Film Rites in Kenya

ON LOCATION

The approach roads to Kenya's Lake Rudolf are strewn with jagged chunks of volcanic lava that wear out shoes in two weeks. The lake's strand is an equatorial desert (average temperature: 105 degrees) blasted by winds of hurricane force. Its inlets are infested with crocodiles and surrounded by lions, vipers and cobras. Its inhabitants, the Turkana and Suk tribesmen, are dying off. Not surprisingly, only a few white men have ever explored the lake. One of them is Actor William Holden, who was camping there last week.

With Holden was an intrepid crew filming a documentary that will be seen on CBS next season. The one-hour production will mark Narrator Holden's TV debut. Ten years ago he left Hollywood and became a co-owner of the Mount Kenya Safari Club. He has since become an avid conservationist, and decided only recently that he would go on TV because he wanted to tell the story of Kenya's ecology.

Survival Diet. Wolper Productions (The Making of the President, 1960 and 1964; the Jacques Cousteau series) agreed to gamble on Holden with a series of perhaps nine African documentaries. After he outlined his intentions and explained the terrain, Producer David Seltzer concluded that U.S. cameramen were out of the question ("Those American prima donnas would have been on strike an hour after they got here"). Seltzer recruited a Dutch crew and 21 African assistants. The expedition could have saved thousands of dollars and two weeks' time by flying directly into the lake from Nairobi. But Holden and Seltzer ruled that out as cheating. So off they trekked through the Kenyan wastelands.

Producer Seltzer hoped to make 50 miles a day, usually made a little over 10. Three hours from Nairobi, one of the safari's 15 vehicles, a custom-made $28,000 British truck, gave out. Next to go were the gasoline truck and the tow truck. Four of the seven 16-mm. cameras went out of commission the first three weeks, and the film kept melting. Holden's human brigade got through unscathed, though, thanks in part to the Kenya Army Camel Corps, which rode shotgun for the company to protect it against marauding Shifta tribesmen. Holden survived partly on a daily diet of 15 cans of Carlsberg beer (he brought along 120 cases).

Through the Bush. Unlike most such projects, the documentary did not have the benefit of a shooting script. Seltzer and Holden gave up trying to create one. They merely filmed whatever they saw of interest.

For example, Holden got word that a circumcision rite would take place at a nearby encampment of Samburu warriors. Rousing his men at 4 a.m., he led them on foot through several miles of country overrun with predators. The crew arrived in time to catch the Samburus reeling into a catatonic frenzy. Then the tribal elder drew his knife. The cameraman closed in so tight that he got blood on his camera. And Bill Holden, who, as one Wolper man put it, had played it all along like "the essential Hemingway man," admitted that suddenly he grew "weak in the knees." Later, the chief's son, speaking with a crisp upper-school British accent, explained to Holden that he had attended the ceremony as a gesture to please his dad, though the young man himself did not go in for that sort of thing. That is part of Kenya's ecology too.

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