September 11, 2002

Eastward bound
Hollywood scouts a new location.

By Chuck Stephens

I SAW OLIVER Stone in Bangkok last night, smiling and waving and looking so fine – it was like a scene from a song on David Bowie's apocalyptic-prophetic Ziggy Stardust album: lavish, tacky, and oh so dreadfully true. "I've always been a big fan of Asian movies," Stone was remarking to the swarming Thai press corps, which was eager to know about his plans to try and market a film called Bang Rajan in the United States. A brutal Thai blockbuster about a border skirmish between Siam and Burma 300 years ago, director Thanit Jitnukul's CGI-free war flick broke box-office records here last year; now the Platoon auteur is trying to tempt an American studio into releasing it stateside under an "Oliver Stone presents" banner.

Stone's admiration for Asian cinema is nothing new. In the early 1990s he provided a book-cover blurb praising Thomas Weisser's Japanese Cinema: The Essential Handbook, a volume so riddled with errors and idiocies as to rival, in use value, The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T. Agnew – a gag book from Stone's treasured decade, the 1960s, that was filled entirely with blank pages. Fitting, since Stone also admires the color white: in 1997, while telling me (in an interview for Spin) how much he admires Asian filmmakers, he asserted that the white suit worn by Chow Yun-fat in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow was a direct indication of the impact of Brian DePalma's Scarface – which Stone wrote, and in which coke magnate Al Pacino sported a set of china-white vines – on Hong Kong cinema. And just to square the circle, there's this: "Oliver Stone to Shoot Film with Chinese Touches," the Asia-watching Web site Eastday.com reported back in July.

To whatever extent Stone can be said to represent Hollywood, one might extrapolate from the director's ongoing excursions to the East that, nigh on the eve of the anniversary of 21st-century America's first great disaster, the minds of the moguls are far away from homeland securities. Indeed, while everyone waits for The Matrix to reload, the fall film release slate is crowded with everything from biopics about Frida Kahlo and Hogan's Heroes orgasm addict Bob Crane to Adam Sandler art films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love) and a much anticipated new melodrama from Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven). Hardly a recap of the Irwin Allen calamity cycle (The Towering Inferno, et al) that mirrored the psycho-political mayhem of the 1970s. Will we have to wait for next year's Ang Lee-directed Incredible Hulk – the story of an overgrown monster-hero unable to control his rampaging id (rumored to be set, of all places, in Berkeley) – to get a sense of Hollywood's encrypted aftershocks from that fateful day last September?

What Stone is really doing here in Bangkok – lending a helping hand to the Thai film industry, scouting locations for his next film, or as he quipped to the press, "researching a film about the local nightlife" – is anybody's guess. (Though the latter possibility seems the most likely.) His interest in Bang Rajan – as a film qua film – seems perfectly reasonable; as locally made action flicks go, it's a pretty good one, filled with muscle-cut, half-naked torsos, ferocious violence, and a spectacularly broad-horned buffalo named Boonlert whose untimely real-life demise shortly after the movie opened here stole newspaper headlines for days and helped boost the film's box-office receipts. But as yet another example of an American power-player attempting to foster a Thai film, he's jumping on a particularly rickety bandwagon.

Though some held out hope that Miramax would do the right thing when it purchased Wisit Sasanatieng's dazzling Tears of the Black Tiger at Cannes last year, the inevitable has now transpired: it recut the film, changed subtitles and the ending, then failed to support it at Sundance last January, and is now widely speculated to be in the process of dumping it on cable TV. (Meanwhile, the film's Thai production company, Film: Bangkok, continues to inflate the price Miramax supposedly paid for the film in the local press, ostensibly as an ongoing attempt to save face.) Likewise, when Francis Ford Coppola offered to help out his old University of Southern California buddy Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol, the most famous of all Thai filmmakers, by reediting the prince's historical epic Suriyothai (the all-time top Thai box-office grosser), his efforts failed to earn the film a berth at this year's Cannes. Though Suriyothai was once vaunted as a potential Oscar contender for best foreign film, its American prospects currently remain in limbo. Amusingly, Prince Chatri thinks Stone's Natural Born Killers is a rip-off of a terrific film he made back in the 1970s, Thewada Dern Din (Grounded God).