A little-known made-in-Singapore film has seized the imagination of some of Hollywood’s greatest minds over the years.
Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino owns a 35mm copy of it and once raved that the film could be an Oscar contender if it is released today by an industry heavyweight such as Miramax.
Citizen Kane director Orson Welles had once been in the frame to direct it, having in mind no less a star than Jack Nicholson to tackle the lead role.
In the end, it was American B-movie king Roger Corman – along with Playboy Enterprises – who bankrolled director Peter Bogdanovich’s little-seen 1979 film Saint Jack.
The movie’s circuitous route to the screen and infamy as a once banned film here has been chronicled in a new book by Singapore-based author Ben Slater.
And yesterday, the Media Development Authority (MDA) revealed to Today that the film can now be screened/distributed commercially under the Mature 18 rating.
The news couldn’t have come at a better time for Slater, whose book, Kinda Hot, hits the stores this weekend.
In it, Slater delves into the details of the US$1 million ($1.6 million) film’s location shoot in Singapore in 1978 and attempts to unravel the lingering mystery surrounding its blacklisting in 1980.
Critic-turned-director Bogdanovich, who made the 1971 classic The Last Picture Show and romanced its then unknown 19-year-old star Cybill Shepherd, is notorious for having made the film under false pretences.
Though he had set out from the beginning to make a big-screen adaptation of Paul Theroux’s 1973 novel Saint Jack, Bogdanovich told the local authorities that he was directing a sentimental boy-chases-girl adventure called Jack of Hearts for fear of being denied permission to shoot the film.
Saint Jack was subsequently banned and was approved for a public screening only once, as part of the Singapore International Film Festival in 1997.
Did the authorities know that Bogdanovich and company were not making the movie they claimed to be filming?
That it was actually Saint Jack, ostensibly an anti-Vietnam movie that was also designed to expose the seamier side of 1970s Singapore, then an R&R destination for United States soldiers fresh from the Vietnam War, replete with pimps, prostitutes, gangsters and transvestites?
That is perhaps the most intriguing question posed in Kinda Hot, whose title echoes a catch-phrase spouted by Saint Jack’s pimp protagonist Jack Flowers, the role intended for Nicholson that eventually went to Ben Gazzara.
“Personally, I like the ambiguity of ‘Did they, or didn’t they,'” said first-time author Slater, referring to the contentious issue of “Who knew what and when?” that dates back to a time even before Saint Jack was released.
In Sept 1978, two months after shooting had wrapped, Singapore’s The New Nation afternoon newspaper carried a story based on an interview Bogdanovich had given the Los Angeles Times.
The title? “How I fooled them in Singapore”.
In the media, Bogdanovich appeared to be a cocky outsider who’d done a smash-and-grab film production in an exotic, yet conservative, island-state, and was gloating over the fact that he’d put one over Singapore.
Bogdanovich would live to regret this insinuation and wrote a letter of apology, parts of which were published in the press here.
But was his film’s cloak-and-dagger production as big a con as once had been imagined? Perhaps not.
According to Slater’s book, based on interviews with the film’s cast and crew, and documents such as memos and production reports, the movie was made under the watchful eye of Cisco auxiliary police officers, who were in-charge of security.
“Towards the end, I think the people knew what we were doing,” Bogdanovich told an American journalist in 1978.
His French producer Pierre Cottrell (who incidentally translated the dialogue in Eric Khoo’s Be With Me into French for subtitling) agreed: “It’s impossible that the Government didn’t know,” he told Slater.
What’s more, the production team had hired the firm Rodyk and Davison as legal counsel, and the lawyer assigned to the case was none other than David Marshall, the former first Chief Minister of Singapore.
According to the book, Marshall probably believed his film-maker clients were being closely watched. Wary of surveillance, Marshall is said to have informed the office cleaning lady to vacuum during all his meetings with the Saint Jack crew.
Wherever the truth may lie, Slater aims to draw attention to Saint Jack through his book and through future public screenings of a film that he sees as a priceless record of Singapore in the 1970s.
It’s a sentiment Bogdanovich evidently shares.
In notes he penned on the film’s shooting script, the director said: “Singapore is in the progress business, and almost any place we’ve shot just won’t be here in 1980.”
“It was inevitable that there would be change,” said the UK-born Slater, who has made Singapore his home since 2002 and is married to a Singaporean.
“But it happened so fast, and it’s kind of sad. I’m sure there were good reasons for change, but it sort of drains the life out of the country.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive visual account of the country in film vaults and archives.
The film features scenes of Bugis Street – at the time a food paradise that was also a happy hunting ground for prostitutes and transvestites.
And similarly, it portrays bygone-era images of Clarke Quay, Boat Quay, Chinatown and the now-defunct Bidadari Cemetery.
It is also a showcase of Singapore’s people: Many of the actors who were involved in the film were amateurs practically plucked off the streets.
For them, Slater reasoned, being involved in the movie was a key event in their lives, a brief excursion into show business.
In researching his book, Slater found that for some, the film is a source of pride, even if many of them have never seen the completed version.
Probably, the most famous among the local cast was Monika Subramaniam, the female lead who once turned down a US$10,000 offer from Playboy to pose nude.
One of the accusations against Bogdanovich and the rest of the production team was that they had ridden into town and simply exploited the Singaporean cast and crew.
However, Slater didn’t find anyone among the Singaporeans who appeared in the film who echoed this sentiment.
Singaporean actor Noel Joseph even admitted that it would have been nice if the movie had become a hit, so he could have “basked in the limelight for just a little while”.
But in the end, acting in the movie “was a personal thing and I don’t think it was enough to boast or brag about,” he told Slater. “Anyway, nobody saw it.”
That’s something Slater is also keen to change: He hopes to screen Saint Jack in Singapore again in the near future.
Although an estimated 1,000 people turned up for the film’s sold-out 1997 screening at Chinatown’s Majestic cinema as part of the Singapore Film Festival, Saint Jack has not been shown since and is only available on DVD in the US and Australia.
Saint Jack was disallowed before the introduction of a film classification system in Singapore.
“After the film classification system was introduced in 1991, the film was re-submitted and classified R(A) in 1998 for screening at the Singapore International Film Festival,” said Cassandra Tay, director of Communications, MDA.
“With the latest revision of the film classification system in March two years ago when a Mature 18 rating was introduced, the Board of Film Censors reclassified the title Mature 18 due to its scenes of nudity. Hence, it can be screened/distributed commercially with the approved rating.”
Estatic at the news, Slater said such a screening would bring a sense of closure for many of the Singaporeans who took part in its production, but never saw the finished product.
It would also afford Singaporeans another chance to see a film that was made in Singapore, about Singapore, and once banned in Singapore. – TODAY /dt
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