You Can Be Whatever You Want To Be

It was in June 2015 when I met the president of Philippine Airlines (PAL), Jaime Bautista, in a Filipino community gathering in New Jersey to celebrate Philippine Independence Day. “Oh, I have heard about you,” Mr. Bautista said, as he reached out a hand to me after an introduction. “We should do something together,” he added, as he pulled out his wallet to get a business card and handed it to me. I thought it was something a president of an airline would say to anyone he meets.

A year before that, I was on the Tony Awards stage at the Radio City Music Hall, where I won my second and third Tony Awards (in one night). My second Tony Award was for producing the Best Revival of a Play, A Raisin in the Sun starring Denzel Washington. The production also starred Anika Noni Rose, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Sophie Okonedo, who won the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in her Broadway debut. The revival was directed by Kenny Leon, who also won for Best Direction of a Play. My third Tony Award was for the Best Musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love in Murder.

In 2013, I received my first Tony Award for producing the frolic comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which starred Sigourney Weaver, David Hyde Pierce, Kristen Nielsen, Shalita Grant and Billy Magnussen. It was my producing debut on Broadway. Jesse Eisenberg presented the Best Play at the Tony Awards.

People thought I was too fidgety at the 2013 Tony Awards when our producing team was on stage receiving the recognition. I was actually pinching myself, because I could not believe my immense luck to be the second Filipino to ever win the most coveted Tony Award. Lea Salonga was the first Filipino to win a Tony Award in 1991, for Best Actress (Musical) for Miss Saigon. That was 22 years prior.

You see, I was born and raised in a slum in Iloilo City in the Philippines. I grew up around drugs and prostitution. I was never exposed to high-performing arts and nothing was expected of me, given the circumstance. Being the youngest of four, I became observant and aware of my surroundings. “You should wait for your older siblings to finish school, so they can pay for your tuition,” my parents told me when I graduated elementary school in 1989. I understood where they were coming from. My father drove a jeepney, which was the primary mode of transportation in the Philippines, while my mother was a beautician. Both of them barely earned $5 a day. It was impossible to support four children – two in college, one in high school, and then me. “I’m smart – why do I have to wait for them?” I asked myself. So I pursued getting a scholarship.

Meguko Society is a student organization at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. Every season, their members would organize fundraisers, selling their old clothes, books, equipment, etc., and the proceeds were then pooled into a fund to cover the tuition fees of high school students in the Philippines and India. Happily, I became a Sophia Scholar. When I graduated high school, I appealed to the Meguko Society to continue my scholarship, so I could go to college. Otherwise, I would have become part of a high statistic of high school graduates who did not continue to college because of financial constraints. In 1997, I graduated from the University of Iloilo with a Bachelor of Science in Accountancy degree.

In August 2015, two months after meeting PAL’s Mr. Bautista, I emailed him asking if he was serious about doing something with me. “Sure,” he said. I pitched him on a short documentary about the importance of education, as chronicled through my life from a slum in the Philippines to Broadway. He loved the idea and pledged flight sponsorship from PAL.

I posted on Craigslist, looking for filmmakers. I knew nothing about filmmaking. All I knew was, I had a sponsor for the flights and I started getting tired of repeating my story to every journalist who reached out to me for interviews. My idea was to do this short documentary and just send them the link, so they would know more about my life.

“Do you have a D.P.?” Sam Miron asked. Sam was one of the three guys from Otherside Pictures, who I hired to shoot the documentary with me. “Sure,” I replied. “I can give you 50 percent upon signing of the contract and the balance, when we are done filming.” Sam looked at Stephen Scarpulla, also from Otherside, both of them confused. After a beat, Sam turned to me straight-faced and said, “I meant director of photography, not downpayment.” My eyes widened and I felt my blood flushed in my face. I was embarrassed. I collected myself quickly and said with a poker face, “Well, what can I tell you? I come from the finance world.” And we all laughed.

We shot my short bio-documentary in three months, across nine countries. It was Sam’s and Stephen’s first time in Asia, along with Chandler Jez, a college student I hired as the production assistant. We shut down Ellis Island for half a day, we shot at JFK’s Terminal 1 and on board PAL’s flight to the Philippines. We had 74 hours of footage. In the editing room, I painfully stitched the story together and decided to name the film Life Is What You Make It. It went on to win awards in 11 countries. Not too bad for someone who knew nothing about filmmaking!

I love every level of filmmaking. I realized it’s simply working smart. Broadway is live eight times a week. The overhead costs are too high and once a show closes, there are hardly any royalties, unless the show is one of the 10 percent that make profit. Another 10 percent make it to recoupment, while the other 80 percent of produced shows on Broadway take a loss.

So, after careful consideration, I decided to shift my focus to filmmaking in 2018. After all, I had produced 18 shows by then, all of which received positive reviews from the New York Times. That’s hard to do. I felt I’d paid my dues, made a name for myself, earned enough respect from the industry and established a bandwidth and network with my body of work, which included a Grammy Award in 2017 that I shared with Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Hudson and Danielle Brooks for the cast recording album of The Color Purple.

The script of Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca solidified my decision to focus on filmmaking. It was my feature film producing debut, which world premiered at the 76th Venice Film Festival and went on to win awards in 10 countries, including Russia, where Isabel Sandoval won the Best Actress at the Pacific Meridian International Film Festival in Vladivostok (beating Frances McDormand’s performance in Nomadland, which eventually won her the Oscar for Best Actress).

Deciding to do Asian Persuasion – my feature directorial debut, starring Dante Basco, KC Concepcion, Kevin Kreider and Paolo Montalban – was a no-brainer.

“I wrote a script. Perhaps you can check it out?” Mike Ang said shyly over lunch break, when I was doing additional edits for Life Is What You Make It in his production studio, Planet X Studios, in Downtown Brooklyn.

“What is it about? You know I’m busy,” I exclaimed. After he told me the synopsis, I asked him if he’d seen Jon Favreau’s Chef. “Same story,” I said. To this day, Mike tells the story of how I crushed his very first elevator pitch. “I thought we were friends?” Yes, he had to use his friend card for me to read his script. “Done. We need to talk,” I texted him, two weeks after he emailed me the script.

Mike sent me an adobo meal (that he made himself) via Uber from Bloomfield, New Jersey, to Jackson Heights, New York, for our Zoom lunch discussion on March 14, 2021. “You have something here,” I told him, as I gave him my notes. He was willing to revise the script to my liking, if I would produce the movie. Mind you, he’d had to Google “how to write a screenplay” before he’d started. It was the pandemic that gave him so much time on his hands.

After about eight rounds of revisions, the script was in good shape. Then I started thinking which director I should give it to. If I got a cis male, it could be mistaken as misogynistic. If I gave it to a cis female, she could be accused of selling out. Mike has a twisted sense of humor and being his friend, I know he means well. “Wait, I’m gay … I can do this!” I thought. No one could question my intention for the film, as it centers on private conversations between both sexes. Coincidentally, it was my 10-year anniversary in commercial producing. I wanted to keep evolving in the industry. Not to mention, it was the peak of Asian Hate. I always stay safe by not leaving home, unless it’s truly necessary, but making films is my ultimate protest that yes, I belong here too.

Making Asian Persuasion – an AAPI rom-com with 21 Asian countries represented – was hard throughout, from fundraising to crewing, and everything in between. Things got really tough when, on Day 16 of the shoot, one of our lead actors got Covid. Unfortunately, it happened when we were shooting at our most expensive location, the Museum of the Moving Image, which we rented for $24,000 a day. We had to continue filming to save the non-refundable rental payment to the museum. Personally, I had to come up with two new scenes to make use of the location and talent that were already there. We shut down for 12 days, which cost us an extra $100,000 that we didn’t have in the budget. We turned to Seed&Spark to raise $50,000 and ended up raising $66,000, which helped a lot. But we then had to rent the museum again, for continuity.

Asian Persuasion world premiered at the 14th SoHo International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. It was selected in two more international film festivals before Mike and I decided to sell it for streaming. We used our personal relationships with studios and network to see the movie, to no avail. We wasted a whole year before finding out that no one buys directly from filmmakers anymore. According to them. But now, here we are. It will now be finally released theatrically in the United States on March 21!

Featured image shows Jhett Tolentino in Life is What You Make Of It; all images courtesy Jhett Tolentino.