‘You’re really a miniature bond’: Weng Weng and the transnational dimensions of cult film stardom

Abstract

In 2006, the Australian filmmaker and cult cinema fan Andrew Leavold began work on a documentary titled The Search for Weng Weng that celebrated the 2 foot 9 inch tall Filipino film star Weng Weng. Tracing the life story of the man listed in the Guinness World Records as the shortest adult actor to play a lead role in a feature film, the documentary follows Leavold as he visits the Philippines to speak with family members, co-stars and directors about the brief period in the early 1980s in which Weng Weng starred in a series of spy films entitled For Y’ur Height Only (1981), Agent 00 (1981) and The Impossible Kid (1982). Paying tribute to the life of this ‘Filipino midget James Bond’ (Leavold, 2008b), footage from Leavold’s film was eventually utilized in a key sequence in Mark Hartley’s documentary on genre filmmaking in the Philippines, Machete Maidens Unleashed (2010).