SHOVED by Herzog!

I'm a little bummed, gentle readers, not only because in a single week all my appliances went on the Fritz (a North Korean Electro-Magnetic-Pulse bomb?), including a new Samsung Washer, a standing fan, and my laptop hard drive. I'm bummed, like so many other naive computer users, because I hadn't backed it up properly. The drive failed with no warning; I left it on, went to get some tea in the kitchen and when I came back the screen said 'No OS detected' - worse than the 'blue screen of death', I didn't even have blue; my hard drive had just gone 'kerching' and left.

On the drive were some photos I'd taken from my recent trip to Bangkok - since I've been there twenty times almost, I hardly ever get any pictures worth the trouble of looking at. This time, however, was similar to my magical first trip to Bangkok 18 years ago. Back then, by chance, I was an extra on the set of Good Morning Vietnam. I had been in the right place in the right time, and had been able to meet and have a minute or two nearly alone with the great Robin Williams. This time, I got to act in a Werner Herzog film (Rescue Dawn) , and so, of course, I was holding my breath to see if I could meet the great director himself. Holding my breath, because the sort of on location shots that extras get to act in, are usually the kind of things relegated to assistant directors. So it might work out that I wouldn't even see the man from a distance.

I needn't have held my breath. Herzog was there, and before the extras were called up for our shot, he had us line up in our pilot outfits, sweating under the Pattaya sun, and shook each and every extras hand. This was extraordinary. I have been an extra for TV and movies maybe, oh, 10 or 15 times, and never, never, have I seen an extra receive any more acknowledgement than "You there! Move over there!"

He was a kindly man, and I took great pleasure in seizing his hand and reciting the cliche, "I'm a huge fan of your work" - at which he brightened, since on the set, Christian Bale (the star of the recent BATMAN BEGINS ) was stealing all the limelight - since he was also friendly and liked to hang out with the extras (in his makeup for the shot , scraggly beard, tattered clothing and all, he looked like somebody you could meet at a Koh Pangan Full Moon Party, or a junkie you would run into on Khao San Road).

Herzog didn't stop there, though. During the shots that we were in, he was in our midst, barking directions (in a nice way) and even shoving the crowd from behind (CAN YOU IMAGINE? I can tell my grandchildren I was SHOVED BY THE GREAT HERZOG! ). The high point came when, after giving orders to move one of the on-set speakers, a behemoth Public Adress speaker on a pillar stand, he ran over and grabbed the giant thing himself, nearly toppling it (it must have been at least 80 pounds) and started dragging it across the set while we all gaped at him, open mouthed. It wasn't so much the feeling that he was picky and wouldn't trust anyone on the set to 'do it right' - it's just that it was obvious to us that this man lacked any sort of feeling of superiority as a director, that there was no job beneath this man (I'm sure he would have been an extra, as did the assistant director at one point, if he had been the right age for the shot)

All in all, a great moment, and it nearly made up for the grueling 16 hours, the multiple takes that seemed identical (except for the actors flubbing their lines), and the heat aboard the ancient British aircraft carrier (it now belongs to the Thai Royal Navy), of which the assistant director said, "The good news is that they have air conditioning on the ship. The bad news is that it makes you sweat more than no air conditioning."

I had just purchased about five of his films from a pirate shop in Chetuchak market, so I felt guilty. I wanted to dig in my pockets, produce a 100 baht note and walk up to him and pay him his royalties directly. Now of course this is flawed logically, since I'd have to seek out the estate of Klaus Kinski, Bruno S., and so on, and pay them all 50 baht or whatever their share is - but it was an emotional response - I mean, I really like his movies, but at this point I'm totally unlikely to pay thirty or fourty bucks a pop (that's including postage to a non-Western country) plus risk losing it in the mail or to the customs guys (who reputedly have a preference for sports videos over art flicks), especially when I can browse in air-conditioned comfort in the Thai weekend market and pay 3 dollars a title.

Rather than get bogged down in the whole controversy over piracy and copyright and so-called intellectual property (which, the very word, presupposes the notion of a unique creation, a western construct invented by London Publishing houses in the 18th century and mistakenly supported by the Romantics) - rather than get all bogged down in that stuff, I just wished I could have walked up to the man and handed him my money, personally, directly - it would have been money well spent, if only we could somehow get around all the legal/societal taboos of such an act.