I first saw Hornet’s Nest in 1980, in a packed movie theatre in a small city in the Philippines. It was the second time the film had played in Dumaguete; the first, according to an uncle, was in 1971 or so, and it was so popular back then people lined up just to get in. We had no idea of the film’s many names, nor that Il Vespaio was the name originally given it in Italian and used during the filming.
I had just turned eleven when we saw the film; we had returned from a year in the States and were already very Americanized, not surprising that we had grown up on the campus of Silliman University, which had been founded by American missionaries in 1901. We spoke English, read only English books, and loved a good war flick -- there were lots of them from 10 and 20 years back, playing in the theaters.
My older sister and I fell in love with Hornet’s Nest, and we remembered all the scenes and all the lines. Everyone we knew had seen the movie, and the boys’ theme (composed by Ennio Morricone) was whistled in school corridors for months after that.
My sister and I had a shared fantasy world, and so we spent the next couple of years drawing and writing stories about the Hornet’s Nest boys, making them interact with other characters in that universe.
Because we never got all their names (much less the names of the actors who played them), we had to invent. And invent we did. We gave them new names and complete personalities, and in the process collapsed one boy into another and made two or three out of what had been one. Memory and imagination mixed.
Then as we got older, she and I fell out, and the old school notebooks and folders of drawings were put away and lay untouched for nearly 40 years.
I was at my childhood home in August this year, and finally called up the courage to open, first my box, and then my sister’s, with a view to photographing everything before it all crumbled to bits. So, filled with nostalgia, and sadness that many of the best notebooks were missing (my fault!) and that my sister was no longer around to help me remember our stories, I decided to re-immerse myself in that world once again.
The boys in this movie are virtually nameless. Ironic, because the end credits present us with a screenful of names: Franco and Tonio, Arturo and Mikko and Romeo, Silvio and Umberto... and so forth. But because few of them are ever called by name as the film progresses, the audiences never get to know who is who. By the 1970s, it was standard to designate a minor movie character with some descriptive phrase: "Bossman's accomplice" "Juggler" "Class child." But not so with Hornet's Nest. No "Lookout Boy", "Demolition Boy no. 2", "Boy who had to pee in front of the sentry."
The list of first names was elegant and tantalizing -- it indicated that somewhere there had been a master plan where each boy, perhaps, had a back story, maybe even a character arc.
At the very least, I wanted to match faces with names. My sister and I had had a whale of a time re-inventing the 15 teenagers of Captain Turner's Baby Brigade, but something was missing. I'd tried twice before, in 1989, when I found a VHS tape of the movie and made some awful color sketches of the boys, taking notes (no luck there) and again in 2012, when I purchased the Michael Avallone based-on-the-screenplay novel off E-bay (still no luck -- the familiar lines had been shuffled around so that attributed to two or three boys were lines spoken by just one in the film).
What was missing was the actors. I've never been the kind of person to watch a film without simultaneously imagining the production behind it. Today, I sit in front of the TV with a finger hovering over my device, and it's a rare movie that can compete with the IMDB. My older sister was the same, and we'd always been that way, so when the 15 Italian boys lost their luster (somewhat) we went on to invent the world of the film production, with results that are too ridiculous to go on the internet. Two smartass girls, 11 and 14... what do you expect?
So I decided to use a combination of social media and movie databases to match names to faces and try to find out who everyone had been and (hopefully) how they had come to be in Il Vespaio. If I ran a search for the names of the actors, focusing only on men in their late 60s with a connection to Italy, maybe I would recognize a face and be able to match it to one of the boys in the film. I’d recently done a portrait project where I’d had to compare photos of some people taken today with images of them from decades ago, and I figured I knew how to study a face and how it changes with the years. I wanted to write about them, and how important they had been for me as a child (or a young girl), how vital to the creative side of me. I decided I would not make it one of those awful "Where are they now?" features that both feed, and feed on, ageism. It was enough to know who they all had been. Details of how they'd come to be in the movie, and a hint or two of the trajectory of their lives since would be an extra reward.
Did I succeed? Yes. Did I contact them? Well, only one, as of this writing (but it feels like I hit the jackpot!). Social media feelers for a couple more.
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This post began as an email, which was sent on November 30 via web contact form to Dan Keller, who played Tekko. How I sweated over what to write him. The resulting email conversation can be read on his website at: https://www.dan-keller.com/photos/1969-Vespaio/ I’m pleased to say that as a consequence of our exchange, Dan found more and more photos from his files and posted them on his Il Vespaio page. I’ve gotten his permission to share those photos on-line. The behind-the-scenes photo above, also the background image of this blog, is courtesy of Dan, and was taken by production photographer Claudio Patriarca.
