Preview

Nineteen eighty-six marked the height of Dolph Lundgren's powers. Following his triumphant portrayal of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Hollywood pundits touted Lundgren as the Swedish Schwarzenegger. With his girlfriend, the flat- topped Jamaican actress Grace Jones, he formed a muscle-bound glamour couple that paparazzi could hardly resist. Therefore, it made little sense that Lundgren would follow a rookie producer into a small African kingdom to make a B-movie called Red Scorpion.It didn't make any sense, except that the film's producer was Jack Abramoff-- the same Jack Abramoff who bilked Indian tribes of $80 million and brought down the most powerful House Republican in the process. But, long before his siren song seduced congressmen like Tom DeLay onto the ethical shoals, it tempted the Scandinavian Adonis to abandon his burgeoning stardom for what seemed like a big-ticket production. Abramoff's winning quality was that he thought big and took others there with him. When he put together a production, even on his maiden film, he didn't just sign up a major studio. He signed up foreign investors to help cover his ambitious budget. He even signed up a foreign army to make the action scenes seem real. As he mulled the Red Scorpion offer, Lundgren got a tempting taste of Abramoff's largesse, when, thanks to the producer, he starred in his very own grip-and- grin photo-op with the president of the United States. "In [Lundgren's] living room somewhere, there is a photo of him with Ronald Reagan," the movie's production manager, Avi Kleinberger, told me. Last spring, Kleinberger ran into Lundgren at the Cannes Film Festival. They began discussing the Abramoff scandal, which had just begun to spill into the international press. As the rest of the world expressed shock at Abramoff's venality, Lundgren shrugged. "Look, he was always connected with politicians, and you just had a feeling about the guy," he told Kleinberger. "I knew it was going to end badly for him." How did a thick-necked action star foresee the tragic fate that most of Washington seems to have missed? Lundgren witnessed Abramoff in his Max Bialystock moment. As the 27-year-old producer of the doomed film that was Red Scorpion, Abramoff previewed the signature style that would make him so famous 20 years later. In 1986, Jack Abramoff, like half the twentysomethings in Southern California, had an idea for a screenplay: the rollicking tale of Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan anticommunist rebel. Following the first rule of story craft, Abramoff pitched what he knew, and he knew Savimbi's story well. After spending his early twenties overseeing the College Republicans, Abramoff set up the Washington office of a conservative student group called the International Freedom Foundation (IFF)--a group that was later revealed to be a covert propaganda operation of South Africa's apartheid regime. (Military code name: Pacman.) That Abramoff could imagine Savimbi as an archetypal Hollywood hero wasn't that surprising, considering that Washington conservatives--with an assist from the IFF--had been lauding him as one. At a 1986 black-tie dinner for the Conservative Political Action Committee, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the doyenne of the Reaganauts, passionately described Savimbi as a "linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior ... one of the few authentic heroes of our time." Hollywood development offices often search for film subjects that they can rip from newspaper headlines. But rarely do they glean their material from agitprop supplied by foreign intelligence agencies and conservative think tanks. There was also a little matter of poetic license. In their celebrations of the rebel leader, Washington conservatives overlooked the abundant evidence suggesting that Savimbi was an ideological chameleon with little compunction about stomping on human rights. But never mind the nuances--Abramoff had found his muse. And Abramoff's well-connected Beverly Hills family supplied him the outlet, an entree to Warner Brothers. "It was Jack using Jack's contacts," says Jeff Pandin, who worked with him at IFF. A script doctor turned Abramoff's folkloric version of Savimbi into a bad parody of the loud whiz-bang cold war thriller then popular with audiences. Red Scorpion, described as the "African Rambo," tells the story of a Soviet-trained assassin (Lundgren) sent to murder a Savimbi-like character. In the end, Lundgren comes to understand the virtues of the rebel cause and turns on his communist bosses, killing lots of Cubans in the process. (Red Scorpion's potty-mouthed dialogue bears tonal similarities to Abramoff's infamous e-mail exchanges: "An American can swear whenever, wherever, however much he or she fuckin' well pleases!") When Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the picture, Abramoff was suddenly living his Hollywood dream. Abramoff sold Red Scorpion as a work of verisimilitude. He claimed to know the region cold, and he would shoot his film in Swaziland, the small Bantu kingdom wedged between South Africa and Mozambique. His attraction to the region was financial as well as ideological. By hiring the services of the South African film industry, which suffered under the anti-apartheid boycott, he could exploit massive tax deductions available to investors there. "Sometimes the deductions totaled twice or three times the investments," says Peter Leon, the South African lawyer who drafted an initial contract for these investors. From his work with the IFF, Abramoff had acquired a host of helpful friends in South Africa. When he approached acquaintances in the Johannesburg Jewish community, though only novice film investors, they shelled out a hefty pile of rands. All told, he raised $16 million for Red Scorpion--quite an impressive budget for the genre. In 1987, Abramoff bought a house in Johannesburg and began commuting to the film's set in Swaziland. The idea of living with the cast and crew apparently never crossed his mind. "It's hard enough to find kosher restaurants in Washington," says Pandin. "Besides, Jack's not the roughing-it type." But the Swaziland location was just across the border from his old friends in the South African military, which had supplied him with between 30 and 40 troop transports and armed personnel carriers to make a film celebrating their Angolan ally. Despite Abramoff's knack for making friends and acquiring military hardware, he showed early signs of his deficiency in the political sensitivity department. The implications of South African soldiers moving armor into a neighboring black country escaped him. But they didn't escape the Swazi king. Carmen Argenziano, who played a Cuban colonel, told me, "When they started bringing in military ordinance, [the Swazi government] said, `What are you doing? Are you crazy?'" The king's obstreperousness posed a problem for Abramoff: He could either abandon his patrons or move to another country. The South Africans urged the latter, proposing he set up shop in Namibia, on their northwest border. But this carried risks. "I strongly advised him against filming there," Leon says. That's because South Africa controlled the territory in defiance of the United Nations. And shifting to Namibia may have been bad politics, but it was worse business. The contract with Warner Brothers stipulated that the film have nothing to do with South Africa. When lawyers like Leon pointed out the possibilities for calamity, Abramoff brushed them aside. He calculated that nobody in Los Angeles would ever learn of his Namibian move. "It was a huge country, and the chances of getting spotted--that somebody from the West would find them--was not great," Kleinberger told me. That might have been a reasonable calculation--if Abramoff were making a film with someone other than Grace Jones's boyfriend. Lundgren and Jones had a tumultuous relationship, and, when a moment of tumult coincided with the filming, Jones traveled to the set to patch things up. At the time, following her star turn in Conan the Destroyer, it was hard to miss Jones. And her appearance in an apartheid country caused the stir you would expect. Argenziano recalls staying at the Kalahari Sands Hotel in the city of Windhoek. "Any time in the day, these old African bush people, people who had never seen an escalator, would hang around the escalator, jumping on and off. Then there were these old Boers, you know how they tolerated the black people. ... And into this scene walks Grace Jones." Following her visit, The Namibian, an independent weekly, ran a story on the film, from which The New York Times caught wind of Red Scorpion's shooting location. Dismayed by Abramoff's transgression, Warner Brothers canceled their distribution agreement. Without studio backing, the project spun out of control. The South African investors panicked that the movie would never get made--and that they would never see their tax deduction. "Jack kept sweet-talking the [investors] about everything coming right," Leon says. But, back on set, "he was overwhelmed," Kleinberger remembers. When he saw extras milling about, waiting for their scenes, he would kvetch they were wasting his money. Indeed, he had reasons to worry. Although the film's director, Joseph Zito, had a long history of churning out B-movies, including Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, he directed Scorpion at a slower pace. The logistics of shooting in Namibia, where even basic props were difficult to procure, delayed production. "You had to travel back to South Africa to get something like a nail," says Kleinberger. The production extended months longer than anticipated, stranding the cast in Namibia. Lundgren's discomfort in Namibia was the least of Abramoff's problems. Abramoff had no way to pay mounting expenses. Actors and catering companies went without pay, as did military consultants from the South African Defense Forces. All he could provide was the promise that money would arrive after the film's release. But Abramoff must have known this money would never materialize. His new distributor was Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, whose highest- grossing film to date had been Maniac Cop. And, thanks to the Times, the film faced the wrath of anti-apartheid activists. Before its release, the tennis player Arthur Ashe, who chaired Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, declared, "If you have part of the South African Army as extras, it's hard to see the film as anything less than an endorsement of South Africa's policies." In the end, not even Lundgren's rising star could save the film. Critics panned it--"The movie's reflective moments belong to Mr. Lundgren's sweaty chest," the Times quipped--and the public skipped past it. Red Scorpion grossed $4 million, leaving a $12 million debt. Instead of staying in South Africa to clean up this mess, Abramoff returned home. When actors launched a bankruptcy inquiry against Abramoff, he failed to show in court. "He just disappeared into the wilderness," says Leon. When his creditors reached him, he struck the same hangdog pose that he wore last year before John McCain's committee. Monyeen Lee, who cast the movie, says, "He took the calls, but he just said, `There's nothing I can do. We're insolvent.'" This experience would cause most aspiring moguls to seek a new career. Not Abramoff. Five years later, he released Red Scorpion 2, albeit without wattage comparable to Lundgren. But, in a sense, Abramoff never truly produced a sequel until he began lobbying, a vehicle that permitted him to properly replicate the chaos and antics of the original Red Scorpion. It is the rare sequel even more spectacular than the original.