KC Confidential.com

Just last summer the crackerjack staff at the historic Hotel Phillips downtown were bracing for the worst…

Producers for actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie Brüno had duped the hotel into signing a release allowing them to film there but Cohen had turned the tables with an R-rated ambush.

“It was a complete surprise,” Blaine Proctor, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing said at the time. “We had no idea who it (really) was. They came to us with the understanding that they were shooting a documentary and wanted to have the subject of the documentary stay in the hotel.”

As Brüno, Cohen – infamous for his stint as Borat – plays an over-the-top, gay Austrian TV personality while conducting ridiculously funny interviews as he transverses the United States.

Before we move on to the DVD, let’s revisit Proctor’s version of how Proctor and the hotel got drawn into the fray…

“They were in bed (Cohen and another male actor) and using some kind of bondage stuff,” Proctor says. “They weren’t actually having sex and neither one of them was naked. And they called one of our engineers and asked him to come up and (find the key to their handcuffs). Then he called me and I went up to see what was going on.”

KC Confidential’s Jack Poessiger saw it this way: ”These two guys are (screwing) each other and one guy gets a phone stuck in his ass – it was a really rough sex scene. I mean, you see a couple guys in leather and chains and they’re having sex on the bed, that kind of stuff.”

What Proctor saw: ”I saw these two guys and the room was full of cameras and I asked them to lower their cameras,” he says. “And Sacha kept asking me to do things, like would I go and get the remote and would I unlock them. I just told them, no, that they were going to have to leave. And after a while, I just told our security guy to call the police. Then I left the room, and they had a number of rooms with a number of props and they started clearing things out. And we had people standing in front of the elevators and so several of them went down the fire escape to get away. But we let everybody go down the elevator that wanted to.”

The latest: Cohen and director Larry Charles’ wrong-state, running monologue in the DVD’s bonus section

“And here we are in Kansas,” Cohen begins as the movie pans the hotel exterior. “Now Kansas was an interesting place because it’s the home of God Hates Fags, which is the most notorious anti-gay group in the country.”

Make that Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, the home of “anti-homosexual propagandist Fred Phelps.

“Now the rule was, I couldn’t get arrested during the movie, because if I did then my visa would become defunct and we’d have to stop shooting and I probably couldn’t get back in the country,” Cohen says. “And so we hired this uh, guy, whose job it was to make sure I didn’t get arrested. And basically we’re in this scene, they call security, they call the police. We run to the service elevator, or lift to those of you in England. And the door’s about to close and then suddenly the security put their hands in and goes, ‘You’re not going anywhere; we called the police, don’t try and go.’

“(So) our guy takes us out; we start running down the fire escape – the uh, internal fire exit – running down the stairs. (And) I say, ‘What floor are we on?’ He goes, ‘We’re on the 24th floor.’ I go, ‘Well, how are we going to get out of there?’ And I’m dressed in manacles, dressed in the outfit…Suddenly our guy gets a message on his earpiece saying, the police are here and they’ve come to arrest you. So I said, how are we gonna get out? And he said, ‘I’ve got a plan, follow me!’ And we’re running down this corridor on the 22nd floor and all the guests are like looking at us – it’s like a bad movie. (And) I go, how are we going to get out? He goes, ‘Out the window!’ And he lifts up the window and he goes, ‘Get out!’ And there’s like a rickety old fire escape and we climb out the window.”

Would that the great escape had been that simple…

“We’re running down the fire escape – 22 floors – and we get to the bottom of the fire escape and we can see the getaway car underneath in the alleyway,” Cohen says. “And we think, ‘Ah, brilliiant idea, this fire escape.’ ”

But for one minor detail.

“Now the problem with a lot of American fire escapes is they stop at the second floor,” Cohen says. “What’s the idea of (that)? What’s the idea, you burn (there)? And there’s a thing you pull down and we couldn’t find that. I said, ‘What do we do to our guide?’ And he said, ‘Jump!’ ”

The final scene would have made for memorable footage were Brüno’s crew not running for their lives.

“I (could) see the getaway car there driven by my assistant,” Cohen says. “And there’s also like two hotel workers just having a cigarette. And basically out of nowhere, in front of them, I arrive from the sky. This semi-naked guy just jumps from the sky.”