The only American film ever to be shot entirely on location in Singapore, ‘Saint Jack’ potentially represented an opportunity for Hollywood wünderkid Peter Bogdanovich to claw his way back to the top after a series of very public misfires. Bankrolled by B-movie legend Roger Corman and executive produced by Hugh Hefner, the film attracted top European technicians – including Dutch cameraman Robby Müller, fresh from a series of successful collaborations with Wim Wenders – to work alongside relatively inexperienced locals in an adaptation of Paul
Theroux’s novel about the Lion City’s pimps and prostitutes. Working for a fraction of his normal fee and placing great store in his belief that ‘every actor should risk his life once’, Ben Gazzara, whose career was also not in the best shape, lived up to his reputation for following the Method approach, immersing himself in the world of brothels and vice, all in preparation for his role as affable impresario Jack Flowers. Bogdanovich was happy to tag along in the name of ‘research’. Forced to work in secret so as not to arouse the suspicions of the ultra-conservative authorities, the filmmakers fashioned, against all odds, an authentic and effective portrait of a now much-changed city. The Singapore government promptly banned it.
For this auspicious debut, Ben Slater, a UK-born lecturer and curator now resident in Singapore, has tracked down everyone from chief crew members and lead actors to the humblest extras in order to uncover just what happened when Hollywood came to Singapore for five months in 1978. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny, ‘Kinda Hot’ ranks alongside Eleanor Coppola’s ‘Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Picture’ by Lillian Ross. At the end, Bogdanovich cracks: ‘It’s almost as crazy to make a book about it as it was to make the movie.’ Reading ‘Kinda Hot’ will have you saluting Slater’s attraction to wild endeavours.
