Lights, camera, Manila stopover for Sydney Pollack

On their way to Myanmar, investment banker Herb Allen, famed movie director Sydney Pollack and a bunch of friends, did the requisite Manila stop-over. Requisite, because if there’s someone in the Far East that Mr. Allen has never lost touch with, that would be Department of Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas. When Mar was "cutting his teeth" on Wall Street back in the ’80s, it was at Allen and Co.

With more than enough on his plate right now, it was no surprise that Mar left it to his friends to organize the very informal get-together. Doris Magsaysay-Ho came to the rescue, and enlisted Margarita Fores to create a Filipino menu for the night.

As Sydney Pollack is such an established Hollywood luminary, it was no surprise to find a host of local directors eager to meet the man.

Talking to Carlitos Siguion-Reyna and Jim Paredes, we awaited Sydney’s arrival playing "Let’s list the movies he’s directed and the films where he’s done cameos." We had gone through They Shoot Horses, The Way We Were, Havana, Tootsie, Three Days of the Condor, Out of Africa, Bobby Deerfield, The Firm, the 1995 Sabrina remake, when the man walked through the door, putting an abrupt end to our listing.

Mr. Allen is no stranger to the Philippines. Right after the Second World War, it was Herb’s father, the founder of Allen and Co., who invested substantially into Benguet Consolidated and brought the mines back to their feet. As Mar succinctly put it, "Tonight is about friendship, old ones and forging new ones. I’ve known Herb for years now, so when he called and said he had some of his friends flying in with him, it became a matter of getting some of my friends together and making a night of it."