"What a terrific read, a charming, insightful and often hilarious look at the Alice-in-Wonderland world of filmmaking in today's Russia - the Marx Brothers meet the ghost of Karl Marx! I couldn't put it down" Henry Jaglom Filmmaker

ARE MY BLINKERS SHOWING?

ADVENTURES IN FILMMAKING IN THE NEW RUSSIA

by Michael York

The unlikely and very funny tale of a world-famous actor making an action movie in today's go-go capitalist Russia

He was the raging, youthful Tybalt in Franco Zeffirelli's classic film of "Romeo and Juliet". He played opposite Liza Minnelli's divinely decadent Sally Bowles in the Oscar-winning "Cabaret." He escaped to the future in "Logan's Run." And he won over an entirely new generation in the "Austin Powers" movies, where as Basil Exposition he engaged in the following exchange:
BASIL: Austin, the Cold War is over!
AUSTIN: Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh, comrades? Eh?
BASIL: Austin . . . we won.
AUSTIN: Oh, smashing, groovy. Yay capitalism!

Yes, the Cold War is over, we won - and now Michael York is off to make the biggest independent film in Russian history . . . in the capitalist Wild Wild East that is today's Moscow. York is costarring alongside the 300-pound, 6-foot 6-inch Russian bodybuilder and movie idol Alexander Nevsky (yes, Nevsky's hero is Arnold Schwarzenegger) in an action film called "Moscow Heat". The only problem is that, for starters, the travel visas have barely managed to come through on time, an enraged Russian husband is threatening to kill a philandering member of the American crew, and filming - even in the middle of a shot - always comes to a standstill as single-magazine cameras are constantly being reloaded because that is "the Russian way of doing things." To say nothing of the fact that the hotel may well have compromised the star's privacy by thoughtfully emblazoning messages "Michael Incognito York."

Michael York has a self-deprecating sense of humor and an eye trained on the imponderables of day-to-day life (especially in faraway places-what on earth did the hotel's laundry list mean by the mysterious men's garment it called "blinkers"?). He also has an increasingly alarmed sense of how the new Russia, for all its capitalist trappings, is becoming ever more like the old Russia under an ever more autocratic government. In "Are My Blinkers Showing?" York has crafted a deliciously readable insider's account that transcends genre. There's much here about the actor's craft, much about Russia then and now - but most of all there's the singular pleasure of being in the company of a witty and delightfully articulate observer of people, places, and the remarkable adventure called moviemaking.