Since finishing a year at Sanford Meis-ner’s Neighborhood Playhouse Amber had done a lot of off-off-Broadway theater, one TV commercial and a great part in a small theater in Boston for the summer. She had a forth and final call back for a major part on Broadway but knew as soon as she finished her monologue she had not had a good reading. Several times Amber made it to a final call back for a feature film but each time was asked if she would do a nude scene. Although an admitted exhibitionist she was resolute in her determination not to accept roles based on her body, which was spectacular, but on her ability as a good actress, which she was.

Now at last she had a real role, and had even told the director, Mr. Wu, as politely as she could, that she did not do nude scenes. This seemed not to be a problem.

Of course, as she explained to her boy friend William, this was a Chinese film company, the first mainland China film company to make a film in the US. She would be the only non-Chinese supporting role in the movie. She even got to die, and not until the film was nearly over. She would play an American who is paid to marry a young Chinese gangster so that he can get his green card, a practice that is no longer possible. Although the marriage is a financial arrangement, she falls in love with her gangster and convinces him to give up his gangster ways. This leads to the couple’s downfall.

Amber was very excited. And, on top of every thing else, she had gotten her boy friend William work as an extra. She suggested that maybe he could get some stunt work, as there was lots of martial arts in the script. William was a painter who relied on the income from his martial arts school to augment what he made from selling paintings of Amber in tight leopard skin dresses, for which there was a limited market. William stopped painting for a moment, thinking about the Chinese martial arts movies he had seen, then said, “I don’t know.”
Most of the shooting, figuratively and literally, was done in China Town or the quieter back streets of Greenwich Village. It was interesting for William how different New Yorkers responded to the making of a movie. In addition to working as an extra he helped to keep people from walking into scenes during shooting. There were no ropes or barriers. On the first day of Amber’s big chase scene William was stationed at the end of a quiet Village street and told to signal the director, Mr. Wu, when no one was walking on the cross street or stop people for the few moments it took to complete each shot. The scene involved five armed men kicking in the door of a brownstone and firing as they ran into the building. Amber and her new husband jump out the front window to the sidewalk where the bad guys had just kicked the door in. For the first take the street was clear except for an attractive lone woman in a business suit walking toward the intersection. William tried to stop the woman from walking into the scene but she brushed him aside.

“I live here,” she said without looking at William,

William spread his arms and shrugged in Wu’s direction. The director waited until the woman was almost on a line with the door. The blanks used in the automatic rifles were incredibly loud; louder than the real thing. The director yelled the Chinese equivalent of “action”. When the kicking of the door and the automatic fire commenced mere feet from the nicely dressed woman she put her hands on her ears and screamed her brains out while the camera man with the handheld camera got a nice close up of her wide open mouth. When the director saw the rushes later that evening of the screaming woman he would be inspired to even greater heights of cinema verity.

William had become friends with the head production assistant who introduced himself as Charley. It was Charley’s job to find odd items at the last moment and solve problems. Some times it was something simple like a battery or a bicycle. William would on occasion help him find whatever was needed. The last time it was a fat lady and William brought his fat friend Eileen. Now Charley needed fifteen Italians, tomorrow. William and Amber lived in Paterson New, Jersey, where they had moved for the cheap loft space. They knew plenty of Italians. William’s martial arts school was on Cianci Street where one could find a half dozen Italian bars, social clubs, and one Italian restaurant. He was sure he could find fifteen Italians who would like to be in a Chinese movie. He was wrong.

That night when they got home he and Amber ate supper and hit the bars and social clubs. The first social club they went to was empty except for a waiter.
“Where is everybody?” William asked. ”There is a fix at the track. Someone let it out of the bag. Now everybody knows. They’re all at the track except me. I’m fucking stuck here, but Tony said he’d put two hundred on the nose for me. Pays six to one, but with all those guys betting it will pull the odds down. Still, it will be good.”

“I don’t suppose you would like to get up at six tomorrow morning to be in a Chinese movie would you?” William asked.

It was true, all the bars and clubs were empty or closed. William got on the phone and called fifteen of his Puerto Rican and Cuban students and told them to meet him in front of the school at six AM. He told them to wear suits.

“You sure these guys are Italian?” Charley asked William.

“They’re Puerto Rican, almost the same, just don’t tell an Italian that,” explained William.

Wu was explaining their scene to Williams’s students:

“You come out of your coffee drinking place. You see these Chinese gangster bastards stuck in traffic. You pull them out of their car and rough them up. Cut—end of scene.”

The first take didn’t go well and they had to wait a while for the driver of the car to calm down. Joey, William’s senior student, had dragged the driver out of the car tearing half his shirt off his back and slammed him into the car a couple of times. The passengers locked the doors and rolled up the windows as the other students rocked and kicked the car or pressed their faces on the glass of the windows raging, “Get out of the car you fucking Chinese bastards,” ad-libbing a little. They shot the scene several times but in the end Wu used mostly the first take.

There was more of the chase to film. Chow Sing, the actor playing Amber’s husband, was supposed to get wounded and go down. Then Amber would bravely pull him to his feet telling him not to give up. They ran down an alley where they climbed a fence and got shot, Chow Sing’s stunt man falls off the fence onto a half-dozen empty beer cartons laid at the foot of the fence to break his fall, later removed for the shot of Chow Sing’s dead body. Amber would die midway over the fence, her climb interrupted by a bullet in the back. Hanging head down she would then bite a small balloon filled with karo syrup and red food coloring, letting it dribble from her mouth for a close up. The depressed American makeup artist who claimed to have mixed seven gallons of the Karo syrup mixture warned Amber not to swallow any as she was pretty sure all that the red food dye would not be good for her, not to mention all that sugar.

Director Wu was not happy with the pristine Greenwich Village street for the final moments of the chase. He felt he needed a more dramatic, grittier, location for the killing scene. He started walking, barking orders to his camera crew. Wu had a permit that day only to shoot on the Village street. The three New York City cops assigned to the movie, whose job up to now had been to keep any off-duty NYC cop from shooting at the gun-toting Chinese gangsters, started demanding to know where Wu was going. Wu, who had forgotten how to speak English, just kept walking and answering in Mandarin. The cops started yelling into their radios about Chinese gunmen actors. The entire film company marched steadily toward Sixth Avenue and Houston, the widest intersection in Manhattan. As soon as they hit Houston Wu started giving rapid-fire commands to the crew and actors while the cops stopped traffic, still yelling into their radios. It was rush hour. Commuters were hanging out their car windows trying to figure out what was going on. The sidewalks were packed with people rushing to catch their subway. It was the busiest time of day on the busiest intersection in the city.

Charley held a piece of cardboard up with “This is a Movie” written on it in magic marker. Wu yelled action and Amber and Chow Sing started running across Houston, the gangsters were firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition and hitting nothing except for putting one slug in Chow Sing. Chow Sing went down. Amber dragged him to his feet, screaming at him so loud you could hear her over the gun fire, Wu was screaming at the cameramen with the hand held cameras and pointing at the screaming commuters. Some were on their knees, others crouching in doorways. It was a scene.

That night New York commuters arrived home and turned on the news to view the slaughter on Sixth Avenue. It was not mentioned. Among the witnesses of the scene were a few husbands, who had promised not to drink after work, and were now viewed with suspicion.

Much time was spent on lighting, camera angles and positioning Amber for the shot of her dead on the fence. When Wu was finally satisfied he said the word and the cameras rolled.

As the red Karo syrup first dripped then streamed from Ambers mouth William heard director Wu murmur in English, “Beautiful, just beautiful.”

A year later William and Amber were told by their favorite Chinese waiter that he had seen her in a movie. Amber was of course excited to see it and they went to the late show straight from the restaurant. About a quarter into the movie there was Amber in the buff in a love scene with Chow Sing. It was shot in a shadowy bedroom and you could not tell it was not her.

“Oh well,” said Amber; at least she had a great body.”