Back in Show Business-in the Philippines.

Update: 15 Feb. 2014

This is Don Gordon Bell, and well... for a Long long time, I have not touched my blog nor even been part of the discourse on This Thing of Ours-Adoption...I have been living in the Philippines, focusing on just getting established and well, getting ready for the last chapters of my life. I found much has changed, much has stayed the same, population has exploded in the Philippines since I left in 1985. Poverty is worse than ever, though the economy is growing at a high rate the trickle-down effect is not providing jobs.

Yet children born to unwed mothers in the Philippines for the most part, perhaps due to being one of the largest Catholic Christian communities in the world, STAY with their Mothers. Society in the Philippines tends to overlook a person's personal parentage with acceptance, unlike in Korea (Rep of Korea or South Korea not the communist run North Korea) where any hint of Taintedness or being Not perfect can kill a career before it begins. Confucian thinking pollutes the mindset of even Catholic and Protestant Christian in Korea in general with the idea that to be Orphaned, or even Adopted...proved that you were tainted according to this non-religious social structure that controls still a large majority of modern Korean society...But I digress.

Since my unfortunate divorce from a Korean national in 2010 it has been challenging to adjust back to living no longer in my birth mother's land, to 'making it' in Manila. I lived almost ten years back in '75 to '85 working in the film making business, starting with "Apocalypse Now". It was contact with Andrew Leavold, that crazy Aussie whose passion for B-movies lead him and I to do interviews on skype back in 2008, awakening memories of my adventures as a B-Movie Character Actor. I returned several times, met Nick Nicholson, Henry Strzalkowski, Steve Rogers, David Light, and FB contact with many other foreigners that I once worked in both International and Filipino action/drama genre films.

Over the last 18 months I 're-invented myself' with my hobby as an amatuer photographer, developing the 'eye' for what looks good on a scene in a film or even with a persons face. I understood from working with John Silao, a Filipino who emigrated to the states as a teenager, in our college days at Mt. San Antonio College. We have known each other since 1973 after both of us got out of the armed forces and through common high school friends shared a house in West Covina, Cal. and in 1975 came to Manila for a 3 week vacation that for John lasted for 3 months before he returned to Cal. to continue to study photography. 

I was caught up in the APOCALYPSE NOW film, the first major production on the Vietnam War. My 'tour of duty' was to last ten years, as I became involved in the Casting Dept. under Ken Metcalfe...teaching foreigners from many lands who had arrived in the P.I. (Philippine Islands) to be extras in this great war epic. I was in my element, and worked to coordinate all the extras, Vietnamese Boat Refugees, D'Ifugao tribe of the Mountain Provinces who played the Montagnards or Mountain Men of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, plus all the Foreign Background extras playing US troops. It was a glorious adventure and healing at the same time for myself.

Hollywood had come to the Philippines big time and for 16 months I worked on the filming. One film led to another during this Golden Age of the cinema in the Philippines, as one by one, foreign productions came to film on location, in the P.I. 

(To be continued)