The Salamander

It was during one of these meetings in a cafe along Tomas Morato that actor and director Richard Arellano pitched a germ of a concept: film and television actors bloodying each other in the boxing ring. Nginiiig! associate producer Ryan Evangelista and I immediately leapt upon that thought. It was very mainstream and very interesting. Admittedly, I knew nothing of boxing at that time but the mere idea of television celebrities duking it out on national TV seemed to me a fucking entertainment goldmine.

The short of it is that we fleshed out that concept and made an AVP out of it. Along the way, we had other brainstorming meetings for other concepts but the celebrity boxing show seemed to have the most promise. By March I was called upon to develop some new shows for ABS-CBN, Ryan was busy with various shows, and Richard was preoccupied with other projects. The celebrity boxing AVP was shelved. When pitching day came around some months ago, we decided to take out the AVP and present it to ABS-CBN’s pantheon. We immediately got the green light. And that’s how Pinoy Mano Mano was born. Hey, look, I don’t have any pretensions that Pinoy Mano Mano isn’t a rip-off of Stallone’s boxing show, The Contender. On the other hand, Sly Stallone didn’t have Justin Timberlake knocking Heath Ledger’s teeth out. We have TJ Trinidad busting up Jordan Herrerra’s nose. And that was just during a test episode. So y’all watch now, hear?

FISTICUFFS!

Speaking of which, here are more bad news from the world of televison writing. The recent rollback in the talent fee rates of writers, I’ve come to learn, is due to this newfangled scheme regarding the little bits of maggoty cheese they pay wordslingers. Before this, you see, talent fees are decided through lots of haggling with producers. The bigwigs have decided to do away with all that by standardizing talent fees. At Sacking-of-Constantinople rates, I must add. Under this scheme, a noob writer in, say, a televison soap gets fifteen pieces of maggoty cheese per script. On his next soap show, he gets a bit more. It goes on that way with each succeeding soap show until the writer either dies of exploitation-induced cancer or he reaches the limit at thirty pieces of maggoty cheese. Thirty. Yeah, something like how much Judas sold Jesus to the Pharisees for. The rotten thing about this is that a seasoned writer who’s just starting out on a soap will still get noob rates.

THE FOURTH CRUSADE IS AT THE GATES!

Anyway, this is Lynn Winchell, Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for December 1967. Also the first chick I saw naked. Really. My father used to keep this centerfold stapled to the inside of his closet door. I practically grew up ogling Miss Winchell’s fine ass, my friends.

Miss Winchell disappeared from Dad’s closet sometime in the late Eighties. I don’t really know who took her down and what happened to her but I suspect the culprit was my mother and the method of execution was by burning in the backyard. I gotta hand it to Dad, though. If that centerfold had been in that closet since 1967– eight years before I was born– then Dad had prevailed over Mom’s prudishness for almost two decades.

GO DAD!