The Locationers

Hollywood has hung out a sign: VACANCY. The old local custom of film making has all but disappeared, and a swarm of travelers in MarcoPolaroid sunglasses have gone off to wander the earth seeking low overhead and finding high adventure. Both U.S. and European companies are working on location everywhere from the Middle East to the Greater Antilles. If the final results may often seem dull as Hoboken on the screen, there is plenty of color in the making of the films. Current examples:

P: Filming One, Two, Three, an East-West satire set in West Berlin and based on a comedy by the late Ferenc Molnar, Director Billy Wilder sent Horst Buchholz, who plays an East German motorcycle bum, past the Brandenburg Gate with a balloon on his exhaust pipe. It inflated, as the script ordered--displaying the words RUSSKI GO HOME. Out came a platoon of People's Police, plus a Russian official who was not amused. Retreating from the row that followed, Wilder moved to Munich, where he is finishing the film beside an enormous reproduction of the Brandenburg Gate.

P: At Jebel Tubeiq in the Jordanian desert, Sam Spiegel's Lawrence of Arabia company (with Peter O'Toole as Lawrence, Alec Guinness as Feisal) set up its camp under towering red dunes, 150 miles from the nearest oasis. Kerosene trucks brought water at a cost of about $3 a gallon, and Spiegel nearly turned into a pillar of salt when he learned that truck drivers were stopping en route to take showers. Then a couple of hundred Bedouins showed up one night, circled the camp, rattled their pots and pans and cried: "We are your guests." The law of the desert says that water must be shared, and that forced Abou Ben Spiegel out of Jebel Tubeiq. Recently at El Jafr, the company has moved prudently from water hole to water hole, will soon reach Petra, where, according to local legend, Moses struck the rock that gushed water. P: On Vieques, an island nine miles off the east coast of Puerto Rico, Director Peter Brook is doing a film version of William Golding's superb novel, Lord of the Flies, in which 30 boys, aged six to twelve, are stranded on a desert island without any adults. They elect a leader, explore the island, go fishing, and things move along at a Disneying pace for a while--until gradually the veneer of civilization begins to peel away and the boys revert to barbarism. All the boy actors in the cast are nonprofessional; they will be on Vieques Island until mid-August, and Director Brook's No. 1 problem is to prevent off-camera the occurrence of what he is trying to re-create on film. The boys who live in an old pineapple-processing factory they call Fliesville, have already formed their own film production company--with a Brownie camera--to do a mystery called Something Queer in the Warehouse. They also have their own newspaper, called War, in which they report such Fliesville events as a so-ft.-high rocket shot, after which a lizard walked away from the nose cone intact. Brook may not be as lucky as the lizard.

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