The Greatest Show on Earth

Phuket has been a popular movie location since they made "Man With The Golden Gun" here in 1975. Since then we've seen one or two invasions per year by the Dream Merchants, who find the local scenery highly photogenic, the local labor very cheap, and the local hotels quite comfortable. Recently, a Big Name In Hollywood spent a year on Phuket making the last in his "Vietnam Trilogy", and found that making movies on Phuket can be hell.

A Prop Buyer from New York told his driver that he wanted to go to Krabi Road, in Thai that was pretty good for a New Boy. The driver, who was a punch-drunk ex-boxer and the nephew of somebody important, didn't believe that a farang could speak Thai, and being from Bangkok and unfamiliar with the island's streets had taken them half way to Krabi province before the farang could get him to turn the van around.

The wardrobe department bought three hundred new sarongs to dress extras in, then told the wash amahs to dip them all in bleach for "ageing". The wash amahs instead put the word out that they would trade one new sarong for one old one and ten baht, and they made a killing. Then the Vietnamese Technical Advisors said "Excuse me, please, but we don't wear sarongs in our country." The Wardrobe Department was embarrassed that anyone should learn about their mistake, and threw away all the old sarongs to hide the evidence. The next week the Scene Painting department spent 10,000 baht on bundles of rags to clean paint brushes with.

The Set Decorator paid some locals 5 baht per stick to sharpen bamboo into lethal-looking "bungee stakes" for a Viet Cong fortress. He bought 1,000 of the things, and after the scene was shot the boys returned the borrowed sticks to the vendors in the market who use them for barbecuing squid.

The director decided that he wanted white egrets to be standing around in the rice fields, as he'd seen in Vietnam. Phuket doesn't grow enough rice to sustain a population of egrets, so they hired a man in the Northeast to catch and deliver 100 of the beautiful birds. He did, but it took him two weeks longer than he thought it would, and the director was demanding that the birds be on location for the first day's shooting, so instead of putting them into a boxcar on a train, the bird wrangler packed them in cages onto the back of an uncovered ten-wheel truck. The truck driver sped to Phuket, at speeds of up to 100 km per hour, for three days and two nights. When he arrived, 80 of the birds were dead, 10 were alive but had had all their feathers blown off in the wind, and 10 were barely alive but still full-fledged.

They took their ten birds and tied them by their ankles to stakes in the paddies, and made their panoramic vista-shots of the rice fields. Then they let these weakened, sickened birds go, in a part of the world far too hot and populated by far too many predators for them ever to survive. The movie opens with these scenes, and you can just see the birds, little white flecks in a sea of green. They could have used plastic flamingos painted white for all the audience sees, and saved the lives of 100 rare birds.

But sometimes the magic works. The Lead Set Dresser fell off a roof where he was taking down TV antennas that didn't look like the TV antennas in Saigon. He broke his arm in three places. The movie was liable, paid his hospital expenses and a hefty bonus. The insurance policy guaranteed the services of a Physical Therapist from the day the injury was sustained until the injured party could work again, which meant that the company had to pay for a Physical Therapist to travel from Thailand back to New York and all her expenses for at least three months. The Visa and Passport were arranged and the Lead Set Dresser flew back to the States with his Physical Therapist, who up until one day before she became a Physical Therapist had worn badge number 78 in the massage parlor at the Pearl Hotel.

And the company recreated a Vietnamese village in Phang Nga, with fifty homes, a hundred outbuildings, roads, wells, fish ponds, and a thousand acres of rice fields. In the fields was a facsimile Buddhist temple, complete with silk tapestries, a brass Buddha figure, incense braziers, candle sticks, and a massive brass bell. They built their village the first week of pre-production but didn't shoot inside the temple in the fields until the final week of production. They had hired a local security firm to guard the village set at night, and when they finally got out in the fields to shoot the temple, they found that nobody had told the guards that they were supposed too guard the temple too. They had spent all their time guarding the pigs in the fake village, in the middle of a Muslim province.

But when the crew arrived at the temple to shoot there, after it had sat untended in the open fields for almost four months, they found everything intact except for a few birds' nests in the rafters and spider webs everywhere. Nothing had been stolen, nothing had even been touched.

That never would have happened shooting in New York or Hollywood or Vancouver, and it never would have happened shooting in the Philippines or Vietnam itself. By rights, they should have found their temple stripped to the walls, and lost several days and countless dollars in redressing the place. But this is Thailand, where it is not uncommon to find a little bit of Heaven on Earth.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

The author can be contacted at: shavethemonkeys@gmail.com

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