Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  ‘Sound ready?’ I finally called to Massood.

  He looked at me for a long moment before replacing his headphones and lifting his boom microphone above his head. ‘Sound ready,’ he replied. Farrukh turned to me and nodded.

  ‘Camera ready?’ he yelled as the actors hurried back to their starting positions.

  I would like to say that it was all slightly surreal but, after ten months in Afghanistan, it was just another day at the office.

  Helmut’s critique of episode one was typically effusive. In an email that Helmut requested I forward to the entire team he waxed enthusiastic about the ‘200% improvement in production values’, the ‘excellent, awesome’ job we had done, and his feelings that the offering was ‘very, very, very close to European standards’. And in a subsequent meeting he presented us with a huge, cream-covered cake to thank us for all our hard work. Even Hamid had to admit that for a ‘fucking idiot foreigner’, Helmut wasn’t such a bad bloke after all.

  We had just completed sixty shooting days on a new series called Eagle Four, working six-day weeks. Thirty of those days fell during Ramadan and all of them in the height of summer, and we still had twelve days of filming left to go. We were shooting at fifty-three different locations and the scripts included seventy-eight main characters.

  It was September 2010 and we were in the final stretch. Then, with just two weeks to go until we presented episode one of the thirteen-part series to our client (a foreign embassy), the machine it was being edited on crashed. And after five days of tinkering, IT finally admitted to me that they had no idea how to fix it.

  Some consultants from Dubai were flying in that very day to sort out the problem but I could barely rally a smile let alone the ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’ that the head of the IT department felt this announcement so justly deserved. Exhaustion had rendered me quite numb, while months of overcoming constant obstacles to get the show made had blessed me with an air of equanimity that was apparently a little unnerving.

  Eagle Four was the biggest television drama production ever mounted in Afghanistan. The client was funding us to create a series that portrayed the Afghan National Police as professional, hardworking and honest. It was an incredible stretch—the ANP were regarded by most of the population as corrupt drug-taking thugs—but we would be paid well for this particular piece of propaganda (at least by Afghan standards) so we had been instructed to pull out all stops to impress.

  Our original brief was to make an Afghan 24, at the time the most popular series in the country—a dubbed version of the American show was the highest rating program on our Dari-language channel. But I knew that we couldn’t do it alone. We had stumbled our way through our first action series, Salam, which had become the most successful show ever aired on our Pashto-language channel, but this was taking it to a whole new level. I would still have most of my Salam crew; regrettably Sidique had moved to sales and marketing, but the wonderful, reliable Aleem was still with me. However, Paul and Jose had finished up at the company in late 2009 with Tiggy following them out just a few months later, so, in terms of expats, I was now it.

  On assurances from both my CEO and head of business development that money wasn’t an issue, I decided to ask two mates from Australia to come across and help mentor the team. Muffy, my business partner in Australia, was producing corporate videos and music clips while continuing to pitch show ideas for our production company. Lynchy had just finished directing a comedy series for an Australian broadcaster and was looking for his next gig.

  But, despite both of them sending me off to Afghanistan with love and excitement and their confidence that it would all be okay, they were strangely reluctant to take the leap themselves. However, after they had received my confirmation that, yes, there was alcohol in Afghanistan and absorbed the fact that I was indisputably still alive and kicking after almost a year in a war zone, they both decided to get on board.

  They turned up just as my energy levels and enthusiasm were beginning to wane. The responsibility of producing Salam had been enormous, and the complexities and complications inherent in making television in Afghanistan had sobered me considerably. The long, difficult shoot had also taken a toll on my health and I had welcomed in 2010 languishing in my bed for two weeks, recovering from a mild bout of typhoid, a chest infection and six different stomach bacterias. After delivering her diagnosis, the doctor glibly added that I was merely suffering from ailments that most Afghans are commonly forced to endure.

  I’d flown out to Dubai to meet them in mid-February and the reunion was bliss. As we sat around in an upmarket bar on our first night together, drinking fine wine and smoking shisha, Lynchy exclaimed that this wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined. I was tempted to let him live with the illusion that this was Afghanistan all over but, instead, gently reminded him that we weren’t quite there yet and that he might notice a couple of minor differences between Kabul and Dubai.

  The subsequent flight into the Ghan had been a bumpy affair; as the glorious, snow-capped mountains gave way to the muddy, brown cloak of the city, Muffy and Lynchy tightly gripped each other’s hands. It was interesting to watch the shock set in: as they took in the spectacle of Kabul International Airport (a big tin shed), palmed off the persistent, pushy baggage handlers, and later gaped from the car windows at the sandal-shod Afghans standing ankle-deep in snow, I started to feel a little guilty.

  Their arrival at our guest house did nothing to dispel their bewilderment. At the time I was living at The Diana or, as it was commonly known without a trace of affection, The Dirty Diana. It was a rundown, drab hovel and newcomers had been known to arrive and check out again within the space of twenty minutes.

  Despite meals being part of the package, I never ate there. I had a personal policy of not eating meat if I couldn’t tell what it actually was, so dinner was definitely off limits. Catching the chef one day picking a winner from his nose and wiping it on his apron just reaffirmed my stance on that particular matter. Even breakfast—a couple of hunks of bread and a pot of jam—ultimately made my personal black list. It was delivered each day by a sweet, meek chap who refused to knock before entering my room and had a continuously weeping eye. Everyone at the guest house had chipped in at one stage to send him to a proper doctor, but his eye never seemed to improve and the thought that he might be handling my food each day somewhat turned me off my morning meal.

  Women could never venture out of their rooms unless completely covered for fear of offending the mostly male, Muslim staff. The only upside was that it made me cut back on smoking because having to fully dress every time I stepped out into the garden for a fag became a tiresome exercise.

  In the end we finally convinced our company to allow us to relocate after around ten grand’s worth of gear—phones, cameras and iPods—mysteriously vanished from our rooms over the course of a fortnight. It took us a while to twig to the fact that our stuff had actually been stolen because everyone individually struggled to recall whether they had taken their camera out at that bar, or used their phone to call a car at that particular party. When the realisation collectively hit us, made definite by the fact that I had been on leave and couldn’t have possibly left my Afghan phone anywhere else but in my room, I stormed up to the owner of the guest house and threatened to call the police.

  He simply smirked and nodded his head, before offering to call them for me. I realised then that he had us. Our rooms were stacked with duty-free booze and the attending police officer would no doubt turn out to be the guest-house owner’s cousin anyway.

  But all that was in the future at the time Muffy and Lynchy settled into their rooms at The Dirty Diana early in 2010. After taking in their new home, they were close to catatonic, so I quickly steered them down the ice-slicked road towards The Den, imagining that a night at my local, surrounded by my friends, would lift their flagging spirits. However, Lynchy stepped into the sewage trench outside The Den just as we were entering and instantly gagged at the toxic mix coating his lower leg.
And, despite it being winter and dreadfully cold, he was forced to hobble around all night with one bare foot while his boot and sock dried near the gas heater.

  When we finally hit the office the following day, all the shock had been shaken out of them and they were only mildly perturbed by the prospect of four people sharing an office the size of your average toilet cubicle. There was talk at one stage of the three of us moving into the office next door but, when Raouf began insisting that we cut a hole in the wall so we could continue to include him in our conversations, I thought it best that we all pile in together.

  Raouf was happy to have some new friends to practise his English on, and was particularly taken with Muffy. ‘Muffy very nice girl. She very good girl. Muffy very beautiful girl,’ he purred.

  I should have counselled him to cool his jets but, instead, I tantalised him by joking that she was on the hunt for a husband and that I was certain she wouldn’t mind sharing that special someone with another wife. When, a week later, he presented her with a lapis ring, I was forced to do a fair bit of backpedalling; while crushed by the news that she was neither on the market nor willing to convert to Islam, he was content enough to sit and breathe the same air as this bewitching, nubile westerner.

  By that stage, my long-distance relationship with Nick was starting to crumble and, having only just welcomed Muffy and Lynchy into the fold, I was forced to abandon them soon afterwards while I flew home to Sydney for an emergency patch-up job.

  There was a bomb attack the morning after I left, followed by an earthquake two days later. By the time I returned in mid-March, Muffy and Lynchy had experienced being in a lockdown (from which they had snuck out, to go party); they had foolishly sampled the food at The Diana, ensuring a good few days of diarrhoea; and handled a gun (courtesy of a drunk security contractor they met at The Den); and Muffy had taken a stack on the ice. All of that, together with Lynchy’s sewage-trench slip-up, had effectively ticked every box on Kabul’s initiation to-do list.

  Pre-production was now in full swing. While Lynchy worked with Hamid plotting out the scripts, Muffy despaired at our lack of resources and skilled crew for a show that we were told needed to be up to ‘western standards’. Our client wanted to see as much bang for their buck as possible and, if the show proved as popular as we hoped, it would be reaching an audience of anywhere up to thirteen million people. Muffy was endlessly on Skype, consulting with contacts back home regarding lights and cameras and sound gear, and finally presented management with a modest wish list that made their collective heads spin.

  It took weeks of negotiating before a compromise was reached. We could maybe lose a light, but not the radio mikes . . . The cheap sound mixer from China would probably suffice . . . If we had to choose between lenses, we’d take the long over the wide. It was with a great sense of relief that we finally handed over the order to Jalal, the Afghan–American head of technical services.

  Finding a location for the whiz-bang headquarters of our imaginary elite commando unit was equally challenging. There were no sound studios in Kabul, so we had to find ourselves a suitable house in a relatively quiet spot that would accommodate a set with multiple locations, plus a make-up room, kitchen, wardrobe department and living quarters for our actual guards and one of our lead actors.

  All up, thirty-eight houses were inspected and most of them were deemed unworthy at a cursory glance. One home, however, seemed ideal and Aleem and Muffy excitedly called me in to give it the final nod. We sent the procurement officer around the next day to negotiate a contract, but he returned empty handed, informing us that the owner didn’t want westerners anywhere near his place. We finally settled on a sprawling, two-storey house that was fortuitously close to the office.

  Meanwhile, Lynchy was having problems of his own. He and Sayed, the Afghan co-director, had begun casting for the show, searching for the three men and two women who would play the leads. It was the usual routine of running an ad on TV and radio calling for actors, but the resultant pickings were decidedly slim. Sifting through a huge pile of CVs, I wondered aloud whether being proficient in Excel bore any real relevance to the job at hand until some wit suggested that they could perhaps create their own call sheets.

  Around two hundred and fifty actors mugged, aped and hammed their way through their auditions, and Lynchy and Sayed were made to witness some appalling crimes against acting before they finally selected three outstanding male leads. Only five women auditioned to be on the show. One was a seasoned film actor and would prove perfect to play the older ‘Sumayah’. Three of them thought they were applying for a job in dubbing; one girl didn’t really know why she was there, but her cousin worked in the graphics department. The hunt for a young, competent, female actor, whose family would allow her to appear on television, grew typically desperate.

  Salvation came in the form of a sassy, twenty-something thespian who had grown up in Germany but had recently returned to Afghanistan to try her luck on local TV. She was comely and didn’t make a complete meal of her audition piece, but she wanted accommodation in an upmarket hotel, a personal driver and $30,000. Thirty grand was just under half our entire budget, and our counter-offer of a room in a lovely little place called The Diana, a taxi allowance and $400 per episode wasn’t well received. Once again Muffy had to don her negotiating cap to push it through.

  It also became apparent around this time that we needed an experienced director of photography. The cameras we had ordered would give us great pictures, but only if they were operated by people who actually knew how to use them. Our crew didn’t. And Lynchy wanted to adopt a fast-paced, fly-on-the-wall shooting style that was beyond our team’s experience. Muffy once again took to Skype, following up leads and interviewing potential candidates before we settled on an Australian guy, Damien, who had the CV, the skills and, most importantly, the laid-back demeanour required to work in our world.

  The hiring of a Hungarian sound engineer and an Indian assistant director completed the line-up, but, even with our expats, we still only had a production crew of seventeen people, who would have to work day and night for seventy-two days to make the thirteen-part series.

  There were still gaping holes in our team that we just didn’t have the money to fill. We had no set designer, wardrobe consultant, props buyer, continuity, runners . . . the list went on and on. Lynchy spent his nights assembling bombs and suicide vests, spray-painting plastic guns, and making up bottles of ‘blood’—a sticky concoction comprising strawberry syrup, caramel topping and red food colouring—while I was dispatched to Dubai to purchase furnishings for our set. Blinds, lamps and light fittings were all bubble-wrapped in my hotel room late at night before being lugged back to Kabul as overweight luggage.

  Our need for a first-rate make-up artist on the shoot brought to us Shakila, a high-spirited, fabulous Hazara woman. She had been with the company for years and could certainly do exceptional face and hair, but had no experience at all in special-effects make-up, so Muffy ordered in a kit from London and then downloaded how-to YouTube clips for Shakila to study. In the lead-up to the shoot, we all walked around the office looking like trauma victims, carrying evidence of bullet holes, burns and knife wounds as this talented and industrious young woman practised her craft.

  We were still waiting for the arrival of our equipment and beginning to get antsy. Our constant enquiries to Jalal about its whereabouts were always met with evasion: ‘You should check with finance’ . . . ‘Perhaps it is in Dubai’ . . . ‘There are always hold-ups in customs.’ It all seemed so very strange that finally Muffy and I strode into his office one day, determined not to leave without a definitive answer. The answer we got wasn’t pleasing; in fact, it made me choke back a smidgen of vomit. He hadn’t yet ordered the equipment as he was apparently waiting for approval from management.

  By this stage, the Dubai office had effectively morphed into the decision-making hub of Moby. In the early part of the year a whole host of expats had been hired; they had colon
ised finance, human resources and business development, from where they were now running the show, housed in a high-rise building in the UAE. With their focus firmly on new territories and ventures, they seldom drifted from the mother ship to make the trek to Kaboom Land and, if any of them did deign to pay us a visit, it was more often than not a single-day stay—literally, a first-plane-in, last-plane-out affair.

  For the Afghanistan mob, the Dubai factor had simply created a whole range of extra approval processes, covering everything from new hires to buying props, and at first we were a little unsure of our footing. ‘Passing the buck’ (already an entrenched practice in the company, if not the whole country) had now become a compulsion and we all initially spent an inordinate amount of time and energy simply covering arse. So, getting to the bottom of the equipment debacle was never going to be an easy task.

  Muffy and I spent the rest of that day stalking from office to office, trying to sort out the unspeakable mess, but ultimately we failed to discover where the process had gone pear-shaped or why Jalal had never bothered to chase it up. There were even suggestions that Muffy and I should have been chasing it up ourselves . . . who knows? However, by close of business, we at least had the go-ahead from Dubai to order in the gear. The best guesstimate we could squeeze out of Jalal was that it would be a five-week wait.

  We were due to begin shooting in three. Even though our funding came with a strict timeline, we were now left with no option other than to delay the shoot by a month. And, even with this delay, we still filmed the first three episodes in virtual darkness as we waited for the delivery of our lights.

  A week away from the new start date, our Indian assistant director called to tell Muffy that he had broken his leg in a bike accident and couldn’t make the shoot. He had found a replacement locally but, being fully across the prolonged visa process, we knew that his substitute was a good four weeks out from arriving. I would have to step into the role.