Infrastructure, Diaspora, and Place: Indexing Beirut in HONEYBABY HONEYBABY (Michael Schultz, 1974)

Between the 1960s and mid-1970s, upwards of 40 foreign film productions featured sequences shot on location in Lebanon. This may not seem significant in and of itself—after all, a commonplace attraction of contemporaneous commercial spy films, action films, and swinging sixties capers was their tendency to feature an array of exotic settings. As a result, their production frequently involved traipsing across not only European and North American shooting locations, but also third-world metropolises like Beirut, Hong Kong, Singapore, Casablanca, Cairo, Istanbul, and Buenos Aires—all of which were major, strategic capitals whose “atmosphere for spy pictures” (according to a 1966 issue of Business Week) emerged in part from their notoriety as key ideological battlegrounds for Cold War political conflicts.

What remains exceptional is not merely the sheer number of foreign commercial films between 1961 and 1975 that featured sequences shot on location in Lebanon, but more so, the range of film personnel and production contexts that converged in doing so. Between the 1960s and mid-1970s, feature films shot on location in Lebanon—many of them coproductions—included British, German, French, Italian, and Spanish films; Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani spy-action-romance films; and an instance of an independent US black action film that is the focus of this paper. As an artifact of its production on location in Beirut, a close examination of the 1974 film HONEYBABY HONEYBABY alongside a geographically diffuse set of archival traces unravels why and how this was the case, through an account of infrastructure, diaspora, and place.