Learning from Lino

I was idly flipping channels one night last week when a vaguely familiar scenario caught my attention – Christopher de Leon caught between Dina Bonnevie and Lorna Tolentino. The women’s big hair – you know, the ’dos with the woolly curls up front – tipped me off to the fact that I was looking at a cinematic artifact – mid- to late 1980s, to be sure. And then they started talking, and as the dialogue tumbled out of their mouths I found myself in the odd position of being able to predict what they were going to say next! (I mean, of course, you can predict, 99 percent of the time, what Tagalog-movie characters will say next – which, 51 percent of the time, is going to be "Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?" But this was uncannily different, because I could actually say that "Nakahanda akong lumaban hanggang sa piitan" would be followed by " – sa hukay pa kung gusto mo!")

There was a simple and soon obvious explanation for all this: I wrote the lines, but naturally, and I was watching a movie I’d scripted in ages past, a melodramatic opus titled Maging Akin Ka Lamang. I’d written it in 1986 for Lino Brocka, working off a komiks storyline Lino had dug up from his files to meet a contractual obligation to Viva Films. It was one of about 14 or 15 scripts I wrote for Lino over as many years, until his sudden death in a car crash in 1991.

Next Monday, the 22nd, we’ll be marking his 13th death anniversary. I was away, finishing my graduate studies in the US, when Lino died, but I remember the shock and grief that hit me when I heard the news. Up until he died we had been working on projects; this was a bit before e-mail – although Lino would have escaped high technology even if he was swimming in it – and he thought nothing of ringing me up in Milwaukee at 3 a.m. to chat with me for 40 minutes if an idea struck him in Manila; I just never found the gumption to remind him about something so impertinent as time zones when he was waxing hot.

I met Lino in the mid-’70s, after I’d come out of martial-law prison and had found a job writing features for (ironically) a government agency, and yet fancied myself a weekend playwright. I’d joined the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) as a summer trainee in 1970, in my senior year of high school, and had figured, with all the brashness of my 16 years, that I could write a television play even if I’d never seen one – because, after I’d seen one in the PETA office, it seemed easy enough to do. So, I wrote one, and sold it to Balintataw, and from then on no one could dissuade me from trying to make a living off writing. At 18, I quit school and joined the newspapers, and I’ve written often enough in this space about what happened next.

But somewhere along the way, I met Lino Brocka at Fort Santiago during the rehearsal for one of my plays; he asked me to write for his TV drama series, and suddenly I had one of those breaks that change your life, and a new career as a scriptwriter. (I was going to say a "self-taught scriptwriter," but at least in those days, all our scriptwriters were self-taught; hardly anyone went to film school, and there was no such thing as a degree in creative writing.)

After a few teleplays – which, truth to tell, have always been more challenging to do than full-length screenplays because of the dramatic economy they require (and more fun, too, if they didn’t pay so miserably) – I got my first crack at a movie. My first completed script was actually for what would become the Chanda Romero-Philip Salvador starrer Mananayaw, but because of production delays, we managed to squeeze in a shameless tearjerker titled Tahan Na, Empoy, Tahan, with an angelic and brilliant Niño Muhlach (a world away from what he was last week at that FPJ "victory" rally). "Let’s make them weep!" Lino commanded me with a big grin, and we did, drawing liberally on the story of his own youth in San Jose, Nueva Ecija, a milieu we would return to over and over again – most notably in what was probably our best film together, 1985’s Miguelito: Ang Batang Rebelde, which gave Aga Muhlach his first big role.

Lino and I did a lot of forgettable movies (who remembers Burgis and Hello Young Lovers?) – Lino would often do a string of unabashedly commercial projects to pay off his debts (and those of others that he charitably assumed), then recover his senses with a truly good one. But we gave every movie our best shot, no matter how ridiculous the plot premise was. Lino knew he couldn’t change the industry overnight, but he also believed that there was always room to bring in a little more sense and sympathy into even the most contrived and convoluted plot, so he worked with and within established formulas and conventions, taking melodrama as an artistic and political challenge rather than disdaining it. We dissected Pinoy motherhood in Inay, tracked a dark domestic drama in Ina Ka ng Anak Mo, made a lawyer out of Sharon Cuneta in Biktima, and sat impatiently as Imelda Marcos lectured us on good filmmaking for her De Millean but abortive Kasaysayan ng Lahi project.

Working with Lino was a wonderful learning experience. We sat for hours over weak coffee in his Quezon City apartment, figuring out fates worse than death for our characters. I learned to write lines like "Ibibigay ko ang lahat – maging akin ka lamang!" and "Dadalawin ko ang bata – kung dadalawin mo rin ako!" (The producer, of course, couldn’t sleep soundly with just one mention of the title line in the movie, so he hired another writer in my absence to inject it into the script two more times – just in case you didn’t get it!) But I could trust Lino with minor compromises like this, because you knew that any change he introduced to the script would have been done for the best or most intractable reasons.

He had enough sadness in his life to fill a dozen tearjerkers, but Lino always comported himself with dignity, respecting his craft as both an art and a source of livelihood for many thousands of people. Despite his many awards, he remained simple enough to bring a packed meal of adobo and rice along on his flights across the Pacific. Long before karaoke, he sang his favorite tune, What I Did for Love, with gusto. I’m sure – I know – he did a lot.

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As longtime Penman readers know, I often receive requests for help with term papers, and you also know how used I’ve become to answering such requests with a polite but firm refusal to do other people’s homework for them. It’s just been a little harder to say no – which I did, anyway – to another kind of request I’ve been receiving lately, maybe because of all the things I’ve been writing about good and bad fiction. These are requests from people for me to read, review, and comment on their work – books, stories, poems, essays, story ideas, etc.

I’m really very sorry – and I do acknowledge and appreciate the fact that these requests are a form of praise for and recognition of my presumptive ability to judge work well – but I simply don’t have the time to give these requests the attention they deserve. If you just knew how much work I have to do apart from writing this column to feed (never mind family and Chippy) my technomania, you’d be surprised that I haven’t keeled over yet – something I often dearly feel like doing.

It doesn’t help that a good number of these requests could have been, shall we say, phrased more thoughtfully. "Send me a copy of your book!" one of them demanded. Last week, yet another reader wrote me to say: "Give me information – what’s your contact no., etc.?" I had to write this person back: "May I please ask why you need this information? Thank You very much." It turned out that he was looking for a scholarship, which I was much less equipped – and even if I were, would have been indisposed – to provide.

Let me say this again: If you need to tell me something, please write to me by e-mail at the address below. If you want to study writing with me, please enroll (whether as a regular or a special non-degree student) at UP; as the classroom is the only place I can commit myself to you. I will be teaching a graduate-level course in writing the personal essay next semester (Creative Writing 341), Fridays, 5-8 p.m. The class size will be limited to 12 students.

On the more positive side, one type of request I hardly ever decline, my schedule permitting, is an invitation to speak before groups of students and professionals. These events allow me to reach larger audiences all at once.

Now I have something to ask of my readers. You all remember Dionisio Ulep, the kidney patient for whom we moved heaven and earth to get a transplant? Well, he’s doing fine, and his kidney (his daughter’s kidney, really) hasn’t been rejected by his body. But he does need some maintenance drugs, not as much as we originally expected but still quite a burden to carry all by himself. He’s raring to go to work or to start a small business, but first he has to get shipshape, and he’ll get there, with just a little more help. If you have something to spare, please make a direct deposit to the account of Florita Ulep, BPI Baclaran, savings account no. 0375-1338-22.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.