“Courage in the face of mediocrity.” A eulogy for Don Escudero by Peque Gallaga
Don on the set of Unfaithful Wife. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
A Eulogy for Don Escudero, 1955-2011
by Peque Gallaga
How can I talk about Don without talking about the movies?
What can I say about Don that you don’t already know? I’ll have to say it anyway, because these things should not just be felt in our hearts but spoken out loud and in the presence of witnesses. The fact that you already know them is a tribute to him, because Don was always who he was and never pretended to be what he was not. He literally wore his heart on his sleeve. But having said this, what you saw was not always what you got. Somehow you always got more.
So as far as the movies were concerned, here goes. When I was supposed to direct my first movie together with Butch Perez, our producer drove us all the way here and unveiled to us the splendors and the magic of Villa Escudero. This was 40 years ago. There was no resort then. We were treated to merienda at the main house by Ado Escudero who regaled us with his legendary courtesy and hospitality. Right there and then Butch and I decided to change the script in order to fit the story to the location, only to be told that the family had decided against any kind of shooting at the Villa (probably because of our unsavory appearance at the time). Basta, no shooting!
As a result we retained the script but had to shoot in more than 15 different major locations around Quezon and Laguna because one magical place was not available. That, and the fact that my directorial ego was so cruelly rebuffed that I swore total and absolute enmity against the Escuderos for the rest of my life if not for eternity.
I never even knew that Don Escudero existed.
Peque and Don shooting Virgin Forest in the forests of Atimonan. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
But unlike Danding here, I remember the night I first met him. Seven years after the big No at Villa Escudero, Lino Brocka decided to shoot Gumising Ka Maruja in Negros at the Lacson ancestral home. I was introduced to Mel Chionglo the Production Designer, who in turn introduced me to his Art Director. A young, gangly, towering Placido Escudero, Jr. For some reason I wanted to impress this guy, and I don’t know why I did it, but I sat at the old grand piano at the sala—it was all out of tune and all—and banged out ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” of Elton John. Very badly. And then I started singing it. Also very badly. And this Don sat down beside me and played along, also very badly and joined me in singing. Also very badly. How could you not become friends after that?
So we met in the provinces, he from Quezon and I from Negros Occidental, and I quickly learned that what we had in common was the world in general.
As I helped him acquire props for the movie I learned that we shared so many things: Elton John and David Bowie, Sondheim and Puccini; fine cuisine and unrestricted devouring of the same; cosmology, astronomy and astrology; the Rosicrusians, secret societies and the Knights Templar; the pyramids of Giza, aswangs and UFOs over Mount Banahaw; herbology, mushroomology and the ingestion of the same; Kubrick, Peckinpah, Kurosawa, Fellini and Paul Schrader; Tolkien, Frank Herbert and T. H. White; it just doesn’t end. As I recite this, I feel like I’m setting ourselves up for charges of snobbery. And it cannot be helped. That was our world and we reveled in it.
Actors’ Workshop. L-R: Peque Gallaga, Jaime Fabregas, Mario Taguiwalo and Don Escudero. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
So it was not long after that we began to work together. And the way we worked was not a division of labor. I wasn’t assigned to strictly direct and he wasn’t assigned to strictly design: it was always a collaboration from the start. From Oro, Plata, Mata in 1982 to Ang Panday in 1993, eleven years, we would sit down with Uro de la Cruz and later on with Lore Reyes and shape the stories and the worlds where the stories took place.
Production Design for Don Escudero was not only about images. It was about behavior. Psychological, emotional, historical and sociological behavior. I think it’s important to understand this. This is why he towers over all Production Designers in the Philippines since the movie industry reawakened after World War II.
He knew his architecture and design. When we took over the Gaston house for Oro, I asked him to get rid of all the blonde, spindly furniture to replace it with the well-known and accepted dark wood Baroque monstrosities that infest our ancestral homes and graduation ceremonies, and he told me, “Are you out of your mind? This is a perfect example of French Creole furniture! You won’t find anything like this anywhere and we’re getting it for free!”
He knew his cinema and lighting as well. Still in the Gaston house for Oro, he decided to paint the walls a dove gray color. Eager to make up for losing face over my total ignorance of the French Creole style, I lectured him on the fact that in Negros, the ancestral homes were painted in baby pink, sky blue, apple green or a soft canary yellow. “I know,” he said, “but that’s not important. The gray will bring out everybody’s skin tones.” And he was right. If you see a good print of Oro, you will see that the skins of Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Sandy Andolong and Cherie Gil glow with preternatural light. It was magic. So much so that when we were about to repaint the house back to its original color, the Gastons told us not to bother. They had decided to live the rest of the century with skins glowing with preternatural light. And they have done so these past thirty years.
And Don had impeccable taste. Nobody like him. When we sat down on the thorny problem of what Daniel Fernando was going to wear in Scorpio Nights, and we were fully aware that he was going to spend an irritating amount of movie time in his underwear, I opted to go sociological and historical: this was the time of bikini briefs in zebra stripes and leopard spots. Don again said no. “He is going to wear classic white Jockey briefs.” And those white Jockey briefs ended up defining Daniel’s character totally and completely.
Madie Gallaga, Don Escudero and Peque Gallaga on the set of Abbo de la Cruz’s Misteryo Sa Tuwa. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
After this we ended our professional partnership, not because of any disagreements, but because it was time for him to move on. So he joined his good friends, his barkada of Manny Castañeda and Joey Reyes, and started to direct his own movies. I won’t be able to talk to you of Don as director because I’m simply not qualified to do that.
I will not bore you further with work-related details. I only disclose them in order to demonstrate the measure of the man and the artist. However. . .there was something else. Something more. And as much as I enjoyed working with him, there was a source of even greater pleasure implicated in this whole enterprise.
One time, we were in Bulacan shooting one of the Shake, Rattle & Roll episodes. We were both seated in our directors’ chairs in the middle of a vast rice field under the light of a full moon that turned the waters around us into silver. We were waiting for the lighting set-up to be finished and this, as you know, can take hours in open fields. And there we were with our feet soaking in bangus-infested waters drinking coffee and discussing Sondheim, Monty Python, Mick Jagger and Philip Glass. Escudero would point out at intervals Aldebaran, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades just as Joel Torre did in Oro and he told me, “Peque, isn’t this the life? Where else in the world does anybody have a chance at this? To be sitting in the most unexpected places in the Philippines in the most unexpected hours of the day and talking? Talking and soaking it all in. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
And it didn’t. Not for me anyway.
We weren’t just making a movie which was our reason for living; we were there in the middle of poisonous and vicious Dahong Palay, while Manilyn Reynes memorized her lines and Totoy Jacinto fussed over the placement of a gigantic and unwieldy HMIs under a science-fiction moon talking about Gandalf and Mars exploration and the latest tragic life-choice of Nora Aunor while Tom Waits sang about a Grapefruit Moon in the background. It never really got better than that.
And we did this in the jungles of Atimonan, in the desert sand dunes of Ilocos and in Mother Lily’s warehouse deep in the bowels of Cubao. I shared these unbelievable, magical hours with a terrific, honourable, funny, lovely and loving man.
Peque Gallaga and Don Escudero on the set of Misteryo Sa Tuwa. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
A man who shared with me the secrets of Elton John and David Bowie, Sondheim and Puccini; fine cuisine and unrestricted devouring of the same; cosmology, astronomy and astrology; herbology, mushroomology and the ingestion of the same; oh. . .and he loved the Philippines! He was completely attentive and responsive to its beauty. He loved our country but he wept when it came to our leaders. And like Carlos Bulosan he loved his countrymen but bewailed our tendency towards cheap sentimentality.
He always held to the belief that we lived in the Republic of the Sillippines. If you can love something that is so full of corn, you have to have a special kind of mind. It is no wonder he was my friend. It is no wonder he was my brother. In no time at all I had forgotten my thirst for eternal revenge on the Escuderos and have since embarked on a long-distance friendship with them full of respect, admiration and affection.
And how can I talk about Don without talking about his family and friends?
Don Escudero and Lore Reyes on the set of Unfaithful Wife. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.
And how can I talk about Don without talking about his family and friends?
I can’t. You’re all sitting out there. You all know how much he loved you. You all know how much we frustrated him as much as he frustrated us. But the man was loyal and if he ever expressed these frustrations, it was just a venting off of steam. He never asked anyone to take sides, because it was always clear to him: he was always on the side of his family. And such was the measure of the man that his good friends were also his family. I have seen him forgive friends who betrayed him again and again, because… well, because they were his friends.
It is easy to talk about a good man. You don’t have to cross the street in order to avoid dangerous areas of his personality. Was he perfect? Of course not. Nobody sitting here today will argue with me that his principal cardinal sin was sloth. But countering his laziness was the courage to go out and do what diligence demanded. He was a courageous man in the face of so much mediocrity.
And Don Escudero never even bothered to play the game.
To paraphrase Julian Fellowes, “Don was unafraid of the customs that frighten people. He was clear about his path and he never wavered from it and one must always admire that. He was truly an original. It’s something so many of us strive for and few of us achieve.”
So. . .good night, sweet prince. I already miss you. I will miss you until the day that my personal End Credits scroll down the screen.
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