MACHAVA, Mozambique -- By nightfall the soccer stadium here resembled a jailhouse, the floodlights framing clots of young men in lithe shadows as they rattled the iron gates, pleading with passersby outside for a slice of bread or a cigarette. "Quem tem pao? Quem tem cigarro?" they shouted in Portuguese. "Who has bread? Who has cigarettes?"

This was not what they had come here for. The fliers that circulated through their ruggedly poor neighborhood on the other side of town beckoned them to "come and see the filming of the movie 'Ali,' " a biopic about the heavyweight champion, starring Will Smith. The flier promised food, drinks and prizes: televisions, stereos and refrigerators. "Bring along your relatives and friends," the invitations read.

But there was no party on this evening in mid-May, according to the villagers, only an over-budget $105 million Hollywood movie in need of thousands of extras to replicate the "Rumble in the Jungle," Muhammad Ali's upset knockout of George Foreman 27 years ago in the neighboring central African nation known then as Zaire.

Scores of Mozambicans say they were deceived and exploited by the production company that recruited them over several weeks spent filming here in April and May, promising money and prizes that were not forthcoming.

The allegations were especially ironic since "Ali," the most expensive movie starring an African American ever to get a green light, is a prestigious project that celebrates a black American hero who felt close to his African heritage.

Scheduled to be released in December, the film depicts the troubled period in Ali's life between his stunning 1964 defeat of Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title and his equally stunning comeback victory over Foreman a decade later.

Columbia Pictures, which is making the film, denied that African extras were misled or taken advantage of, suggesting that those interviewed were confused about how moviemaking works.

"There was a fight scene where a large number of extras were needed. It was clearly said to people to come down and see a Hollywood movie being made," said Blaise Noto, a spokesman for Columbia. "There was a raffle of motor scooters, refrigerators, athletic shoes, clothing. Provisions were made for food."

However, he added, "Do [African] people understand what a raffle is? That someone gets something someone else doesn't? Raffles did happen."

But 46-year-old Madalena Muntimucu said that she and other poor Africans worked into the wee hours, cheering, clapping and dancing at a director's cue, without food or prizes or pay.

"We were expecting a celebration," said Muntimucu, a frail woman with haunting gray eyes who ekes out a meager living selling charcoal briquets. "But we worked and we were not compensated. There was no food. We got only a bottle of water and the kids got some juice," she said in an interview through an interpreter. "We asked one of [the organizers] if we would be paid and she said no. We asked if they would take us back home and they said not until they were finished filming."

Finally, after 10 hours inside the stadium, Muntimucu and a few of her neighbors began the long walk back home at 4 a.m., even as the filming continued. "We were hungry. We were tired. I needed sleep. It was a dirty trick to play on people who struggle just to survive," she said.

Noto said he did not know whether the production provided transportation to extras, or whether they could have expected to be taken home before the end of the shooting day. "I don't know the particulars," he said.

For crowd scenes in movies like "Ali" that require thousands to fill arenas, movie productions will typically advertise the chance for fans to watch a movie being made, and raffle off prizes. In these cases the background extras are usually not paid, nor are they normally promised money.

But extras close to the camera or in smaller scenes are paid. In the United States, members of the Screen Actors Guild receive $100 a day and non-union members $50 per day to work as extras. The sum is increased if their own clothing or cars are used or they work more than an eight-hour day.

In countries with no acting unions, there are no such rules -- and Mozambique is as poor as Africa gets. "Ali," directed by one of Hollywood's A-list directors, Michael Mann, and starring one of its hottest box office attractions is the first big-budget American movie ever filmed in this nation of 17 million people.

Dozens of people hired as extras said they were paid $20 a day and fed while filming the stadium's fight scenes, as well as earlier scenes in which adoring Zaireans swarmed Ali in training. All these extras said they were positioned closer to the movie set's boxing ring during the filming than those who said they were not paid. But the paid extras also said they knew neighbors, friends and relatives who had come to the stadium expecting money or a party, and found neither.

And even extras who were paid said they were hoodwinked. "They exploited people," said Angela Jane, 23 and pregnant, who said she agreed to be an extra for a scene that took place in the rain but quit when, at the end of a 12-hour workday, she was paid $20 rather than the $60 she said she agreed to. "This is not America and no one here expected them to treat us like we would be treated in America," she said. "But at least people should be respected as human beings."

A spokeswoman for director Mann said it was "ridiculous" for extras in Africa to think they'd be paid as much as $60. "Sixty dollars a day for Mozambique?" said Pat Kingsley, Mann's publicist. "They don't make that in a year."

"No one was ever promised $60. The payment for scenes was negotiated upfront, and there was never any reneging on that," said Noto. He said he believed extras made $10 or $20 a day.

A spokeswoman for star Will Smith said, "I think this is a very disturbing situation" but added that Smith had nothing to do with the treatment of extras. "He didn't know about it," she said.

"Ali" has reportedly struggled with money problems, sliding over its $105 million budget since production started this year. Several Hollywood publications reported last year that Mann, Smith and the movie's producer, Jon Peters, agreed to pay for cost overruns when Columbia threatened to kill the project when it appeared that it would exceed its budget.

A production manager who spoke on condition of anonymity said the producers knew before going to Mozambique that the African extras would be paid little or nothing, because the local organizers said that spreading money around in the poverty-stricken capital of Maputo could lead to rioting.

At one point they considered giving T-shirts of Will Smith as payment, but even that was rejected as too provocative, he said. "Michael Mann was taking the location manager's word for it," he said. Will Smith, he added, "was being kept in the dark."

Many of the extras said that they were misled by the fliers distributed by film crew members in their slum of colorless concrete huts and unpaved roads just beyond Maputo's airport. And others in the township of Hulene said they were lured to the stadium by movie staffers who promised that they would be paid for their work.

All those interviewed said they boarded buses for the stadium in Machava nearly 15 miles away and were told when they arrived that they would not be paid. Unable to get home, and told by security guards that they would not be allowed to reenter the stadium once they left, they said, most simply stayed.

"We thought we would get money," said Carlotta Fabianoi, 27. She sells tomatoes and onions from a stand and left her infant son at home with her elderly grandmother when crew members began recruiting people from Hulene. "But they just took advantage of us. We were deceived."

Fabianoi said she clapped and cheered as directed, but with so little enthusiasm that "I don't think any [shots] with me in it will be useful. If you see a woman clapping her hands but looking like she has just come from having a fight with her husband, that is probably me," she said, smiling.

"Many of us left our work thinking we were going to make money," said Feliciano Manjate, 51, who owns a makeshift tavern in Hulene. He said he was standing outside his shop Saturday afternoon when three men -- one white South African, a white American and their black Mozambican interpreter -- approached him, offering him work.

Once at the stadium, he and a few friends waited in line for three hours before entering. As they walked through the gate, Manjate said, "The lady said to us: 'You are coming to clap hands and to eat, you will not be paid.'

"We were very angry," he said. "Everybody was arguing. They tried to exploit us because we are Africans," he said, echoing a common sentiment here. "If the task they were to do was to have been performed by white men, they would have given them money."

The abiding sense of betrayal and resentment is ironic, since Ali endeared himself to Africans with his animated affection for the continent during his visit in 1974 to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. And he credited the poor and Africans with inspiring his remarkable upset of the bigger, younger and stronger Foreman.

"Oh, we still love Ali," said Bernardo Buque, the dreadlocked owner of a roadside hut that sells beer, chicken and rice. He says he received only half the $45 a day that crew members promised him to close his shop while they were filming in Hulene.

"But I hope," he said, as his young son tugged at his leg, "that the movie doesn't do so well."

Waxman reported from Los Angeles.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

How sad.

My brother Quansah, thank you for bringing up this topic. In the Biafra we are striving for, you can bet your last farthing that this yeye Oyibo(whites) will be put in their rightful place. And I'm sure the rest of Africa will follow suit.

Biafra will not even have need for their hitech(as we can easily make our own), and they know it and are afraid their era of manipulation and fraud will be over in the new Biafra.