IT WAS a bit of a shock when I realized a week ago that, as of last Saturday, 20 years would have passed since the film director Lino Brocka died in a car crash on East Avenue in Quezon City. The awareness of his impending death anniversary came to me when I was reading a book—Filipino Directors Up Close: The Golden Years of Philippine Cinema, 1950-2010—that its author, Bibsy Carballo, had gifted me with some time ago. I had glossed over the date of his passing once or twice in the essay about him until it hit me that May 21, 1991 was almost exactly two decades ago.I was away when that happened. I had just finished my graduate studies in America and was about to come home (and I would within three weeks, just in time to catch the ashfall from Pinatubo). I can’t even remember who called me on the phone to tell me the terrible news. This was long before email and the Internet became as we know them today, long before cellphones and SMS.
Over the five years of my stay in the US, Lino had kept in touch by long-distance phone to give me jobs and to talk about projects. He had a habit of calling me from Manila without thinking about what time it was in Milwaukee, but that was all right. He loved to talk on the phone, so the bills must have been horrendous, but he kept me employed, knowing that I needed to make extra money for my family back home, since I could barely support myself with my teaching assistantship.
(Typically, on June 14, 1989, I would write him, by mail: “…. By the way, are you familiar with Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, which dealt with Filipino immigrants in California in the 30s? That was a great novel, and it's been one of my dreams to do a screen adaptation of it—maybe for TV, when we get the chance?... I know you'll want or need something more contemporary for this SF project, so I'll work on that. Give me another couple of weeks, unless you need it rush-rush. And I haven't forgotten the Toronto and post-Marcos things. As it is, this is all I plan on doing this summer (think of storylines, at least; Viva's final payment will be enough for me to live on, I think). I thought I was going to do another script for XXX, but it fell through because I couldn't, for the life of me, do just minor surgery on the script they sent me of XXX’s other radio serial; I don't exaggerate when I say that this is the worst movie script I have ever read—great for high camp, but of course they want it dead serious—more baby switches, lost mothers, etc.; I gave them a completely rewritten storyline, but they said they preferred to stick to the original, anyway, so I just said fine, whatever you wish, but I'd rather do something else....”)
We ended up doing about 14 movie projects together over his lifetime. Lino has nearly 70 movies in his filmography, and for most of those he relied on a stable of writers that came to include, most prominently, Pete Lacaba, Ricky Lee, and Joey Reyes (Mario O’Hara, Doy del Mundo, and Orlando Nadres, of course, also wrote memorable scripts for Brocka). Ricky and I would figure out years later that Pete got all the serious, pang-award assignments like Jaguar and Orapronobis because he was the slowest one among us, an accusation Pete has not disputed; Joey got the dramatically masalimuot projects like Adultery (Aida Macaraeg); Ricky and I got the scripting jobs that had to be finished within two to three weeks (working, mind you, on typewriters with onion skin and carbon paper, making cut-and-paste revisions nearly unthinkable). I wrote one script (1981’s Dalaga si Misis, Binata si Mister) so fast, in three days, on a schedule so tight that I didn’t even see the movie when it was done.
Today, when people ask me about Lino Brocka and what I did for him, I tell them, only half in jest, that I wrote the scripts for some of Lino’s most forgettable movies. You’d have to be a diehard Brocka or Pinoy movie fan to remember Burgis (1981) and Hello, Young Lovers (1981), our contribution to the Bagets genre. To be a little kinder on myself, I must say that I was privileged to write such blockbuster dramas and tearjerkers as Tahan Na, Empoy, Tahan (1977), Ina Ka ng Anak Mo (1979), and Maging Akin Ka Lamang (1987), as well as the small but lively comedy Inay (1977) and the politically charged Miguelito, Ang Batang Rebelde (1985). (Please don’t ask me about the movie titles, which will take another column to explain; the short answer is, producers provide the titles, sometimes even before anything else, as was the case with Hello, Young Lovers). In what would become something of a pattern, Lino would do two or three unabashedly commercial projects, so he could earn enough credits to do something more aesthetically or politically risky.
It was at PETA and its Raha Sulayman theater, where I’d cut my dramatic teeth in the early ‘70s, that I met Lino Brocka. He saw one of my plays, and invited me to write for his drama anthology on Channel 2, Lino Brocka Presents. (It proved to be a terrific training ground, even and especially for my subsequent fiction: when you need to work within one studio, within one day, with no more than two cameras and two sets, you learn dramatic economy well and quickly.) I got my break into the movies in 1977, when he asked me to develop a script for a project that would become Mananayaw (1978), with Chanda Romero; in the meanwhile, Tahan Na, Empoy (with Niño Muhlach) and Inay (with Alicia Vergel) got made first.
Lino was thoroughly professional—he discussed the storyline, the sequence treatment, and the script with you, but not overbearingly, giving you enough leeway to develop your own ideas; when he had to make changes to the script during the actual shooting, he told you about it, and told you why. But beyond his professionalism, he was kind and generous to a fault, making sure that everyone on the set—especially the lowest-paid workers—got their due, often dipping into his own pockets (never bulging to begin with) to give out loans to other artists and persons even needier than he was.
I would come to know and work with many other directors after Lino, and almost without exception, I found each one of them a different challenge, in a positive way. Today, many new, young directors have also emerged, especially on the “indie” scene, brimming with talent and energy (last April, during the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio, I had the pleasure of watching Khavn de la Cruz’s marvelous Son of God, which had even National Artist Bien Lumbera clapping after the screening). But as many claimants as there have been to his mantle, Lino Brocka remains unique in that combination of artistic vision and humanity that he possessed. His art was never just a means to glory, or a manifesto for a cause; it was a job he took on and performed diligently, knowing how many others depended on him for their economic and artistic survival.
(Photo of Lino Brocka courtesy of the Philippine Star.)