ELY BLOGS: A ballad for the birds

The scene looked straight out of a gangster flick. The men in suits and greased hair cradle drinks in one hand and cigarettes in the other, filling the chandelier-lit room with heavy smoke and light banter. The objects of their desire, the women, are all prim and poised, suggesting a different, forgotten era.
 
There is a hush as a group of men arrive. They are obviously armed underneath their coats. Everyone knows who they are. Or rather who their leader is. It’s not clear whether he’s feared or loved, but he and his lady get their own table and when they get up to dance he instructs the band to play him a special song.
 
The band obliges, cutting off the current song and deftly segueing into a slower number, as if they’ve done this a hundred times before. As the strains of delicate guitar plucking and a lulling backbeat engulf the room, the pair moves to the middle of the now-deserted dance floor, and the man nods in approval at the singer’s rendition. Asiong Salonga is pleased. This really was a gangster flick.
 
No budget, no script and a strip club called Bartolina

Prior to working with Tikoy Aguiluz on “Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story,” I had already collaborated with the controversial (a compliment) director twice. The first was when he produced—and just maybe coaxed me into doing—my own short film and the second was during the Final Set.
 
We shot the zero-budget, script-less short film in Aurora Boulevard, very near the BMG offices where I used to work, from sundown to sunrise, hidden in the shadows as we filmed people on the street.
 
During a break, Tikoy and I sneaked into this strip club with the evocative name, Bartolina. I was apprehensive and embarrassed at first, lest I get recognized, but then I could see in the hard-boiled director’s eyes that he meant business.
 
Then I understood why the he brought me there. I was being schooled, and not on the subtleties of stripping. In order to film the street, I should walk the street.
 
Tikoy and ‘the coolest night of my life’

A few weeks later, I would experience one of the coolest nights of my life: the premiere of my short film. It was a free outdoor film festival masterminded by Tikoy along the Marikina riverbanks. As the crowd in their slippers and shorts sat mesmerized by the projected images unfolding before them, I realized that one of my long forgotten dreams had already come true. I was a bonafide filmmaker.
 
After an aborted documentary on the making of the Final Set I did not hear from Tikoy Aguiluz again until late last year when I got a call from him and we had lunch at Pancake House in BF Parañaque, where we both lived.
 
While I was eating my cheese waffle, he filled me in on his new project, a gangster movie about Asiong Salonga. He was fired up, as any director in his position would be. It was not hard to buy into his excitement, as I missed Pinoy action movies much like he did. There was one awesome stuff after another—a period film in black and white, a tour of the international festival circuit (hello, Cannes!) in the works, and yes, lots of gunfights in slow motion.
 
Putting together a band for ‘Asiong’

Then he told me about the song "La Paloma." It was his idea to record a version of this 400-year-old Spanish folk song. According to him, it was Asiong's favorite song. Naturally, it would make a great movie theme.
 
We also discussed some ideas for the score. I imagined it to be a cocktail of old music true to the period like rhythm and blues and rockabilly and classic Hollywood soundtracks. I was heavily into Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores so I made him listen to some tracks off Danger Mouse's "Rome" album. He loved it.
 
While verbally committing to the production’s rigid time frame, at the back of my mind I was already in the process of putting together the band. I had recently done something with Hilera, just about the only young band out there with the chops and musical awareness required to pull off this particular sound convincingly so they were my first and only choice. There was no doubt in my mind that it would all click.
 
There was one other gunslinger I wanted in my posse and it was Nitoy Adriano, ex-guitarist of the Jerks. One of the most tasteful blues players I know—he just knew what to play and when to play it—I was itching to work with him again.
 
We cut a demo at my place, the arrangement patterned after Elvis Presley's "No More," one of the most well-known versions of "La Paloma."
 
The band was complete and the song rehearsed, but the producers still did not have a recording date for us. Instead, we got a call for a shooting date: September 8 at the Las Casas Filipinas de Azucar (a sort of heaven for restored Spanish era houses) in Bataan.
 
What went wrong

Tikoy had already expressed his desire for the band to have a cameo in the film during a “pivotal” dancing sequence, but due to the production’s scheduling problems everyone hardly had time to prepare. In the end, I was less than thrilled with the results of the live, on-set recording. It was barely mixed, with my vocals way up front and the band practically inaudible. Before I knew it, “La Paloma” and its music video was already online.
 
I wasn’t fazed. I was still very much interested in scoring the movie and Tikoy, of course, shared my enthusiasm. With the Metro Manila Film Festival just a few weeks away, I finally got my hands on the director’s rough cut of the movie.
 
Even as I was prepping for the score, there were rumblings from Tikoy, signs of a storm brewing. He told me that the producers balked at my fee, which I am certain was quite reasonable. Up to the very end, we were both determined to finish what we started.
 
At that point I was already willing to do it for free. With the release date looming, I told Tikoy, “We can still do it. Come to my place, I’ll have my guitar player sit down with us and we’ll hammer out the score in one day.”
 
He agreed, but I did not hear from him again until the movie had already premiered, when he asked for his director’s cut DVD back. Of course, by then, Tikoy Aguiluz’s sweet Pinoy Noir project which had given him so much joy and pride had, almost overnight, turned irredeemably sour.
 
Cut to: Tondo/Exterior/Day. It is a scene straight out of a gangster flick. Two warring factions with opposing points of view resort to the final solution: obliterate each other with bullets. Amid the din of gunfire and screaming, the strains of an English pop song can be heard. “It’s a very, very...maaaaaad woooooorld.”
 
Indeed.
 
Ely Buendia has written for The Manila Bulletin and Esquire. He is the frontman of the rock band Pupil and co-author of “Against the Light: A Pupil Tour Diary” available now. His blog posts appear on OMG! Y! Rocks every week.

Read Ely Buendia's previous blog post:Sounds Family