The making of Evita turned a country upside down. Is it any wonder Madonna and Alan Parker tried to stop CLAUDIA NYE exposing their shenanigans?
HOME sweet home. I was back in Argentina to make a documentary about Alan Parker’s Evita. It was a dream come true. Eva Peron was the most important woman in my country’s history – loved by the poor and despised by the rich – and Parker is one of my favourite film-makers. So I was touching the sky when Channel Four came up with the cash.
>From what the papers in England were saying, I had expected the Peronists to be outraged when I got there. But all I found was the largest press corps I had ever seen gathered around the parliament building, Parker’s first location and the place where Evita used to receive her “shirtless masses”, her descamisados. So this is what they called Hollywood hype. It didn’t bother me – I had come to make a film, preferably with Parker’s co-operation. And I was still looking for my story.
Just round the corner, at the Plaza de Mayo, dockers were on hunger strike. They had all got the sack after the latest privatisation, when the harbours had gone to the “Yankees”. Posters of Evita and Peron flew in the wind. I couldn’t understand why the dockers didn’t go to the parliament. At least they might get some exposure. “No, my friend,” said the leader. “Parker has brought us jobs. We are against Carlos Menem [the president].” He complained about the Peronist leader, who was undoing everything their old one had done.
Not even the Falklands war vets at the Malvinas memorial seemed to mind: “Evita lives in the struggle of the people, not in a Hollywood blockbuster,” said Jose Carrizo. “Anyway, I won’t be going to see the film.” His eyes had been blown out during that idiotic war.
But Hollywood seemed to be alive and well in the hearts of the kids gathered around the Hyatt Mansion hotel, screaming Madonna’s lyrics, which they did not understand. The hope that they would get a glimpse of their MTV idol seemed to sustain them day in, day out.
After a few wasted evenings sitting at the Plaza bar, Parker’s drinking place, I finally managed to intercept him. My commission was to get behind-the-scenes access. Denied. I told him I had watched Pink Floyd’s The Wall five times: it had meant so much to us in Argentina, for it was shown in the year democracy returned to our country. Parker rolled his eyes. I bit my tongue, trying to come up with the next thing to say. I had been naive to think he would even consider letting me in.
Giving it a last try, I quoted his own words at the press conference called to quell the furore that he’d created over Madonna playing Eva: “I’m an artist; please let me express myself. I haven’t come to denigrate your history.” He replied: ‘I don’t believe everything I say. Do you?” I swallowed hard and thanked him for his time, wondering what he did believe in. Without access to the shoot, I thought, I had no story to tell.
Not having been allowed on set, I went just- off-location to the huge corrals where we slaughter our sane cows. Parker had had a shanty town built and surrounded it with a high fence.
Unable to see or film anything, I ventured into the Hidden City, the real shanty town directly opposite the fake one, across Eva Peron Avenue – these are the kind of coincidences that Latin America has on offer. As I walked among the homes, the idea grew. Why was Parker making this film? Why was I making mine? But most of all, why do people seem to need to believe in something or someone? Why this need for icons?
Nilda’s shack was a shrine to the memory of Eva Peron. Evita on the walls, on the fridge, in the loo. “Menem has sold the telephones, the railways, the airline, the television and the oil to pay the foreign debt,” the old woman told me. “All we’ve kept is the foreign debt. One thing we thought could not be sold, and that was the memory of Evita. Now, even that goes to them.” “Them?” I asked. “The capitalists! Parker and his people are neither with God nor the Devil. They are with the money!”
While showing me her relics, Nilda tried to play me a record of Eva’s speeches, which she knew by heart, but the record player would not work. So she started turning the record with her finger. Eva’s voice came out in strange, varied pitches, now a man, now a woman: “My dear shirtless masses, rise up!” Meanwhile, the shirtless ones outside the Hyatt Plaza were all swinging to the rhythm of Material Girl. One of them, Sandra, had made herself up to look just like the Madonna of the early Eighties.
“People get frustrated that they can’t see Madonna, so they comfort themselves to see me, to touch me. We are two water drops,” she said.
“Who needs the real thing?” I thought. My film was now about what people believed in. This girl believed in Madonna. And Nilda believed in Evita. So I was ready when my commissioning editor rang from London. I had not managed the access I had so carelessly promised. We’ll do a story about fanaticism instead, I said. About belief in icons. Through an Eva fan and a Madonna fan, we would learn about two asteroids of 20th- century pop culture that were now about to collide. Evita, the social transgressor – who rose from the slums to power – and Madonna, the sexual transgressor.
Back in the Hidden City, a group of enthusiastic young kids at the pirate radio station Shanty Beats, were recording a programme on how “Parker insists so much about getting the presidential balcony under the pretence that the spirit of the story is there, but when it came to shanty towns, he didn’t dare come to us.” Parker and Madonna spent much of their time in Argentina pleading to be allowed to use the presidential balcony of the Casa Rosada, from which Evita had made her most famous speeches. President Menem eventually allowed them to use it. But later Parker changed his mind and reshot the balcony scenes in Budapest and London.
Weeks started to pile up, and I had long run through the development budget. My team of ex-schoolfriends were beginning to look at me with distrust.
Then Parker’s chief publicist invited me to his hotel for a drink. What was I doing still hanging around when the other crews had given up? I enthused about my two fans, naively thinking that they might grant me access at last. I also told him the money hadn’t yet come, so please could he help with a fax with some kind of goodwill. He promised he would.
But the fax was never sent to Channel Four. My producer in England was desperate. “What? You told them everything you are doing! They may steal your ideas!”
I told myself I had to dig in. I must be here when they get the presidential balcony. I must stay. There’s bound to be a revolution! The great day came. The two meteorites were about to collide. Hollywood was dressing up the Plaza and the Casa Rosada. One lonely local journalist complained. “The presidential balcony has been sold out!” But there was no one there to protest. No demonstrations, no revolting dagos disrupting the production line. Argentina was too busy making a living. Anyway, Evita’s press machine was doing the job for them, churning out the same tired old stories of threats and deadly graffiti.
My faith in my story was slowly sinking. At the end of the day, I had been just another sucker, providing free publicity for a Hollywood film. Maybe, as Parker had pointed out to me, “We don’t need another documentary.” He was doing his own Making of Evita; who needs the Argies’ point of view? By the time I had reached this conclusion, the money arrived from Channel 4, and I was on my way back. The struggle was over, I thought. Little did I know the story had only just begun.
I moved to Scarborough to put the story together. I was casually editing barbecues in the Hidden City, looking out of the window on to the mad cows of the Yorkshire Moors, then back to a Madonna fan gyrating on my video screen, thinking: “I am really enjoying this.” I sent a rough cut to Channel Four. They enthused: “We’ll put it in the winter season selection.” But no sooner had the cut travelled to London than problems began again. Madonna’s office had told Warner to revoke our licence to use her music.
I sent desperate letters to Madonna asking her to reconsider. No reply. “I’m an artist,”she had said in In Bed with Madonna. Sandra, my Madonna fan, was watching the video in my film. “This is the way I choose to express myself, and I’m not changing my show.” Madonna’s words resounded in my editing suite. “And remember, lads,” she said to her dancers, “that in America there is freedom of expression.” They all cheered her. “God bless America.”
“Madonna taught me not to be a hypocrite,” said Sandra again and again in my cutting room. Cut to a mute Madonna fan singing. Singing what? You could clearly read her lips: “Express yourself.” “You can’t show her mute – you’ll have to recut,” my new commissioning editor said.
“But can’t you see?” I pleaded. “They can film Madonna imitating Evita, they can put words in her mouth she would never have said, but I can’t film a girl who imitates Madonna.” Then I had an idea. I would send the cut to Madonna. There was nothing in it she wouldn’t like, except for the mute bits, which made her look like some fascist entertainment dictator. Then the computer started crashing. And crashing.
Then I crashed. For a couple of weeks I felt like the poor, the descamisados, must have felt for their entire lives in the days of dictatorship and oligarchy back home. Deceived, unwanted, chucked out.
While I daydreamed and played with these ideas, Madonna seemed to scream from the balcony: “I am biased and in many respects ignorant, but so what? I possess the economic might to back me up, and I don’t care who knows it.” And the crowds in the Plaza cheered her in unison: “Hollywood! Hollywood!”
I decided to start again from scratch, to ask why, for some, life is only worth living when they have someone or something to believe in. This Evita knew. Evita who only spoke in black and white, who had a child’s view of the world, a world that remains an unfair place. Evita who mounted the “means justifies the ends” horse and rode it at full tilt with a resentful honesty.
So while I waited for Madonna’s reply (which never came) the film completely changed. Evita knew that fanaticism is the energy of the people. Now the energies of the young were being siphoned away in the worship of distant idols who filled their brains with empty TV words they didn’t even understand.
When we went out to Argentina, we had no idea what we would find or come back with. Hollywood went out knowing exactly what they would come back with, and that was a product – a merchandised Evita, like Batman. We were not part of their business plan, and we were wiped off like shite.
Well, you can now buy your Estee Lauder Evita Peron lipstick, and the airheads of the fashion pages are already predicting that buns will be all the rage, and back in Beverly Hills Madonna claims to have been taken over by the spirit of Evita.
But the dead are still with us in Argentina, as are the descamisados. They are our ghosts, and their spirits, Mr Parker, are not for sale.
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