met with Jeff Celentano, who turned out to be a surfer as well as cineaste with a suitably laid-back demeanor. Some of his locations remained to be found, he revealed, but there was talk of being allowed to film in the Kremlin. John Aronson, a frequent collaborator, would again be his cinematographer, and Jeff gave me a copy of a recent film, Gunshy, to more fully appreciate their work.

Reluctantly curtailing our conversation, I left for an appointment in Hollywood, where a producer friend, Mace Neufeld, was receiving a star on the Walk of Fame. Mace, incidentally, was a veteran of the Russian campaign, having filmed The Saint there with Val Kilmer as recently as 1997. I hoped for a chance to get some practical advice. Perhaps propitiously, my phone rang in the middle of the ceremony, confirming that the proposed deal for my services was now agreed.
That evening Pat and I watched Gunshy and were impressed. The action sequences were exciting yet didn’t overwhelm the acting. Jeff was a former actor and probably knew from personal experience how to optimize performances. The film’s production values were far in excess of its modest $2 million budget, and John Aronson’s cinematography, in particular, was outstanding. All this boded well for Moscow Heat, the biggest independent film in Russian movie history, with a budget reputed to be around $10 million.

The following day a contract was finalized, replete with all the arcana peculiar to such documents—notably, size of billing, trailer, accommodation, and airline seat. “While on location in Russia,” the fine print stipulated, “Mr. York will attend a Press Conference, do at least 3 Television Shows and 3 interviews (magazines, newspapers, etc.).” Even though we would be filming in midsummer, and its relevance to the story was questionable, the comforting pledge was also made that there would be “no nudity or doubling for nudity.”

The only drawback was that the production company was asking for a two-week leeway for the start of filming. Pat had an important show opening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles on September 12, and I wanted to be there to support her. If we kept to the proposed start date of August 11, I could just make it back in time for the festivities.

As already mentioned, my cop co-star and also executive producer of the film was the autocratically named Alexander Nevsky. A famous bodybuilder and a former Mr. World, he had even written a book called How to Become a Schwarzenegger in Russia. Trading bulk for the boards, he had now followed his idol into the acting business. Looking him up on his website, I found not only several photographs, including one of him brandishing muscles and a gun outside the Moscow White House, but also some interesting personal details. For the past ten years he had pioneered a campaign to outlaw the use of steroids in sport. In addition, he had “four published books, a weekly radio show, a top-rated TV program and a PhD in Economics.” Now dividing his time between Moscow and Los Angeles, Alexander had already appeared in small roles in several American movies. On the other side of the critical fence, he was also a member of the influential Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the presenters of the Golden Globe Awards.

There was also a photo of his Moscow-based co-producer, Alexander Izotov, meeting with the speaker of the Duma, the Russian parliament. So these were not provincial nobodies cobbling together a project to launch their careers. They had already collaborated on a movie about bodybuilding, and Jeff confirmed that Alexander indeed had a compelling quality on screen. He was still hoping to start filming soon, which galvanized me into applying for the necessary visas from the Russian consulate in San Francisco, the only one west of the Mississippi.

Two days later, Jeff called with an upbeat progress report. Adrian Paul, who had starred in the Highlander TV series, was cast to play my doomed son. Moreover, the respected director Tony Leung, who was also chairman of the Hong Kong Stuntman’s Association, had agreed to choreograph the action sequences—to give them extra style, impact, and presence. I mentally added more laps to my daily workout in the pool. The big problem, Jeff reported, was that dealing with Moscow was a logistical nightmare. Because LA lagged eleven long hours behind, it meant staying up until the small hours of the morning in order to communicate with the Russian production office just as they started their day. We agreed to meet for lunch to discuss things further.

Over the inevitable pasta and Pellegrino, we talked about character and costume, motivation and method, and found ourselves in general agreement. We debated whether Roger Chambers, as a diplomat and an Englishman, would want to be armed, as per the script, and I resolved to try and work in a certain reluctance, reflecting as it did my own proclivities. The accessibility and profusion of guns in the United States, all justified by an antique clause in a colonial document written with a feather, is one of the things that truly scares me about living there. And yet American politicians wax indignant about the same weapons proliferating in other countries. Our own messy act, I suggest, requires cleaning up first.

Among other suggestions was that perhaps father and son could be quarreling at the outset. This is an old Shakespearean trick that the Bard used to grab an audience’s attention at the beginning and heighten energy. In our film it would also serve to make the son’s death more poignant and his father’s strong response more plausible. I thought there were too many male characters and too much testosterone—at least one of the Russian police officers, for example, could be played by a woman. Ray Bradbury, nattily dressed in shirt and tie on top of minuscule white shorts, was lunching nearby. “Tell them to send me the royalties they owe me!” he urged on discovering that we were Moscow bound.

The following day I contacted Robert Madrid, who was wearing three hats in this venture—writer, co-producer, and actor. Cast as Rudy, my son’s cop buddy, he sounded amiable and enthusiastic. When I discussed ideas for the script, he seemed receptive to many of them. He mentioned, however, that the Russians had already said nyet to my suggestion of a female cop because I would have to spike her drink with shampoo at a crucial point when escaping from police detention. This was deemed far too ungallant for my character!

Robert also reported that the Russians, in retaliation for the difficulties they were experiencing from the Americans in the post-9/11 climate, were apparently going slow on U.S. visa applications. And we were supposed to be leaving in a few days. Like Chekhov’s three sisters, I began to wonder if we would ever get to Moscow. But there was a thread of hope: Russian consulates abroad apparently had to live on their income from issuing visas, so sheer economics dictated that we would eventually obtain them sometime, somewhere.

For the next few days while recording a BBC radio play, I made innumerable phone calls to check the status of our documents. Despite this era of electronic immediacy, I eventually learned that approval had been dispatched by telex. It seemed incredible that such Cold War–era communication still existed. We were advised to cut our losses and reapply for our papers the following week in Stockholm, where I had long been scheduled to perform the Tennyson/
Strauss “Enoch Arden” in a recital en route to Moscow.

With the application of a little further exasperated pressure, it was conceded that they could be sent by mail. Eventually Robert kindly arranged for a courier to pick up the documents, which, like an old Soviet agent doing a spy drop, he then hand-delivered. This triumphant scene took place at a Beverly Hills dinner party, Robert having received the permits a scant hour before.

The next morning Pat and I rose before dawn to do all those things that had to be done before our afternoon departure. I habitually leave packing until the last moment to prevent dithering over choices. Seeing Pat’s carelessly crammed bags, I’m always amused to think that she once penned earnest columns in Glamour magazine about how a young lady correctly packed a suitcase. But now she was still preoccupied in selecting images to be digitally printed for her Academy exhibition. The continuing demands the show made meant that, sadly, she would not be able to stay long with me in Russia. We were still making arrangements by phone in the departure lounge before our 747 finally lumbered off to Europe, taking me back to Russia on the thirty-second anniversary of my first visit there.
En route, London greeted us with several days of unusually warm sunshine. We then flew on to Sweden for the performances, first at an arts festival amid the rocky

fjords of the west coast, and then in sea-girt Stockholm. Here we received news that the film had been delayed a week. Where to go? What to do? A return to London was a possibility, except that England was now sweltering under the same intolerable 90-degree heat wave that seemed to be baking most of Europe. Staying put was an enticing option, as there was still so much of this Venice of the North to explore.

Eventually we decided to press on. The delay would provide an invaluable opportunity to get settled and start preparations. Besides, Pat was anxious to see a little more of Russia before returning to complete her exhibition. At Stockholm’s Arlanda airport there was perhaps a foretaste of things to come. Getting her return flight from Moscow delayed to maximize our time together, we confronted a stern lady Aeroflot agent who scrutinized Pat suspiciously as if she had just asked to bring a bomb on board. A notice prominent on the desk explained: “If we are not smiling, we are just working hard to make you smile!”

I once heard a rumor that Aeroflot had to instigate a “smile at the customer” campaign. Why is it that Russians are disinclined to smile? Is it the residue of some bygone order of Peter the Great, like his banning of beards, or the result of so many violent political swings? Or is it simply a component of their famous stoic fatalism? The reason lay waiting to be discovered.

Buying disposable cameras and other supplies, I little realized how ridiculously redundant this was, and what bounty awaited us at our destination. My most significant purchase, however, was a little notebook. I had a half-formed idea to keep an informal journal about the experience that lay ahead, anticipating that it would be memorable, challenging, and hopefully noteworthy.]