“Yes, it’s a racket,” said another longtime film worker, this one a resident of Thailand. “A production guy comes here with a local budget and Thailand says, ‘Hey, that sounds do-able,’ then a hundred actors and key crew check into hotels in Phuket, production begins, and about a week later, even the price of paint doubles or triples. What’s the studio going to do? Go home? There’s too much invested to do that. Of course, everybody knows this by now—when you go to Thailand, they take you for a ride. The bottom line is that it’s still cheaper here than other places. And more professional. And when the cameras are turned off, more fun.”
“You must, let me repeat that, must have an agent working for you in the country before you get here,” said Mona Nahm, originally from Germany and a co-production coordinator for Kantana Productions, a Bangkok-based company with nearly fifty years of film and television experience. “If you come here and don’t have an agent, you’re going to die because the paperwork is a killer.”
Mona said that when the film company for Bloodsport, a low-budget martial arts movie starring then-unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme, came to Thailand in 1984, the producer hadn’t done his homework. When the film’s point man arrived at the Bang-kok airport, they had tourist visas. That stopped them until they got non-immigrant visas, which would allow them to apply for work permits and go into production. When they returned with all of their cameras and other equipment and declared its value at US$1million, they were asked to deposit a cash bond in the same amount to guarantee they would not sell it. The deposit was refundable, but the company didn’t have the money, so Bloodsport was not made in Thailand.
“There are two categories of foreign film made in Thailand,” said Skip Heinecke, a twenty-year veteran of the Hollywood PR wars, then a vice president of Royal Garden Resorts in Bangkok. “There are the ones using Thailand as a setting for somewhere else, the Vietnam films and so on, and the ones about Thailand. There aren’t very many of the latter.”
One reason was the Film Board, a section of the Prime Minister’s office, created partly in response to the Japanese porn movies that were filmed in Thailand some years ago. This was a panel of forty men and women from numerous other ministries and departments that wanted to know, in the words of one production chief, “everything including the color of the leading lady’s knickers.” That wasn’t precisely true, of course, but control was fairly strictly maintained. The application for filming in Thailand required a detailed plot synopsis along with forty copies of the script in Thai and a promise that “the filming process and end product shall not adversely affect the national security, public order or good morals.”
It was the Film Board’s job to see that the country was not slandered. When part of The Deer Hunter was shot in Patpong, for example, the scene was allowed because the movie was set in Vietnam and the sign erected outside the bar, during filming, was in Vietnamese. If the movie was about Thailand, such bars and prostitution were taboo subjects, as was Buddhism, sexually transmitted diseases (especially AIDS), drugs, and anything that might in any way denigrate royalty. This last situation resulted in moving production of the big budget Anna and the King (starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat) in 1999 from Thailand to Malaysia after the Film Board rejected the first three submitted scripts for reported inaccuracies.
“And to make sure you don’t submit one script and then try to film another, there’re always at least two members of the Film Board present during shooting and they must sign off on all raw film before it can leave the country for processing,” said Supaporn (Penny) Kanjanapinchote, who worked for twenty-three years for a Hong Kong-based film company and had a firm of her own in Bangkok. In addition, she said, Film Board representatives must be paid at least a thousand baht a day and given transportation and accommodation allowances at the same rate as that of the film crew.
The person regarded as the king of Thailand’s cinema hill was Santa Pestonji, a cigar-smoking wine connoisseur whose father was a noted Thai filmmaker. Ethnically Parsi but a Thai citizen, his first big assignment was The Killing Fields in 1984 and he coordinated in-country services for a majority of the big-budget foreign films since. Khun Sant, as he was called, coordinated everything from transportation to hotel rooms to catering and permits to equipment to locations and sets.
He also assisted with crises, including the wildcat strike that halted filming of The Killing Fields in Phuket when the American studio gave private rooms to American technicians and put their local peers two to a room, tantrums Danny Glover threw during the shooting of Operation Dumbo Drop when he was called Khun Danny—because the honorific Thai “khun” sounds like the American epithet “coon,” the high profile scuffle on the set of The Beach when local activists accused him of siding with foreigners even as they were ravaging the pristine Krabi beach, and the suicide of an assistant director during the filming of The Phantom in Krabi. For smaller problems, such as obtaining last-minute permission to use someone’s front garden or block traffic in a neighborhood or anything else causing inconvenience, he carried an attaché case full of cash.
Smaller fish swimming in the cinema sea were the specialists, or subcontractors. One, Oy Pachara, was a production assistant who took foreign passports to the Immigration Department so all the foreigners who planned to remain in Thailand for longer than fifteen days could work legally. She said that for Cutthroat Island she processed two-hundred passports.
Another specialist, Jack Shirley, a CIA agent who helped organize the Thai border police’s air force in the 1960s and later played a major role with Air America in the secret war in Laos, now was paid to coordinate police permits, a seemingly effortless task that he performed on his mobile phone, calling all his old cop buddies from his regular seat at the end of the Madrid Bar in Patpong. It was Jack who coordinated the sinking of the ship in the Chao Phrya River for Jean-Claude Van Damme. A big budget French film in 2002 required the closure of thirty-two public roads.
A third specialist was Richard Lair, a longtime resident of Thailand called “Professor Elephant” for his pachyderm expertise. He was hired by the Disney studio for Operation Dumbo Drop, a feature based on the true story of the U.S. military’s moving an elephant several hundred kilometers during the war in Vietnam to replace one accidentally killed in a village, eventually dropping it from a helicopter by parachute.
Richard, who said that it made sense for the animal to be brought to Thailand from the U.S. because it was better trained than any local ones, auditioned more than a hundred elephants before he found the one he liked for other stunts, and then he worked with the mahouts throughout the filming, using his Thai fluency to assist in communication between Thais and the foreign crew.
One more specialist was Neville Melluish, a pin-striped insurance broker whose Bangkok office is festooned with Japanese samurai swords, machine guns, and a World War II-era bazooka, souvenirs from earlier productions. He said that for The Killing Fields, helicopters were leased from the Royal Thai Army and two of them crashed. They were twenty-two-year-old Hueys, noisy workhorses left over from Vietnam’s war with America, he said, and not worth much. Still, when the next foreign film company came to Thailand and wanted choppers, the military said no.
“So I found an insurance company that would, for a price, insure the aircraft for more than their true value,” he said, “and I was able to guarantee the army that if one of their choppers went down, it would be replaced by a brand new one. That was for Casualties of War . Happily, none of them crashed.”
Steve Rosse, a set decorator in the U.S. before he became a columnist for The Nation, a daily English language newspaper in Bangkok, worked on Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, filmed mostly in Phuket. “Oliver wanted white egrets in the rice fields,” he recalled, “and we don’t have white egrets in southern Thailand, so he sent a guy to Isan, who captured a couple of dozen of the birds and brought them in cages on a flatbed truck. By the time they arrived, a third were dead, another third had had their feathers blown off
, and the survivors, who appeared in a long shot, little white dots in a field of green, for about two seconds, within three days were eaten by wild dogs and ferrets.”
Another story was told about The Deer Hunter . When the studio advance man checked into the Oriental Hotel in 1978, he met a man who insisted he was a colonel in both the Thai police and the Thai army who promised to arrange all security. The “colonel” walked away with a small fortune in cash and was never seen again. It also cost the producer of another major film a substantial sum to be released from jail after he openly smoked a “Hollywood cigarette” in a popular Bangkok restaurant.
Indeed, many of Hollywood’s losses are self-inflicted. “This is not a big surprise,” said one production executive. “Let’s admit it, Hollywood is just another word for waste. Between the big spenders—egos on an expense account—and the creative accountants, you say the word ‘Hollywood’ and it’s an invitation to larceny.”
Nor is it merely a case of the Thais getting fat from Hollywood’s lavish spending. In typical Asian style, Thais also skim the earnings of other Thais. “A typical stunt,” said one Bangkok-based facilitator, “is for the Thai hired to contract a crew of drivers to ask for five hundred baht a day for each one, then pay the drivers two hundred, keeping the rest for himself, and if the driver complains, fire him.” Similarly, a local production secretary said she routinely kicked back twenty five percent of her salary to her boss. “So what,” she said. “I still get four times what I can make in a regular job.”
“And,” said Skip Heinecke, “she still costs less than someone working in the same capacity in Hollywood. That’s why there are so many runaway productions. In Thailand, the below-the-line crew will work long hours, seven days a week, without overtime, without complaint.”
“You know about ‘tea money.’ This is called ‘facili-tea money,’” said Supaporn Kanjanapinchote. “If you have a big budget, I can deliver. If you have a small budget, I can still deliver, but it’s different. Cheaper hotels. Not so many stunts. You get what you pay for.”
“The bottom line is getting the job done,” said Richard Lair. “Hollywood is willing to pay fifty percent more if they know that they’ll get delivery. That’s what Khun Sant does. He guarantees delivery. This is true in any business, if you’re going to be successful—get the job done. No matter what it costs, so long as you think you can still make a profit. And in the movie business, profit is always a hopeful guess.”
“With the competition of Hollywood’s so-called blockbusters in the movie houses, the audience for local films has shrunk, so not many are made these days, and the local budgets are shrinking, too,” said Stirling Silliphant, Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night, who lived the last seven years of his life in Bangkok.
“Some of us tried to get Hollywood and New York to put money into local production of films for television, a TV series, something that would be true to Thai ways, yet commercially attractive in foreign markets. It hasn’t happened yet. So for now, the talented local professionals will have to get by on what Hollywood brings. It’s a good living for most of these people and let’s be honest, we’re all in this for the money. The glamor, too, but mostly it’s the cash.”
Going Troppo
Sleeping With Conrad
Somerset Maugham was delirious. Crazed by the splendor of Bangkok one day, and by the anopheles mosquito the next. He was so sick with malaria when he arrived at the Oriental Hotel, in 1923, following an arduous trek through the jungles of what was then called Burma and Siam, that when his fever rose to 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.5 Celsius), the hotel’s German manager-ess was overheard telling the doctor on the verandah outside his room, “I can’t have him die here, you know.”
Maugham didn’t die in Thailand, of course (but in France, some forty-two years later), leaving instead a mark on the country’s travel-cum-literary legacy. This is not unusual. Writers tend to leave their footprints in places foreign to their origin or nationality. Can anyone think of Ernest Hemingway and not think of Paris, Key West, Spain, and Africa? Are not the same associations made between Pearl Buck and China, Herman Melville and the South Seas, Jack London and the Arctic, and James Michener and a dozen very fat books whose titles were taken straight from a map? And so it has been for Bangkok, a port of call for writers for more than a century.
Joseph Conrad was a young ship’s officer staying at the Sailors’ Home in Singapore in 1888 when he was given command of the barque Otago, then tied up in Bangkok, after the captain died at sea. When Conrad reached the Siamese capital, he reported in a letter to the ship owners in Australia that the crew “suffered severely whilst in Bangkok from tropical diseases, including fever, dysentery and cholera.”
At the time, the “Old Oriental Hotel” was a one-story building raised on piles offering “Family Accommodations - American Bar
- Billiard Saloon - Newspapers Kept - Boats for Hire - Table d’hote with breakfast at 9:10 a.m., tiffin at one p.m. and dinner at seven p.m.” Such luxury was unexpected and worrying to the future novelist, but he was reassured by Captain H.N. Andersen, the former sailor who owned the hotel and was reconstructing the building which survives today as the facade of the Authors’ Wing, overlooking the garden and the river. The hotel admits Conrad never actually spent a night as a guest, but insists “he was a frequent patron of the hotel’s facilities.”
Thus, Conrad and Maugham, along with two other illustrious former guests, Noel Coward and James Michener, today have the hotel’s most expensive suites named for them, each containing a number of their books and period photographs.
I’ve never understood the appeal of sleeping in a room where someone famous once spent the night, but it seems a popular practice in the overnight accommodation business. So many bedand-breakfast places dating to the 1700s in the United States boast that “Washington Slept Here,”—it’s become something of a joke, and the financial advantage President Clinton found in offering wealthy contributors the use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House is somewhat shamefully well known. Similarly, the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port Au Prince, Haiti’s most famous hostelry, has suites named for Graham Greene, Sir John Gielgud, Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger. Presumably it’s a commercial scheme employed in other parts of the world as well. I digress.
Maugham’s long journey from London by sea to Rangoon, then up the Irrawaddy River by steamer and overland by train, car and pony through Burma’s Shan states, and on to Siam, traveling to Bangkok by train, was undertaken to produce his only real travel book, The Gentleman in the Parlour . (It was less than a great success when it was published in 1930 and unavailable for many years before being reprinted in 1995.) At the time of his visit, Maugham was famous as a dramatist who once had four plays running simultaneously on the London stage and as the author of several best-selling novels, including his quasi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence, the latter based on the life of painter Paul Gauguin.
From his remarks about Thailand, it is clear that however willing Maugham may have been to travel rough in Burma and in the Siamese north, when his train reached Ayutthaya, he’d had enough and intended to remain aboard, saying that “if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station?” His guide had other plans and dragged him from monument to monument, allowing him the contentment of one night on a houseboat, then led him finally to Bangkok, where in an act that proves some things never change, he was handed a card by a street tout that read: “Oh, gentleman, sir, Miss Pretty Girl welcome you Sultan Turkish bath, gentle, polite, massage, put you in dreamland with perfume soap. Latest gramophone music. Oh, such service. You come now! Miss Pretty Girl want you, massage you from tippy-toe to head-top, nice, clean, to enter Gates of Heaven.”
Finally, he stumbled into the lobby of the Oriental, burning with fever that may be blamed for the erratic nature of his observations, leading him to remark on the “dus
t and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust” and calling Chinatown “dark, shaded, and squalid” one day and on the next being bedazzled by the city’s wats .
“They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldness of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day’s work needs doing.”
Especially impressed by Wat Suthat, he further wrote, “With the evening, when the blue sky turns pink, the roof, the tall steep roof with its projecting eaves, gains all kinds of opalescent hues so that you can no longer believe it was made by human craftsmen, for it seems to be made of passing fancies and memories and fond hopes.”
Other writers who have visited Bangkok may be too numerous to name, although the Oriental has memorialized a wide variety, including, besides the four for whom the suites were named, John LeCarre, Graham Greene, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Barbara Cartland, Kukrit Pramoj—Thailand’s best-known author, as well as a favorite prime minister—Alec Waugh, Romain Gary and Wilber Smith. Why did these authors get some of the most expensive rooms named after them? Some came as keynote speakers for the annual SEA Write awards, presented as an encouragement to young writers from each of the ASEAN countries and co-sponsored by the hotel.
Thailand Confidential Page 18