Bad times for bad guys

In a dimly lit alley on a cramped Yangon side street, the bad guys cluster together, plotting their next move. A Yaing Min, "the King of Cruelty", twirls his moustache while cultivating a pointy beard with a pointed message: Mess with me, and I will end you. Myint Kyi has been dispatching enemies since 1958 - typically with spears. Phone Naing, muscular and sinewy in tight military pants, talks only in a low snarl.

But these aren't actual evildoers. They're long-time cinematic villains who gather each morning in a tightly packed enclave of video production houses, movie-poster studios and worse-for-wear apartment buildings that serves as the tattered ground zero of the Burmese movie industry.

In the heart of Yangon's Little Hollywood, they sit on tiny plastic chairs, glowering, spitting betel-nut juice onto the ground. They wait and wait, stalking a quarry that is becoming ever more elusive: a day's work.

Through the decades of Myanmar's international isolation, these actors were the twisted faces of wrongdoing that the struggling film industry showed the Burmese people in movies that rarely made it out of the country - and even more rarely dealt with anything that really mattered. Now the nation is glimpsing all the world's pop-culture choices, along with big-budget special effects and foreign bad guys who jet in from Stockholm and Shanghai. In Myanmar's movie industry, it got harder to earn a living being evil.

"In other countries, villains don't have to walk the streets to get their jobs," says A Yaing Min, a former boxer who turned to onscreen villainy in the early 1980s and became a fixture in such local staples as "The Bad Guy with a Pure Heart".

Each morning the bad guys of Yangon and their brethren in the Ko Lu Chaw - the Handsome Guy Group, which is effectively a trade union for cinematic villains - arrive at dawn. They take up positions at outdoor breakfast stalls along 35th and 36th streets, order coffee or tea, and hope for work.

It comes more rarely every day. When it does, it is hardly lucrative - a day or two on bottom-budget videos, a few hundred kyat here and there, perhaps not even practising the villainy that has been their bread and butter for so long.

The government privatised the state-controlled film industry in 2010. Decaying theatres began to close. Films were supplanted by a sausage-grinder glut of cheap home videos made in mere days, even hours. The masses began turning away from overwrought Burmese action movies, choosing instead in times of tentative hope romance, comedy and supernatural horror.

And, of course, the arrival of movies from India, South Korea and Thailand, plus visually arresting Hollywood epics like "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Wolverine", pointed up the lack of production values in the homegrown B-movie culture.

"I worry," says Phone Naing, 45. "I used to work non-stop. But I haven't had regular work in six months." His compatriots nod vigorously. Things have got so bad, he says, that directors press their technicians into service to play bad guys. "They'll be working on a set and someone will say, 'Hey, can you be a villain?'

"You use cheap villains, you get what you pay for."

Membership in the villains' union helps - a bit. Some of the group's 100 members contribute money to support others. And this year a coalition of stars got together to donate 100 bags of rice each month to the society. A Yaing Min points proudly to a recent newspaper tabloid that shows him receiving rice from actress Wut Hmone Shwe Yi, Myanmar's latest "it girl".

In Myanmar's movie industry, actors form unions, develop healthcare plans and lobby for benefits based on the roles they play on screen. There is an ageing-mothers' guild, a spinsters' guild, a comedians' guild.

It's typecasting, pulled into the real world.

The villains' union was founded in 1990 to offer such assistance. Myint Kyi, 73, one of its founders, talks not only of ageing but of the injuries that many actors suffer filming acrobatic, athletic scenes without stuntmen. "There was no one to help us when we die, nobody to pay for our funerals or help with our hospital bills when we were injured," says Myint Kyi, known for 2000's "Blood: A Love Story".

He learned his craft from a 1950s screen villain known as "the Spear Prince". It wasn't exactly a safe apprenticeship. "I'd get cut all the time," he says. His mouth was once cut open and he had to pay for the surgery himself.

Comedians seem to fare better these days, perhaps because Myanmar is hungry for laughter, not crime dramas. This is of no small import to the villains, befuddled by a world where the jokester outpaces the scoundrel.

Just up the street, clustered around a plastic table drinking tea, the comedians see it differently. Kyaw Htoo says the video industry's rise glutted the market for everyone, not just villains. And, like so much media today, an easy overabundance means cheaper production values. He talks of Indian movies with multiple versions in the same movie. But in Myanmar, "they let Father die, they let Mother die. It's cheaper to have a boy without parents."

"We face the same obstacles," he says. "There's just not enough money."

Last year just 17 feature films were produced, down from 60 five years ago, according to the Myanmar Motion Picture Organisation. By contrast more than 1,000 videos were made - and that official figure probably excludes hundreds of others, says U Aye Kyu, a screenwriter and the organisation's vice president.

"When we were young it took many months to shoot a film," he says. "Casting was careful, and people were committed. I'm worried. If they just show foreign films, that's bad news for Myanmar movies."

Industry people also fret about whether a coherent international strategy for Burmese movies will emerge. Few films have gone beyond the borders, says Tom Vick, author of "Asian Cinema: A Field Guide", and those that have are more on the serious side - hardly the potboiler fare these villains are accustomed to.

"They've been thinking about what the local audience wants to see" says Vick, curator of film at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer/Sackler Gallery. "The question is, would any of these films translate well or will they only appeal to people there and just be a curiosity in other places?

"They have to decide how to focus their film industry. Once countries open up, suddenly Hollywood dominates the movie screen ... If 'Skyfall' is taking over, what hope does a local filmmaker have?"

That's precisely the worry that consumes our Central Casting of villainy down on 35th Street. Accustomed for so long to being despised and loving it, they never imagined they'd wind up at the margins of the local show-business caste system, lost in a confusing landscape after being so delightfully nefarious to so many for so long.

http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/bad-times-for-bad-guys/