Plus there has been a regular stream of documentaries, music videos and commercials. No one knows exactly how much this is worth to the Thai economy, although official revenues by 2003 from foreign productions had tripled since 1998, when the take was US$10 million. This is miniscule compared to the $10 billion spent by foreign visitors, but add the exposure that Thailand’s sights and scenery get, presumably easing the job of the state Tourism Authority, and add to that all the unreported exchange that takes place under the table.
“You know what it cost to lease the choppers and planes for Air America?” a Hollywood production manager said, insisting on anonymity because he wanted to work in Thailand again.
“We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of it going straight into Air Force pockets. There were these aircraft that were supposed to be self-starting, but the batteries were dead, so we had to pay a fortune to fly in a battery starter from Lopburi. Back in the States, I could’ve bought an entire airplane for the same price.
“It doesn’t matter,” he continued, laughing, “because if the script is set in the tropics, this is the place. Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines and The Bridge on the River Kwai in Sri Lanka and not even tourists go to those places these days. Vietnam? Forget it. The communists didn’t invent red tape, but they perfected it.”
“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.