Drinking for Korean TV
Drinking for Korean TV
I was sitting on a platform on the edge of rice fields next to an old Korean farmer with a total of six fingers. In front of us was a small table of makkolli, the local rice beer. He held out his cup. I poured. Then he reciprocated. We were about to drink when…
“Stop!”
The director brought things to a halt, again. We’d already tried this shot—a standard foodporn closeup—a few times, drinking the bad takes. And now we’d have to try it again. We were finishing a grueling day of living my dream as a travel show host with the most inefficient director in East Asia.
He’d scheduled a big massage scene at a hotel on Jeju Island, flew the crew and me down there, only to find out the hotel didn’t allow filming. He’d set up a scene with female sea urchin divers, and we’d arrive to find that no one had told them about it. He had driven us five hours through a monsoon to do a fishing scene only to discover that the fishing place was closed because of… rain. So we drove five hours back to Seoul.
The crew was on the verge of mutiny.
This late summer afternoon was one of the few times things went well. Started out the day filming me walking through a museum. We filmed a lady making a special traditional cloth that breathes like magic in the summer heat. Then shots of walking along rice paddies. Quite pastoral, really. During the summer rice is just grass. It’s a wet manicured lawn that stretches on for acres.
Usually my scripts were written in Korean by a Korean who had not done much traveling, then translated by interns. I would have to say things like, “This reminds me of my mother’s cooking,” while ogling a table loaded down with raw fish. Believe me, my mom didn’t make that in Alabama.
This time, however, I had no lines. I was to look like I’d spontaneously met this farmer and scored a drink with him, though we didn’t speak each other’s language. In reality, we’d been introduced and got along well. My Korean isn’t great, but it gets better after a few drinks. Makkolli is usually milky-white and fizzy, but this one had been filtered. Amber. Clear. Ricey. Not too strong but strong enough.
We were losing sunlight, so the cinematographer forced the director’s hand and made him start shooting, which meant we had to start drinking. There are certain drinking rituals in Korea, especially when drinking with an elder, that are designed to get one drunk quickly. I think we were both equally starving, so we ripped into a pajeon, a kind of scallion pancake that somehow gets crispier and tastier the farther you drive from Seoul. At this point, I didn’t care about making government-sponsored TV. This was one of those moments indexed for that big flash of my life the moment before death. Hazy setting sun, green rice fields backed by greener mountains. The whole scene was staged, but in this one brilliant moment it was real.
And then the moment was over. We wrapped. The crew pounced on the food and booze like velociraptors. I napped in the van, then returned to my motel room with the cracked toilet seat. I’d never see the farmer again, nor the director. He got replaced. Reality caught up with us all.