1948 Metro Manila, Philippines
Sylvia “Billie” Suntay Trinidad
1944
Metro Manila, Philippines
February 6th, 2025
by Issy Po
Billie first words to me are “I hope I can help you!” and I am flattered but must assure her, “There is no right answer!” She giggles as we begin the interview. Billie doesn’t quite remember the first time she went to the cinema, but she is sure that it was with her mother. With a much younger sister and a teenage brother who preferred “hanging out with his friends”, it was often just Billie and “Mommy” who would head to the cinemas together on both weekends and weekdays. “I wasn’t going to school yet because I remember watching movies on the weekdays,” Billie surmised after I asked her more about trips to the cinema with her mother.
The first movie she remembers watching is the 1962 remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari where she was disturbed by the “loud screaming of those people in the mental asylum”. Simultaneously, she was enamored by Glynis Johns’ performance as she easily recalls the actor by first and last name (her quick recollection of the names of her favorite actors would become an important theme in our interview). Her memories of the movies are retold with wide eyes as if it was being played right in front of her right at that moment. She gives a hearty laugh at the childhood fear that lives in her today, telling me about how her older brother would tease her for decades after the movie premiered. Billie exclaims how the film had “traumatized” her and was left wondering “why [her mother] even brought [her] for that movie!” Despite a rocky start, however, it is clear that her relationship with the “downtown Escolta movie theater” only blossomed as she aged.
It is walking into the theater with her mother, “past the ticket booth, up the stairs, and towards the balcony or the lodge seating areas” that she remembers vividly. “Mommy never bought tickets to the standing area,” Billie tells me, but they would sometimes sit in the aisle when the cinema was “just too packed” during awaited movie premieres. “During those times, you could just walk into the cinema- we were not obsessed with coming in on time”. The theater was on Escolta Street, the main road of the bustling central business district of Metro Manila at the time. “It used to be so cheap! The tickets were PHP1.20 (0.02 USD) those days”, and so the cinema was really “for everybody”. At the time, there were only imported chocolates at the snack counter since the Filipino snack industry was nonexistent. “I don’t really remember buying sweets with my allowance. Mommy would bring snacks, though, like butong pakwan (watermelon seeds)”. Billie remembers that the theaters smelled like cigarettes and by the time they would leave the theater “[Billie and her mother] smelled like smoke!” Still, she never stopped going back until Escolta closed.
It is interesting the way that Billie’s movie memories guided our conversation, as she inserted interesting tidbits about her personal and family history between recollections of Escolta. She remembers how her dad, who “must’ve been in his 30’s” was often cast in small roles during the early days of Filipino cinema. As a half-American, his Eurocentric features made him an easy cast despite his lack of acting experience. It also helped that growing up, Billie lived near two new major Filipino production studios: LVN Productions and Sampaguita Films. After moving out of her grandparents’ house, they would use the garden to film “usually Cowboys because they needed places where horses can go” and her backyard was literally “in the woods”. Billie remembers “the ashtrays, everybody smoking” and how she “met so many famous [Filipino] actors” in her grandmother’s house through the ’60s and ’70s like Eddie Guttierrez. Despite the local film industry growing, “English films were always more popular. It was only so much later that Tagalog films became better”. In the earlier days, Tagalog films were spoofs of classical Hollywood narratives that made their way into Filipino pop culture through the influence of American imperialism. I assume that it took years for these films to be replicated but Billie corrects me, “You know, the Filipino ingenuity…they’re so smart. They were fast”. She tells me about Filipino star pairings, “You know, we had our own Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire- they also danced!” and of acclaimed foreign films “mostly from France” that “would only show 7 days for one week”
However, Billie remembers when Filipino cinema diverged from the typical Hollywood tropes. The Tagalog film movement was founded by the prominent Filipino experimental film director Peque Gallaga who was also her “classmate’s brother”. She spoke about how they’d gather for intimate dinners: “We were very close, so sometimes in his movies, our characters would be there. One of them he called Billie but they made Billie a guy. Still, we knew we were there”. From this memory, she jumps to narrating her husband’s film production stint with Trigon Cinema and Cineng Silangan and the joy of bringing her kids to the movies “for free!”
Toward the end of the interview, I looked up the first movie Billie mentioned, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1962). She recalls that she was “Maybe 4 years old? Or 6? Or 8?” when the movie premiered but I must correct her because she was 18 years old in 1962. She is stunned at first, certain I am mistaken. She Google searches on her own to the same result. The movie elicited such a strong horror out of young Billie that, in her memory, she is 10 years younger than she actually was. By this time, we have spoken for almost 2 hours and Billie must leave, but not before promising me that she will “Ask [her brother] about the movies” and “try to remember the first one she actually watched”. I leave Billie with the promise that I will try and find a copy of her father’s movie, which she “just cannot find, not even on the internet these days”.
Sylvia “Billie” Suntay Trinidad is my maternal grandmother born in the Ifugao province in the northern Philippines on August 8th, 1944. She is a mother of 5 and grandmother of 10. She was raised between Northern and Central Philippines and resides in Metro Manila today. The interview was conducted in “Taglish”- a mix of English and Tagalog.
