Indian Writing

Via Moorishgirl, I came across this LA Times article about the budget of the 2005 action film Sahara. The film, which was mostly filmed in Morocco, lost a huge amount of money. But it had cost a lot to make, and look at some of the ways in which the money was spent. “Courtesy payments,” “gratuities” and “local bribes” are bad enough; then there’s a $40,688 payment to stop a river improvement project. A $23,250 for political support.

One payment was made to expedite the removal of palm trees from an old French fort called Ouled Zahra, said a person close to the production who requested anonymity.

Other items include $23,250 for “Political/Mayoral support” in Erfoud and $40,688 “to halt river improvement project” in Azemmour. The latter payment was made to delay construction of a government sewage system that would have interrupted filming.

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And as for product placements, they seem to affect the plot in ways that would be funny if they weren’t so chillingly real:

Producer Karen Baldwin demanded script changes to accommodate DaimlerChrysler because the German-American carmaker negotiated to have its Jeep trucks featured in the film. “You can’t have the truck get almost stuck,” Baldwin wrote in a March 2004 e-mail to “Sahara” executives. “I would bet that Jeep will have a heart attack when they see that. They want to show how well the Jeep handles and responds — not that it will get stuck in a tough situation.”

Four months earlier, when director Breck Eisner expressed concern during development of the film about problems with another sequence involving a four-wheel-drive truck, Baldwin wrote in a memo, “Can’t cut it. Jeep to pay 3 million.”

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For a big-budget film, the “Sahara” production team was reluctant to spend on animal safety requirements:

Although the actual jumps were performed by a trained camel master, there was no independent safety officer on hand during the filming of “Sahara” to monitor the treatment of more than 100 camels, horses, donkeys and other animals. That’s because producers of the $160-million movie opted not to pay a $30 hourly rate plus travel and other expenses, said Karen Rosa, director of the American Humane Assn.’s film and television unit. As a result, the film’s credits could not include a statement certifying that “no animals were harmed” in the making of the movie. “Sahara” executives said they were not required to use the American Humane Assn. because the production was based in Britain. “No animals were injured during the shooting of the film, and professional animal trainers were used,” one executive said about “Sahara.” He declined to be identified.

The animal-welfare organization assigns safety officers at no cost to about 900 U.S. films annually. “We’ve learned after doing this for 67 years,” Rosa said, “that you need to be there to know the level of care the animals receive.”

The rest of those numbers contain more revelations, but this was all I could take.