The Unvanquished [I/II]
Arash Alavi
April 18, 2001
The unvanquished
Exiled Iranian film superstar Behrouz Vossoughi traded
persecution in Iran for obscurity in the United States.
Twenty-three long years later, he's ready for a comeback.
By Robert Avila
LAST YEAR'S GRAND prize at the San Francisco International
Film Festival, the prestigious Akira Kurosawa lifetime
achievement award, was slated to go to Iranian auteur Abbas
Kiarostami - and it nearly did. But on being handed the
trophy, the renowned director graciously announced he was
accepting it instead on behalf of an exiled Iranian actor
seated in the audience, Behrouz Vossoughi. The explosion of
applause from the largely Iranian audience masked the
consternation that must have struck everyone else. Abbas
Kiarostami, universally acknowledged as one of the world's
best filmmakers, is also among the first of a growing
number of Iranian directors whose international acclaim has
brought attention to Iran as one of the more fertile
grounds for filmmaking anywhere. No one disputes his
importance.
But who is Behrouz Vossoughi?
Amid the applause, a handsome, dark-haired man, 50ish, in a
black jacket and red tie, ascended the stage and approached
the podium as Kiarostami's interpreter explained to the
Farsi-impaired: "This is an award for all the years he's
worked in the cinema in Iran, and all the years he's
awaited work here in this country. And I look forward to
his return to the cinema."
The name may be unfamiliar to the rest of us, but Behrouz
Vossoughi is synonymous with cinema and stardom to Iranians
the world over. More than a celebrated actor, this year's
S.F. International Film Festival "Unvanquished" honoree was
one of prerevolutionary Iran's biggest pop icons, a
box-office Bruce Willis with the acting chops of a De Niro
or Brando. He'd already set the standard for tough-guy
roles before becoming central to the Iranian neorealist new
wave of the '70s. Paired for a time, on-screen and in real
life, with Googoosh - the glamorous Iranian diva whose
recent stadium-filling tour of the United States marked a
return from 22 years of government-enforced seclusion -
Behrouz Vossoughi represented all the sophistication,
style, and success of modern, urban Iran. He was gossiped
about in the papers and invited to parties at the Royal
Court. The nation got to know him on a first-name basis.
Even his hairstyle in Ghaisar - the pivotal Iranian new
wave film - set a national trend, compelling Iran's barbers
to advertise a "Ghaisari" for any man who wanted one. You
could not get bigger than Behrouz.
That was before he came to the United States. Arriving in
1978 as a visitor, shortly before the Iranian Revolution
toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and led to Ayatollah
Khomeini's Islamic Republic, Vossoughi ended up joining an
unparalleled wave of immigration to the United States from
Iran. As the new regime came to power, it became clear to
Vossoughi that he would be blacklisted if he returned to
his country. He found himself indefinitely stranded in Los
Angeles, relegated to an inconstant series of television
bit parts and stereotyped roles in B movies. 1991's
video-store vehicle, Terror in Beverly Hills, may have been
the nadir of a difficult career in the United States:
Vossoughi played the dreaded "Middle Eastern terrorist"
who, in this case, kidnaps the president's daughter. His
life has since followed the trajectory of the larger group
of émigrés seeking refuge in the United States, among
Americans who, for years, were too ready to equate all
Iranians with the demonized government they were fleeing.
Trapped within and between the politics of two nations,
Behrouz Vossoughi has been living a double exile - not just
from his homeland, but from the cinema.
New wave, Iranian style
One hundred and eighty of Iran's 400 movie houses were
burned down between 1978 and 1979, the years Vossoughi
began his stay in the United States, but it wasn't the
first or only time film has come under fire there. You
could say Iran has always been ambivalent toward its
cinema, which has been alternately beloved and reviled by
the government and its opponents alike. A shah of the Qajar
dynasty introduced film to Iran in 1900. But technical and
economic limitations hindered the growth of a national film
industry until the 1930s. Cinema also carried the taint of
Western cultural influence, a sore point for many Iranian
nationalists. Muslim religious leaders labeled the early
films and theaters immoral. Mobs, goaded by religious
disapproval, attacked the first movie houses. As mass
opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi mounted in the
late 1970s, crowds of demonstrators again torched movie
theaters, along with banks and liquor stores, as symbols of
Western-backed oppression.
But film was incredibly attractive to a state bent on
modernization and control. It had the potential to reach
the majority of a disparate and largely illiterate
population. In the years after World War II, with the
support of both the Iranian and American governments,
entrepreneurs gradually made movies the entertainment of
the masses. Later, under the Ministry of Culture and Art,
the Iranian state cultivated avant-garde film as part of a
bourgeois cultural policy meant to bolster the government's
prestige abroad and thereby maintain its authority at home.
It was in both the film of mass entertainment and this new
art-house cinema that Behrouz Vossoughi made his name.
Vossoughi, the oldest of five sons, was born in a small
Azerbaijani town in 1938 but raised in Tehran. As he
described it to me in an interview near his home in
Sausalito, his early attraction to acting made the decision
to become an actor a simple one. Telling his parents was
another matter. His father, like other very religious men
in 1950s Iran, did not go to the cinema. So Vossoughi kept
his career a secret for as long as possible. When his
father heard his son's name mentioned among the cast of a
radio drama, he lied. "I tried to explain to him, there are
a lot of Behrouz Vossoughis."
Vossoughi got work dubbing films (a big business, since,
owing to technical limitations, all Iranian films were
dubbed). The job required carefully watching the same
sequence over and over, and Vossoughi found it good
training. He landed his first film role with The
Hundred-Kilo Groom (1961), and was an immediate hit. As a
darkly romantic leading man, he made a series of adventure
films and romances before the end of the decade, winning
his father's approval along the way, and became so big a
star that Tehran's producers colluded to cap his salary.
Vossoughi felt limited, however, and by more than the
opposition of the producers. It was not just a question of
money. Iran's popular cinema made mostly singing and
dancing entertainments, crude comedies, and treacly
romances designed for mass consumption by the new urban
working class. To Vossoughi, such roles no longer presented
any challenge and seemed a dead end. "I wanted to have a
revolution in my career; I didn't want the same career that
everybody had in the cinema in Iran."
His revolution came in 1969 with Ghaisar (Caesar), a film
independently produced by Vossoughi and writer-director
Masoud Kimiai, later a prominent new wave filmmaker. Based
on actual Tehran police reports passed to Kimiai by a
cousin in the force, the film concerned a Tehrani jahel
(tough guy) who avenges the deaths of his sister and
brother at the hands of a local crime ring. The revenge
plot may not have been new, but the realistic setting in
Tehran's poorest neighborhoods, together with a tragic
ending for the hero, helped make Ghaisar a bold departure
from the typical formula. "When [Kimiai] told me the story
of Ghaisar, I saw something different," Vossoughi
remembers. "And I was right; I was really right."
Ghaisar ended up being one of two films that inaugurated
the Iranian new wave in 1969. The other was Gav (The Cow),
by Dariush Mehrjui, about a peasant driven mad by the death
of his only cow. Drawing on techniques and themes of the
French new wave and Italian neorealism, Ghaisar and Gav
debuted a gritty realism that took as its subject ordinary,
often desperate people suffering tragic ends in a corrupt
world.
The political implications were clear. Ghaisar, which also
drew inspiration from the American western, resurrected
vigilante justice in the face of an ineffectual police and
court system. Gav's depiction of the futility of rural life
belied the propaganda for the shah's agrarian reform policy
and earned the film a government ban - although, in a
pattern that would be repeated under the Islamic Republic,
Gav's critical success in Europe and the United States
eventually convinced the authorities to allow it to be
shown conditionally in Iran.
Sleek and sexy Ghaisar, meanwhile, was an unprecedented
financial success at home, without the intervention of the
foreign press. After a brief shelving and reediting by the
censors for excessive violence, it became one of the
highest-grossing films domestically in Iranian cinema
history, and a new cinema was born. Many among the new
generation of filmmakers it gave rise to are making films
today, including Kimiai, Mehrjui, Perviz Kimiavi, Bahman
Farmanara, Bahram Beizai, and Kiarostami (who, nine years
after designing the title sequences for Ghaisar, made his
first feature film, Gozaresh, or The Report, in 1978).
Iran's new art cinema came to represent part of the larger
culture of opposition to the Pahlavi regime. It channeled
the pessimism of a new generation of artists and
intellectuals chafing under a corrupt political order. Its
critical success expanded the audience for Iranian film at
home by wooing the Westernized, educated middle classes who
had formerly ignored the national cinema in favor of
European and American movies. And Behrouz Vossoughi, an
innovative actor with box-office draw, contributed
significantly to the bridging of this gap between popular
and elite cultures.
The politics of abstraction
Vossoughi would continue to make popular films, but he was
now also the darling of the new wave directors. This was a
unique achievement, according to Jamsheed Akrami, whose
documentary on Iranian cinema, Friendly Persuasion, is
currently making the rounds at film festivals. "He had the
dual distinction of being a bankable star for commercial
projects and a very capable and versatile actor for the new
wave films," Akrami says. "Behrouz would not shy away from
taking chances in new wave films. He would alter his
physique, wear heavy makeup, or even use [i.e., dub] his
own voice in these films."
Vossoughi pushed himself to embody the most complex and
disparate of characters, often spending months developing a
role. In his own brand of method acting, the self-taught
Vossoughi slept in a mental hospital for the character of
Majid, the mentally handicapped protagonist of Sooteh Delan
(Broken Hearts). His performance in Gavaznha (The Deer),
perhaps his finest, came from research he did in disguise
among drug addicts in the mean streets of South Tehran.
"From the beginning, I really wanted to be different,"
Vossoughi says. "And I really wanted to challenge myself in
creating a character." Gavaznha and Sooteh Delan, he adds,
were written with him in mind. "They would say, 'Behrouz,
we've been working on this script for two years for you and
just you - if you don't play the part, we are not going to
do this movie.' "
Ghaisar's unqualified success meant Vossoughi was now
powerful enough to dictate terms to the film producers and
cinema owners. "Now they came to me asking, 'What do you
want?' It was a very good question." But if he had his way
with the producers, the government was another story.
Although treated publicly as a national treasure and wined
and dined by the royals, behind the scenes his films, and
others of the new wave, were frequently censored by the
shah's Ministry of Arts and Culture. "There was a special
section of the Ministry of Culture, 12 people who would sit
down and read the story and then stamp every page, which
meant that nothing could be added or subtracted from the
page. And when a movie was finished they watched it to see
that it matched every page of the script."
The censors, a blunt lot, were frequently gotten around.
For example, Tangsir (1973), directed by Amir Naderi and
starring Vossoughi, had a strongly antiauthoritarian theme.
In this story of a popular uprising in the southern region
of Tangestan, the villains include an exploitative merchant
class backed by the police and religious authorities. The
implication that a mullah could be corrupt was unheard of.
But because it was based on a true story, which had been
the subject of a popular book by Sadeq Chubak, and set 60
years in the past, it eluded the crude radar of the
censors.
Gavaznha, released in 1975, was less fortunate, inviting
the government's unwelcome scrutiny. The last film
Vossoughi made with Kimiai, it featured a sympathetic
portrayal of a young communist militant named Ghodrat who
hides out with an old friend, Sayyed (Vossoughi), a former
idealist turned drug addict, until they are surrounded and
crushed by the overwhelming forces of the state's police.
After it was featured in Tehran's third international film
festival, where Vossoughi walked off with another award for
best actor, the government ordered the picture closed. In
the end, several minutes of offending scenes were excised,
the ending was changed, and Gavaznha was rereleased. But
the film's antigovernment bias remained so overt that
SAVAK, the shah's notorious secret police, interrogated and
threatened Vossoughi, leaving him with no doubt as to their
attitude toward roles like the one he had taken in
Gavaznha. "After that, every time I went out I was looking
over my back," he says. "For six months I was like that. It
was a nightmare. I hired a bodyguard to follow me wherever
I went."
Pressure from the regime plagued the new wave filmmakers as
a whole. Iranian art film, then and today, has had to be
subsidized by the state, but with that relationship has
come the intrusion of state policy into the filmmaking
process. As censorship continued to dog new wave
filmmakers, content became more abstract. Criticism had to
be made indirectly through symbolism and metaphor (much as
in Iranian cinema today). This abstraction led some
filmmakers to increasing cinematic complexity on the order
of a Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and others toward a seemingly naive
style of storytelling, as in many of today's child-centered
Iranian films. On the whole, abstraction made the new wave
films less accessible to the mass of moviegoers (one thing
that Iranian cinema today doesn't have to worry about as
much, since government censorship essentially eliminates
all foreign competition). By the end of the 1970s, new wave
filmmakers were facing the erosion not only of their
audience, but also of their financial base, as the
government directed its funding increasingly toward
television and educational films rather than features.
But the rejection of these films in Iran was no passive
affair: one of the pivotal events in the escalation of
unrest in 1978 was a lethal fire set at a movie house in
Abadan. The government blamed the torching of the Cinema
Rex, in which more than 400 theatergoers died, on Islamic
militants. But many thought the timing and location of the
attack did not fit the usual pattern of protest. The
theater itself was situated in a poor neighborhood, and the
fire coincided with the screening of the well-known
antigovernment film Gavaznha, starring Behrouz Vossoughi.
The fire was therefore widely believed to have been the
work of SAVAK, and it sparked waves of protest around the
country, ultimately feeding the mass uprising that was
Iran's revolution before it consolidated under the Islamic
right. Shortly after Abadan, all film production in Iran
ceased. The Iranian new wave was over.
Of hostages and B movies
By 1980, Iran was no longer an obscure or exotic place to
Americans. News coverage of events in and around Iran in
1978 and 1979 made Americans more aware of the country than
ever before. Stories of mass demonstrations and riots
highlighted the erosion of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's
power. The shah himself - who had been an ally of the
United States government ever since the CIA put him
squarely on the throne back in 1953 - made headlines as the
subject of the Carter administration's new emphasis on
human rights abuses worldwide. He was finally forced to
flee Iran in January 1979; he sought asylum in the United
States but was denied. The following month, after
revolutionary militants briefly captured the U.S. embassy
in Tehran, the State Department evacuated the families of
embassy personnel and urged all U.S. citizens in Iran to
leave. In October the shah, dying of cancer, was granted
entry to the United States for medical treatment,
triggering angry demonstrations from tens of thousands of
Iranian students residing at American universities.
But public perception changed most dramatically after a
crowd of 3,000 stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov.
4, 1979. In the end, 52 Americans were held for a total of
444 days. Carter, whose presidency would go down with the
botched rescue mission he authorized in April 1980,
eschewed election-year campaigning, sequestering himself in
the White House to devote full attention to the crisis.
Meanwhile, the public responded with a mixture of
bewilderment and outrage. Simultaneously, the political
turmoil in Iran spurred an unprecedented wave of
immigration to the United States, which attracted nearly
half of those fleeing Iran. Of those who came, about half
would settle in California, with the vast majority in Los
Angeles. In that exodus, lives of consequence and
accomplishment were often traded for ones of obscurity,
anonymity, and, in the atmosphere generated by the hostage
crisis, often fear and alienation as well.
Vossoughi was already in Los Angeles in 1978, working on an
independently produced thriller called Cat in the Cage. At
the time, the political disturbances in Iran had not much
concerned him. "I saw they were banning theater and things
like that," he says. But like many other Iranians who came
over around that time, Vossoughi assumed that any day he
would be free to return. "I didn't see that I was guilty of
anything. I thought that if anything happened, I could
still come back and work. I am an actor." But he was far
too famous. Newspapers in Tehran printed his picture with
the shah and the queen. In the early months of 1979, his
mother warned him not to return until things cooled off.
This never happened. "After six or eight months, I heard
that all my colleagues over there were not being allowed to
make movies."
Khomeini's government banned nearly all prerevolutionary
Iranian and foreign cinema. Banned, too, were all actors
and entertainers whose work was deemed inappropriate or who
were too reminiscent of the old regime. The blacklist would
certainly extend to Vossoughi. His very popularity now made
it impossible for him to return to Iran, at least as an
actor. In the meantime he had a part as an Egyptian
architect in Franklin J. Schaffner's Sphinx, released in
1981 on the heels of the Indiana Jones craze. Though a
box-office bust, Sphinx was the work of a major director
and featured top Hollywood talent (Frank Langella,
Lesley-Anne Down, John Gielgud). For Vossoughi, the part
suggested better things to come. If he were temporarily
stranded in the United States, at least there might be good
work ahead. He had, after all, a distinct advantage over
other Iranian actors in exile: he came with formidable
experience. Before arriving here, he had participated in
two joint projects between American and Iranian film
producers, both in English, that were attempts by the
Iranian film industry to penetrate the Western market. The
second of these, Caravans (1978), filmed in Egypt, starred
Anthony Quinn. It was Vossoughi's work in Caravans that had
attracted Schaffner's attention. The stint in Hollywood
should have put Vossoughi in an enviable position. He
enrolled in a class to bolster his English, joined the
Screen Actors Guild, and found representation through the
William Morris Agency.
But global events would get in the way. Though unofficial,
censorship in the United States was no less real than at
home for Iranian actors on the wrong side of the politics
of the day. Vossoughi remembers it as "a very hot time."
Popular demonstrations against Iran were a common feature
on the news. Reports of vigilantism directed against
Iranians and Iranian Americans were not unusual. The
Iranian flag was being burned across the United States.
Many Iranians lost their jobs, and many Iranian families
received threats. Finding work as an Iranian actor would
now prove almost impossible. Vossoughi remembers
auditioning in 1980 for a role in The Black Stallion
Returns, a sequel to the 1979 hit, and getting as far as a
meeting with the executive producer, Francis Ford Coppola.
"My agent told me that he was sure I had the part. On the
last day there were only three of us left after the 150
who'd originally auditioned. Then Francis Coppola came and
said he had seen my résumé and that my last movie was with
Anthony Quinn. Eventually he asked me where I was from. I
said Iran. So he said, 'Thank you for coming.' My agent
called me later, asking why I had done this to him. Did I
know how much money he had lost? I didn't understand."
His agent wanted to know why Vossoughi had not told Coppola
he was Turkish or Greek. While the idea struck Vossoughi as
absurd, his identity had become a serious liability.
"Because of the hostages in Iran, Coppola had called my
agent and said I was very good, a very fine actor, but that
they could not get involved with the politics right now."
According to Vossoughi, this situation repeated itself many
times. Coppola's response may have been surprising, from an
outspokenly political director, but it was not atypical.
(His office told the Bay Guardian he could not possibly be
expected to remember details of a casting decision almost
20 years old). As film scholar Hamid Naficy confirms, "The
[negative] stereotype of Iranians, especially because of
the hostage crisis, was really very deep-rooted. In certain
parts of society you wouldn't have known that such
hostility existed, but in others, especially in the
entertainment field, it was quite vast."
For Vossoughi, work dried up for the next four or five
years. In the United States he was bizarrely associated
with the new Khomeini regime that was banning his work, and
in Iran with its political opposite, the toppled shah's
regime, whose censure he'd already suffered. He had no
place to go. "I was so mad. Everywhere I went they'd say,
'Where are you from?' and I would say 'Iran.' Period. I
lost many parts." He managed only a small role in a horror
flick, Time Walker (1982), until the mid 1980s when, thanks
to a contact in television (Iranian-born director Reza
Badi), Vossoughi began to find work in TV, on shows
including Falcon Crest and T.J. Hooker. But even so
positioned to enter the mainstream, Vossoughi found that
parts for Iranians and other Middle Easterners were mostly
limited to stereotypes, especially that of the Middle
Eastern fanatic. "That's the irony of it all," Naficy says,
"the way these stars in some ways were pushed into playing
stereotypes of their own country, which they probably
didn't agree with. And so they ended up reproducing
sometimes the typical stereotypes."
Vossoughi himself played some of these parts - in Veiled
Threat (1989) and Terror in Beverly Hills (1991),
low-budget action films that traded on the now iconic image
of the Middle Eastern terrorist. Terror cast him as a
Palestinian ex-CIA informant and hostage-taker. A vehicle
for Sly Stallone's no-talent sibling, Frank, it was a film
Vossoughi now deeply regrets making.
But options were limited, and not just for actors.
Unemployment among Iranian immigrants was very high in the
first half of the 1980s - over 20 percent for men - owing
largely to the atmosphere generated by the hostage crisis.
Faced with public prejudice not seen since the internment
of Japanese Americans during World War II, Vossoughi found
himself shut out of an industry for which he was eminently
qualified and in which, had circumstances been different,
he would almost certainly have found work.
[...]