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.”