WWW- PAMELA Anderson looks completely caught off guard and highly distressed as a bag is thrown over her head and she’s chased through a bookstore by Sacha Baron Cohen in the box-office smash “Borat” – but the buxom blond beauty was actually in on the joke.
Unlike other pranks in the movie that bring together real people and Cohen in his role as the imbecilic Kazakhstan journalist, Anderson’s gonzo confrontation with him was loosely scripted, then carefully choreographed with jerky camera movements to make it look real.
An insider told us, “There’s no way Sacha and a camera operator could have gotten past her bodyguards in real life and then manhandled her . . . It was filmed by pros so it looks completely realistic, as if Pamela had no clue. There is improvisation, but nobody was in the dark.”
Not that anybody connected to the film will admit that. Neither 20th Century Fox nor Anderson returned our calls. When MTV News confronted her about her participation, Anderson said cryptically, “I can’t really say. I’m sworn to secrecy.” She also gushed, “I love Sacha, he’s such a nice guy.”
Director Larry Charles was vague as well: “All I can say was that she was extremely good-humored about what happened to her.”
In fact, Anderson and Cohen are old friends and have pulled pranks before. Last year, a “commitment ceremony” between her golden retriever, Star, and Chihuahua, Luca, was crashed by Cohen in a Borat segment for his “Da Ali G. Show.”
MTV News, which probed whether the “Borat” scene was real, concluded it was “likely . . . that Baron Cohen and Anderson arranged the ruse together, and then hired unknowing guards to react to the events.”
Others weren’t so lucky. Feminist Linda Stein was told she was being interviewed about the plight of women, only to hear Borat call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a “chocolate lady.” She and others were paid a few hundred dollars and made to sign waivers against claims for “offensive behavior.” But some lawyers feel the waivers may be null and void because of the deception.