By Mark Cerulli
“Ne Oldu, Ne Oldu, Veelyam Hayes…” That line from Midnight Express, delivered with swaggering menace by a depraved prison warden (played by the great Paul L. Smith) burned itself into this scribe’s cortex back in 1978. Alan Parker’s iconic film about the real-life ordeal of American student Billy Hayes caught smuggling drugs in Turkey and sentenced to a hellish prison became a cultural phenomenon – not to mention an international box office success. It earned glowing reviews and Oscars for screenwriter Oliver Stone and composer Gorgio Moroder. Hayes even met his wife Wendy at the splashy Cannes premiere. No joy for Turkey, though – there was an international outcry about their seemingly draconian justice system and the country’s once-booming tourism hit the skids hard. The gritty association to the film has stuck ever since.
Cinema Retro caught up with the real Billy Hayes, now touring with his one-man show “Riding the Midnight Express with Billy Hayes” to separate fact from Turkish prison fiction. And as Hayes freely admits, it’s been a wild ride, indeed…
“Six months ago I was in a prison cell, eating beans and now I’m flying to LA to talk about a movie deal for my book!” Hayes remembers, still scarcely believing the turn of events. Unlike many authors who are gently shunted aside as their work is repurposed, Hayes bonded with Oliver Stone, then making his name as a hot young screenwriter.
“I spent a week in the Mayfair hotel in New York with Oliver, eight to ten hours a day” he recalled, likening it to being in a washing machine on spin cycle, “but I loved every second of it.” Stone, who had read an early galley of the book, wanted to glean any hidden gems and Billy wanted to see how a screenwriter worked. Then they parted ways – Stone off to a cabin to write and Hayes waited to see how actor Brad Davis would bring him to life.
“I had no control, I had sold the rights …” Billy remembered, “but I ended up being really lucky. Oliver wrote a great script and (director) Alan Parker was brilliant… but at the same time, my biggest problem with the movie is everybody says ‘I’ll never go to Turkey, I saw Midnight Express’. I love Turkey, Istanbul is wonderful… I got busted on my fourth trip. In the movie you don’t see any good Turks.”
The island of Malta stood in for Turkey when that country predictably refused filming permission and the producers flew Billy in for some publicity shots. He and star Brad Davis hit it off, forging a friendship that would last until the actor’s death in 1991. “They walked me onto the set in that incredible stone fort, Fort St. Elmo, and they were shooting a scene on the balcony with Brad and Randy (Quaid) and it was like I was looking across at myself… it was surreal!”
There was even time for Billy to meet his tormentor in chief… “They took a break and I was being introduced, I felt this hand on my shoulder. I looked up and there was Paul Smith, in costume, looking like the badass sadist guard… then he smiled. He was a very nice, warm, cuddly guy.” The 6’4” Smith (who later played ‘Bluto’ to Robin Williams’ ‘Popeye’) was so cuddly that Brad Davis went to the director and said “This effing guy is killing me in the fight scenes.” Alan Parker promised to get Smith to dial back, but instead told the hulking actor, “You’re doing great, keep it up!”
But the movie, effective as it was, wasn’t the real story, not completely. Yes, Hayes smuggled hash and yes, he was just 54 days away from release when the Turkish court, under pressure to “get tough” on drugs, heartbreakingly re-sentenced him to Life, but that’s where film and fact start to diverge.
Billy did indeed get retried. The judge – as in the film – was very sympathetic. As Hayes recalled, “He said he wished he had retired before having to render the (new) verdict.” In fact, said judge did him a solid – since he couldn’t give him a lower sentence than Life, he reduced Life to 30 years. A nice gesture, but thirty years is still THIRTY years! When the sentence was handed down in court, the real Billy Hayes said, “I can’t agree with you, all I can do is I forgive you.” Run through Oliver Stone’s typewriter, Billy’s enlightened zen morphed into, “I hate you. I hate your nation… And I fuck your sons and daughters because you’re all pigs!”
Strong stuff. A “dramatic beat” in Hollywood parlance… and there were immediate consequences. After Billy’s escape, Turkey didn’t seek extradition. After publication of his book, they still gave him a pass… but once the movie came out, they issued an Interpol arrest warrant, a travel restricting scarlet letter that branded him for the next twenty years! “Thank you, Oliver.” Billy laughs.
His other issue is with the film’s portrayal of his incredible escape. On film he has a final confrontation with the psychotic warden, impaling his skull on a coat hook. (Listen for the “pickaxe in a watermelon” sound effect!) Then he slips on a guard’s uniform and walks out the door. It worked and was the kind of ending that had audiences cheering… but his real life escape was even more dramatic. Billy had managed to get himself moved to an island prison and was planning to somehow swim to shore when a storm forced the local fishing fleet to take shelter in the prison harbor. In the teeth of the storm, Billy swam out, cut a rowboat loose and rowed to the mainland. Eventually he walked through the highly defended (and land-mined!) border between Turkey and Greece and got his freedom, along with lifelong bragging rights.
“The one thing I thought was, if they make this into a movie, they’ll put this ending in, it’s made for Hollywood… and then they didn’t do it!” Billy remembers, adding, “Alan (Parker) showed me the movie in this little screening room in New York… at the end of it, I was all sweaty and Alan asked, ‘So what do you think?’ I said ‘I loved the movie, but I missed my rowboat, what happened?’” The director explained that to include Billy’s elaborate, true-life escape, they’d have to cut out 45 minutes of story.
“As a filmmaker I understand it…” Billy concedes, “but I really wanted my rowboat. It gave me back my life!”
Over the last forty-odd years, Billy has tried to set the record straight about his entire ordeal, but never has he had a forum like this one-man show, which grew out of his 1980s college lecture tour. As Billy puts it, “At the very least, my life is a cautionary tale.”
“Riding The Midnight Express with Billy Hayes” was put together by lead producer Barbara Ligeti (who’s made several films of her own including Hugo Pool and Motorama). She was looking for a singular talent to present at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival and Barbara, who knows everybody, knew Billy Hayes.
“I had met Billy when he was in a play I enjoyed in the late 80s, I didn’t realize he was ‘THE’ Billy Hayes.” Ligeti laughs. “I asked him ‘Can you tell your story in an hour on a stool with a bottle of water?’” Billy signed on and the Edinburgh show proved too good to leave as a one-off event. “We all went to work” Ligeti remembers, “and now the show is up to 70 minutes with an immediate Q&A afterwards.”
Producer and Director Jeffrey Altschuler helped Billy craft his lecture into a riveting, yet uplifting live presentation. Curiously, Altschuler, who had worked in TV commercial production, had numerous ties to the film version of Billy’s life, “I knew the guys who put the movie together, Peter Guber and Neil Bogart, and I knew Alan Parker from commercials.” That helped when Barbara brought him in to dramaturge the show. He and the star had a lot in common…
“We grew up in the 1960s in New York, we both dropped out of college. I chose to buy and sell horses instead of hash”, Altschuler recalled. “It was a very different time, everybody got stoned but nobody thought about where it came from or how it got there until Midnight Express.”
As with any creative project, it all came down to the material. “I was really impressed with Billy’s writing.” Altshuler said. The two honed the script from a lecture to a dramatic reading and when the show’s original director left, Altschuler got the gig even though he had never directed live theater.
“I just had to encourage him and get him to dig a little deeper to cover the material the way it should be covered. It was totally a collaboration.”
In city after city, the show has received a rousing reception. Many Turks are coming out to see the performance, something Billy appreciates. “They’re young kids whose parents were alive when all this was happening and they’ve been hearing about it, now we can talk about it.”
After decades of wanderlust, Hayes sounds like a man who has finally found his place in the world. “This just confirms to me that this is what I need and want to be doing now…. it’s cathartic and therapeutic, but every time I tell it it’s like the first time.” With plans for the show to tour the globe, there’s not even a hint of Midnight fatigue. “This has been a joy, it’s just been a joy.” Sounds like a happy, Hollywood ending at last.
“Riding The Midnight Express with Billy Hayes” will return to New York’s Barrow Street Theater starting September 24th.
You can also read the interview at CinemaRetro
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