Ring of Fire: The Movie … (another short story)

Draft 4. Screen Treatment:

An award winning international portrait photographer, Sir Anthony Post, introduces himself to the camera by announcing his decision to quit photography . “My eyes have been blinded by the Sun.” We see that he is basically a likeable fellow now living in splendid ‘retirement’ in Barbados in a gentleman’s ‘grand house’ with servants, pool and a stable of thoroughbred horses. Life has been good to him as he enters the eve of his life – he has just celebrated his 70^th birthday.

But tragedy has struck. His 15-year-old daughter by his second marriage has just been discovered dead in the pool. She has drowned and the circumstances are highly suspect. Anthony clearly knows who the murderer is, but he cannot and will not do anything about it. He knows too that he is ultimately responsible for this huge loss and that he must bear both the responsibility and his grief in shameful silence.

It is, after all, his just due.

He prepares a large transfer of funds to an offshore account as per the instructions of his young and beautiful wife. She is packing – content and triumphant – and ready to go. Tony picks up a faded snapshot from his desk and looks at it long and hard. “My eyes have been blinded by the Sun. At least, that is what I will say.”

Flashback to 1960. Anthony is a precocious and ambitious young prairie boy fresh out of the west coast Emily Carr Art College. His portfolio is strong and he is the pick of many newly emerging advertising companies. Soon he is winning enticing commissions that promote a variety of different consumer products. He cuts his hair short while his peers continue to grow theirs long. He develops a certain infamy for the stark realism of his work – much the result of offsetting angles. Objects are not framed they are sideswiped. ” I learned it from the prairie winds”. It is an unsettling but effective technique to get others to both look and see. His career takes off.

After several years of product shots from cans to cars, he is invited to undertake more ambitious projects. He begins to work on annual reports for corporate businesses. Americans begin to call. He moves to New York in 1970 and lives it up as an ambitious go-getter. He frequents Greenwich Village jazz clubs and Harlem nightclubs befriending unknown talented musicians and ladies-of-the-night. One young friend and co-vivant, Stewart, is a sax-playing Brit. Stewart was ‘hiding’ in America from his father’s ambition that he become a partner in the London based century old family law firm. They explore together.

In the late 70’s as Anthony’s pay cheque increases, he moves from the bohemia of the Lower West Side to the tony Upper East Side. Soon one plum ‘corporate photography’ assignment has him off to Indonesia for three months. There, he photographs an open-pit gold mine, part of the Busang deposit. Smelters and fires roar up from the bowels of the earth. While at the mine he is witness to corruption on a scale unimaginable in the generally law-abiding confines of North America. To fulfill his own curiosity, he casually and somewhat innocently associates with an unscrupulous local ‘geologist’, Raoul, to further investigate and ‘learn’. He inadvertently becomes involved in a series of events that embroil him in a controversial ‘corporate fraud’ (known as salting) involving the very company that has hired his services. During this interlude, while running with the rogue, Tony has a short sexual encounter with a shy local girl. Raoul had introduced the pair at a ‘company beach picnic’. The quiet girl is the daughter of the native chief of the Wawanessi tribe that inhabits the area surrounding the Busang deposit. The local girls are all very popular with the foreign men. But the government of Indonesia, the Wawanessi tribe, and her father are strictly against any inter-racial sexual mingling. It is forbidden. Tony is merely and somewhat naively satisfying his basic body urges. He cares for her in an off-hand kind of way and pays her handsomely for her thigh favours. He loves to burnish that penny birthmark on the back of her right thigh.

For the native girls, sex with the foreigners is a cheap and easy way to get valuable American dollars. They instinctively know how it will alter their centuries-old life and give them a modicum of freedom. As the chief’s daughter, the girl knows she enjoys certain privileges and associations. Advised by her mother (number 7 wife of the chief), she is doubly discreet and also highly ambitious. When she learns of Tony’s involvement with the ‘salting’, she uses it as leverage to secure her own future. She threatens to expose the ‘fraud’ to his unsuspecting overseas employers.

In anger at her surprising betrayal and ‘native’ cunning, Tony brutally rapes her, leaving her with a crashing blow across the face. He cruelly photographs her as she lies whimpering in the corner. However, he still throws the $5000 U.S. she had requested into her lap with the parting words ” Who would ever believe you? You’re just a two-bit nothing.” The assignment over, he returns home. Older and wiser and poorer.

Returning to America he continues to cultivate his career. Annual reports turn into corporate executive head shots – he flatters and shoots. In the early 1980’s, he is picked up by global media/advertising companies as a rising star ‘portrait’ photographer. He becomes a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, People, and Playboy; and quickly becomes the darling of celebrities who seek his irreverent yet sympathetic portraiture. His schedule is filled too with national dignitaries; he even shoots the ‘official portrait’ of two Presidents. And he begins to make a lot of money.

He meets and marries his first wife, Alice, in 1982. Tony is 37, she is 25. Alice is working in the public relations department for her family-owned privately held brewery company. A fluff job, she doesn’t really have to work for a ‘living’. She is an Ivy League born and bred beauty – complete with Yale and Vasser-Wall Street parents. Tony meets her on a ‘commercial shoot’. Their ‘best man’ is Stewart, (now a junior partner in the family law firm in London). Stewart arranges a British pre-nup that on the surface seemingly protects Alice’s large inheritance for any children. Tony grows his hair long into a ponytail when his peers cut theirs short. His is always the maverick ‘fashion’. Soon Tony is introduced into the tightly controlled world of the old money WASPS of the East Coast. The association gives him an additional polish and charm and her money further propels him into the international jet scene. Alice quits her job. Tony and his new bride travel to Europe frequently on her money and hobnob with private school and privileged young adults as well as eurotrash Prince and Princesses in Vienna, and Paris. She gets pregnant, but loses the baby after a bad fall on the ski slopes of Gstaad. Not long after, while lunching at a ‘see and be seen’ restaurant in Lichtenstein, Tony is approached by a Royal Family Messenger to ask if he would consider producing a ‘private family album for the Royal Family’. He does, at an exorbitant fee. While there he is privy to several indiscretions and uses photographs to extort an additional ‘privacy’ fee. The Queen, meanwhile, in gratitude for his outstanding work, bestows him with an honorary knighthood and ‘in-house’ title – ‘Photographer of Our Realm’. Now as ‘Sir’ Anthony Post the commissions just pour in. Alice gets pregnant again, but loses the baby again. She meanwhile gets progressively jealous of his growing social success and increasingly demands more of his time and his money. The marriage turns sour. He finally divorces her under English law – giving her nothing from his burgeoning estate – and gets away with it because she has ‘failed to deliver an heir’.

Single again, rich, popular and very manly, he dates a variety of intriguing self-possessed and powerful moneyed American women. His relationships are short lived however as his work always comes first. The women are initially attracted by his prospects – good looks, life of the party, and growing international fame. But they eventually find him to be an emotional lightweight, unreliable and always ‘away on assignment’. Men are increasingly interested – in his rugged prairie good looks and polished charm. He meets and uses his new ‘artist’ acquaintances to further his commissions. He develops a ‘Coward-esque’ friendship with a Lebanese ‘art dealer’ who traffics in antique bronze horses. Soon he is introduced into the fabulous wealth and greed of oil-rich Arabs. ‘Sir’ Anthony is feted and a welcome palace guest and court photographer. He takes his camera everywhere and records it all – he then sells the world of the Saudi Princes to the National Geographic. (Armchair anglos just love those powerful sheiks with their veiled women chattel…) He photographs sidelong forbidden glances, the exoticism of desert racehorses and Moorish architecture. He wins his first coveted CNN World Photography Grand Prix Award.

When he returns to his New York Park Avenue flat his secretary delivers his messages and mail. There is a call from the pressroom at the United Nations, a Miss Emma Hanlu. He returns her call and instantly responds to her shy flirtatious tone – “Might he be available to group photograph the newly appointed Environmental Commission?” He meets with her to discuss the details and in short order they are an item. Emma is an outstanding Hawaiian beauty of surprising wit, charm, sex and youth. Young male heads turn as she glides into a room, and old men visibly buck up. Tony is besotted and marries her in a passionate instant. Anna’s mother does not fly over to the weekend-in-Vegas wedding. According to Emma, her mother does not speak English anyway and is a ‘bit backward’, her mother calls her ‘my little mongoose’ and is sort of embarrassing, so it doesn’t really matter. She never knew her father, it’s a non-issue. Tony could care less, all he wants is Emma.

Emma immediately becomes pregnant and has a child, a girl, Anna.

Anna is a beautiful honey coloured baby with only one unusual blemish – a small penny size birthmark on the back of her upper right thigh. A remarkable coincidence, Tony remembers the local native girl of long ago, but he says nothing of this to Emma. He does however derive a perverse pleasure in this seemingly peculiar ‘synchronicity’.

At 52, Tony settles into married life contentedly. He buys a small house on Long Island in South Hampton for his family, and keeps his apartment in the city. He dots on Anna and spoils her rotten. He continues to trophy and squire Emma. The money is pouring in. Tony hires a young ‘digital’ protégé, Daniel, to assume his small/mid size assignments and ‘work his profile’ on the internet. Additional awards and honors keep coming in. He receives an honorary title from the American Press Club.

Emma is increasingly homesick for Hawaii, and wants to introduce Anna to her ailing mother. Tony, ” suddenly frantic with business”, suggests a short holiday to the Caribbean instead, Jamaica. While there they meet Jonathan Winslow an old Greenwich village acquaintance of Tony’s, now Chief of Police and a major drug lord. He and Tony develop an easy money-laundering scheme. Tony is a frequent international traveler so he can move cash with impunity. He becomes Johnny’s front man and gets 17% of all the cash he redirects on Johnny’s behalf. Johnny also holds several exotic Caribbean properties and makes them available to the Posts as desired. These properties distract Emma while Tony “works” and she develops a small reputation as a ‘design consultant’. She makes a little pocket money. Anna attends private day school in New York.

At 62 Tony buys Johnny’s Barbadian ‘hideaway’, moves his family down, (escaping taxes) and settles into the life of an island gentleman. Emma redecorates with charming elan. A retrospective of his ‘advertising’ work of cans and cars is put on at the Gagosian Gallery in New York to great acclaim. Books are published that record his later ‘indigenous people’ works. He is lauded by the privately owned ‘liberal’ press for ‘showing the evil effects of corporate imperialism’ (especially noteworthy are the photographs of the tiny beaten native girl strewn with cash…) He gives several interviews by satellite. Larry King. 60 minutes. He produces a series of platinum prints ‘Thoroughbreds: Royalty and their Horses’ and is exhibited at the new Getty Museum. Life goes on.

He makes Anna her first pinhole camera as a birthday gift when she turns 10, and delights in island sojourns with her to teach her how to look and see. He buys her a horse, then one for he and Emma. They ride the island, exploring, enjoying. Life is borderline bliss.

Johnny Winslow dies of a heart attack. None are the wiser about his dealings with Tony.

Daniel – still running the office in New York – develops an interest in pinhole photography, grows his hair long and begins to visit at Christmas. He is developing an interest in the budding Anna.

Tony’s 70^th birthday is coming up and he wants a large celebration. Over 300 international guests and celebrities are to attend the gala 3-day affair (and thereby indirectly boost the island economy). The Governor makes special provisions and remarks that Anna is turning into a stunning beauty just like her mother. Tony’s heart swells with pride.

Suddenly Tony notices that Emma has gone strangely quiet. Her youth and gaiety vanish overnight and when he seeks affection she displays a forbidding anger. His conscience however intuits the shadowy truth. He begins to drink heavily – morning, noon and night. He sarcastically suggests she see a psychiatrist and he seeks solace in the pleasant and innocent charm of his daughter Anna, though the horrible and diabolical truth of his old sin becomes increasingly difficult to bear. Emma grows increasingly volatile and deliberately attempts to sabotage the ‘father-daughter’ love and affection between Anna and Tony. Anna, meanwhile, does not understand their muted martial problem and becomes increasingly resentful and angry with her mother. Emma is beside herself.

She has received a copy of her dead mother’s Will. Attached to it was a privately sealed envelope to her from her mother. Inside Emma finds a faded snapshot of Tony as a young man. He is boldly standing on a beach with his arm around her bashful mother – and the note reads in broken English: “Emma, Tony Post your daddy. No good. I shame. Move to Hawaii. When I see your wedding picture, I see our future. My little mongoose will eat this poison snake. We Wawanessi now all gone. Our land, our people, our spirit broken. And for what my baby this sad sad life? Never no gold in Busang. Never no gold. Ask your daddy now. Always kiss kiss you, mama”.

In a heart-wrenching scene, Emma slowly drowns Anna after the opening night festivities of Tony’s birthday. The following morning Tony discovers Anna’s body in the pool. Emma silently gives the photograph to Tony, and tells him she is leaving. With cold and forbidding eyes, she also tells him she expects the proceeds of his entire estate to right his great wrong.

Tony sits at his desk in the library.

He looks again at the faded snapshot, and considers his bleak future –

“My eyes have been blinded by the Sun.”

Camera Close-up of his face, his eyes, to the centre of his left pupil, enter in, saturate frame to jet black …

His voice over. ” … at least,that is what I will say … “

Cut.

(Author’s note: This ‘fictional story of a screen treatment’ is loosely based on the infamous Bre-X ‘gold mine’ salting scandal. When that ‘news story’ initially broke, the Canadian investment community, both greedy investors and savvy underwriters, suddenly ‘came of age’, kicking and screaming …)