If attention to cultural detail makes a great epic, “Anna and the King” will be a blockbuster. Its creators insist that “Anna” is not a remake of “The King and I,” the 1956 movie musical, which was also based on the Leonowens diaries. While the real Anna may have met the king only a few times, both Hollywood movies cast the two in a love story. But the similarities end there. As played by Yul Brynner in the musical, the Siamese king was charming but buffoonish. The creators of “Anna” hired Thai consultants to ensure that their love story portrays King Mongkut the way Thai historians do: as a visionary who fended off colonialism by launching his country’s modernization. “There will be no king saying ’et cetelah, et cetelah, et cetelah’, " says Tennant, mimicking Brynner’s comical English in the musical. “This is a movie about the arrogance of the West meeting the alternative of the East,” says executive producer Jon Jashni.
That didn’t prevent Twentieth Century Fox from meeting trouble in Thailand, where the story takes place. Thai film authorities hated “The King and I” so much that it has been banned in Thailand for 44 years, and they refused to allow Tennant to film in Thailand. Anxious to protect the image of Mongkut, whose heirs are still in power, the authorities fear the new film will also offend the institution of the monarchy. Among other things, the National Film Board didn’t like eye contact between Anna and the king. “Mongkut said there’s nothing to fear in foreign culture, but his lessons haven’t been learned,” says Tennant. If the film was absolutely accurate, he adds, “the king would have betel-nut-stained teeth and Anna would look like Austin Powers.”
Hoping to win approval from the film board, Tennant went through five rewrites to address a long list of objections. According to the Thai press, the board didn’t like a scene in which the king’s daughter climbs a tree and drops fruit on his head. They didn’t like Anna’s son, Louis, making fun of the way the king walks and talks. They didn’t like comments about the king’s concubines and children (according to Thai books and records, he had 82 children by 35 different mothers, and a harem of more than 100 women). “They were adamant about everybody crawling around on all fours around the king,” says Foster. “Details like that would have been prohibitive.” In the end the National Film Board refused Tennant, so he shot in Malaysia instead. The budget soared to $70 million–much of it to build a seven-acre re-creation of Thai royal palaces on a golf course 100 miles away from Kuala Lumpur.
To the Thais, however, no story about one of their great kings can be seen as just a movie. Centuries-old lese-majeste laws remain on the books, promising imprisonment for anyone who would dare criticize the monarch. The film board is one of the most conservative institutions in Thailand, and wasn’t about to take chances. It sent a copy of the script over to the imperial palace, which sent it back, saying the decision was up to the board. It was a tough position for any Thai official. Even Tennant’s Thai advisers say the original script was unacceptable. “The first version was terrible,” says Supinda Chakraband, a member of the royal family and a film producer who represented Fox in its negotiations with the film board. “King Mongkut was portrayed as a combination of an Arabian prince and a kung-fu master.”
Thailand’s current monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, is a direct descendant of Mongkut, and no one knows what he thinks of the flap over “Anna.” But King Bhumibol once described Yul Brynner’s portrayal of Mongkut as a “sympathetic character.” His queen, Sirikit, said she had a “wonderful evening” after seeing Brynner perform the role on Broadway in 1985. “She thinks the show is fun,” said the queen’s spokeswoman at the time. “She and the king are open-minded.” Supinda, whose great-grandfather was one of King Mongkut’s sons, says she and other members of the royal family urged the film board to give Fox a second chance. Supinda says the family also assured the board they would advise the filmmakers on historical accuracy–and accept public responsibility if the final cut stirred up controversy. But it was no-go. One film-board member told NEWSWEEK that he feared the eruption of “a political crisis” if they had given the green light to film in Thailand. King Mongkut is a potent symbol of independence, particularly at a time when a financially battered Asia is worrying about “colonization” by Western investors and bankers.
But more than one Thai critic has pointed out the great irony of this flap: King Mongkut was the first Thai monarch to begin opening up Thailand to the West. As a young man he became a monk and Buddhist scholar, and also learned Latin and English, Christian doctrine, Western science and culture from missionaries. When he became king in 1851, Mongkut ordered people in the palace to wear shirts as Westerners did. He also began to bring the king’s godlike role down to earth, breaking protocol by shaking hands with a favorite missionary–at a time when no one was allowed to touch the king. Mongkut pre-empted Britain’s gunboat diplomacy by embracing open trade before the boats arrived and personally welcoming the British trade emissary. His boldness ensured that, unlike its neighbors, Thailand would never be colonized. And, of course, Mongkut invited a British governess to teach in his court. Publicly, the film board’s main complaint against the final script was that it portrays Anna as “far more superior than the King in every way.”
Leonowens’s account of Mongkut has always been controversial, and it’s still unclear just how much of it shows up in “Anna.” The final script is still under wraps. But Leonowens was known to have embellished at least parts of the books she wrote after returning to England in 1867. She casts the king as a mercurial figure, alternately kind and cruel. She tells of harsh royal punishments, including sailors who got 30 lashes for playing cards, and a royal concubine burned at the stake for keeping a secret lover. Thai historians say there is no record of the incident, nor any like it, except perhaps for the $6 fine Mongkut once imposed on a man who ran away with a faithless royal concubine. “Anna’s role is pretty dubious historically. She’s very prejudiced and so is the king,” says Foster flatly. “But they learn from each other.”
Reinventing Leonowens as a difficult but likable character was a challenge. So was bringing emotional life to her relationship with the king, while also capturing the stiff restraint of 19th-century manners. “It’s a bitter romance,” says Foster. “It’s true to the period, but also messy, and interesting, and emotional.” On the set, as Tennant painstakingly shoots the king’s march down the corridor, Foster, in blue bonnet, heavy bolero jacket and sweltering hoop skirt, stands primly in the blazing sun, hands clasped. It’s hard to imagine her falling in love with the bejeweled monarch, followed by a retinue of concubines and dozens of children. “Both characters are victims,” says Foster, a Yale graduate who is reportedly earning $15 million for starring in the film. “They are unconventional people living in conventional times.”
The role that may draw the most heat in this film, at least in Asia, is the king. Chow has made his name playing tough villains in Hong Kong action movies, but he is stepping out of his old character to become the first Asian film star to play a complex, romantic leading man in a serious, big- budget Hollywood movie (box). It’s a role that will offend at least some Thais, who argue that no foreigner should be allowed to play Mongkut. But Chow, whose regal bearing dazzles everyone on the set, says the movie is about shattering stereotypes in more ways than one. “Anna and the king have certain walls and boundaries because of the system they live in,” says Chow. “The king is always slipping over the boundary.”
The setting is a gloriously cleaned-up version of 19th-century Siam. The Oscar- winning production designer, Luciana Arrighi, created a “surreal reality” on seven acres–one of the biggest sets ever built. Some 500 Malaysian and Australian workmen erected the green and gold replica of Bangkok’s royal palace and a royal barge fitted with golden oars. Dozens of Thai sculptors carved flying Buddhist angels and winged golden cornices from Styrofoam. The costumes were made from 15 kilometers of Thai silk. In one spectacular aerial shot, the royal barge sails down a river (meant to be the Chao Phraya, which runs past the imperial palace in Bangkok); 19 elephants, decorated with sparkling Thai fabrics, join the royal procession to a rice festival. The Thai consultants to “Anna” believe that Thais will clamor to see the film, even if they have to see it on bootleg videos. “Mongkut comes out as the great man he was. The film will show his love for his people,” says Foster. “The film wasn’t filmed in Thailand, but in the end, the Thais will say they love it anyway.”
At the end of the day, Foster and Chow take their places for a final shot. A Thai consultant scurries about, making sure that ceremonial umbrellas protect Chow’s royal visage from the sun. The kowtow wave has been perfected, and the king’s procession has reached Anna, where the only lines of the day are spoken. It is a close-up shot, filmed from the waist up. In the tropical heat, Foster stands stoically in her bonnet and bolero. Underneath, hidden from the cameras’ view, she has dropped her hoop skirt. She is wearing yellow and white polka-dot boxers. After all, this is just a movie.
title: “The Royal Treatment” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Sue Ek”
It’s the first good news the airline business has had in quite a while. The question now is whether the new growth in business travel will translate into a recovery for the entire industry. After all, premium travelers are the backbone of the airlines. And over the past few years, their purse strings have been tighter than ever. Thanks to what the travel industry grimly refers to as “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”–terror, recession, war and SARS–all business travel has either shrunk or remained flat for the past three years. “When the economy is soft, business travel is one of the first things to be cut,” says Rick Miller, vice president of the World Travel and Tourism Council.
Finally, though, it looks as if companies are set to let their road warriors back out on the road. Thanks to increased consumer confidence and a jump in cross-border mergers-and-acquisitions activity (which requires intensive travel), business travel is expected to grow more than 4 percent this year, according to the WTTC. The question is whether the growth will translate into profitability for the airlines. Historically, first class and business class have represented only about 20 percent of airline traffic, but as much as 80 percent of its profits. In recent years, various factors have been converging to change that ratio, as fewer people fly first class and fares continue to drop across the board.
For starters, there’s less and less reason to fork over for a first-class ticket when both business and economy classes have been getting cushier. Even before carriers like Virgin took the trend to new heights, business class had been moving toward the kind of service that was once the prerogative of first-class customers. Likewise, many airlines have introduced premium-economy services, with just enough comfort to lure travelers on the border between business and economy. The changes have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Carriers like Northwest, Delta and Alitalia have dropped first class altogether owing to lack of demand; others, like Singapore Airlines, Air France and Lufthansa, are continuing it only on certain heavily trafficked business routes.
There are still growth areas for top-of-the-line travel–newly affluent business people from developing countries like China and India, and an increasing pool of baby boomers who want to travel in style. But those customers have access to another cost killer: the Web. That’s led to flat or even lowered fares in all classes. More and more, online travel sites are tapped not only by leisure travelers, but corporate travel managers. There are even sites like firstclassflyer.com, which specialize in finding cheaper luxury flights for executives.
The rise of low-cost carriers like Ryanair and JetBlue has put even more pressure on the industry. Experts say that since 2001, major airlines’ revenues have fallen about 10 percent, and some doubt whether the numbers will ever fully rebound. The National Business Travel Association reports that more than 60 percent of its members (mainly big multinational corporations) plan to put more of their people on budget airlines in the coming year. Majors like United and Delta are spinning off their own low-cost subsidiaries, and new cheap airlines are springing up in the highest-growth markets, like China. In the United States, low-cost carriers are even starting to offer modest business-class services themselves.
All this has forced airlines to continue ratcheting up business services, without raising fares to match. Dozens of entertainment channels are now de rigueur, as are flat or nearly flat beds. Lufthansa has revamped its cabins to offer 25 percent more space in each seat, and serves gourmet meals prepared by celebrity chefs. KLM gives corporate travelers Perrier Jouet champagne and Aveda goodie baskets. Qantas, which unveiled a $385 million revamp of its business class in September, boasts of a mood-lighting system–pale pink for morning, midnight blue at night–which it claims helps passengers go to sleep and wake up more comfortably.
Aircraft makers like Boeing and Airbus are building new planes designed to increase comfort and service in all classes. On its 7E7 planes, which begin shipping in 2008, Boeing is swapping aluminum for lighter composite materials, which allow it to build a wider cabin. Cabin pressure would simulate 1,800 rather than 2,400 meters, which increases the moisture in the air, reducing jet lag. On Airbus’s 555-seat A380, which begins shipping in 2006, airlines would have the option of offering onboard business centers, as well as bigger seats and separate armrests on every chair.
While Boeing and Airbus duel over a vision of future travel, industry analysts say there’s a market for both. The 7E7, which is designed to carry fewer passengers over longer distances, will help service all the long-haul routes springing up between Western cities and booming parts of the developing world. And while the thought of the baggage-claim area after an A380 flight might be daunting, it’s easy to see how any traveler on a budget might be attracted to supercheap fares of $200 or less on key routes like London to New York. Either way, the industry’s struggles are good news for passengers, who can continue to expect better service and more perks no matter what class they fly.
title: “The Royal Treatment” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Daniel Anderson”
Mirren has since tried the crown on twice. Just a month after winning an Emmy for her lusty turn as Elizabeth I on HBO, Mirren’s nuanced performance as Elizabeth II has won her the best-actress award at the Venice Film Festival–and made her a top Oscar contender. In Stephen Frears’s marvelous, and surprisingly intimate, new movie “The Queen,” she plays Elizabeth II in the days after Diana’s shocking death on Aug. 30, 1997. It was a week when Her Majesty seemed strikingly out of touch with not just her people and her new prime minister, Tony Blair, but with the entire planet. Despite an international frenzy of mourning over “the people’s princess,” the queen hunkered down at her summer retreat in Balmoral, Scotland, unwilling to shed a single public tear over the death of her former daughter-in-law. Millions of Britons were asking the questions Mirren had posed as a girl: Does it hurt her to show a little emotion? Isn’t that what she’s there for?
To play Elizabeth II, the actress immersed herself in the monarch’s psychological world. “I watched a lot of film, read all the books I could,” she says. “The most valuable was written by Crawfie [Marion Crawford], who was their nanny and also their teacher, the woman in charge of Elizabeth and Margaret from when they were little kids. I found myself drawn toward the young Elizabeth, the person she was before she was queen.” Mirren was also struck by 20 or so seconds of film shot when Elizabeth was 12. “She’s coming out of a car and she’s got her little socks on and her little coat with a velvet collar and gloves. She’s meeting a dignitary and she puts her hand out. She doesn’t smirk, she doesn’t wriggle, she doesn’t look around at the cameras. She does what she has to do as well as she pos-sibly can.”
That, says Mirren, is the essence of the woman who has been on the throne for more than five decades. “She’s very dignified. There’s a sense of self-control, of self-discipline,” she says. When the queen finally was forced to make a televised speech about Diana–or face a potential crisis for the monarchy–she looked stoic and grim. In Mirren’s re-creation, you see the effort it must have taken in that moment for the queen to reject her most deeply held beliefs about how she should behave.
One thing Mirren learned from playing two Elizabeths is that the rulers shared a name–and not much else. “No sycophancy was too much for Elizabeth I,” she says. “She just adored being flattered and lied to, in a way. She wouldn’t countenance anything else.” The HBO movie depicted an aging queen losing her longtime lover and falling for a much younger man. The 61-year-old Mirren made for a sexy monarch, even without the benefit of any obvious cosmetic surgery. “Power is sexy,” she says. “And if a woman is extremely powerful and extremely wealthy, she becomes sexy. It’s just that women don’t often have that position.”
Playing the two Elizabeths back to back was “pure chance,” Mirren says. But it has given her a break from being so closely identified with her role as detective Jane Tennison in the award-winning series “Prime Suspect.” “Now, I’m not the policeman anymore,” she says, “I’m the queen.” (Until November, at least, when she makes her final appearance as the character in “Prime Suspect 7” on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre.) With no new projects lined up at the moment, Mirren says she and her husband, director Taylor Hackford, are taking a little bit of a break. They have houses in Los Angeles, the south of France and London, which Mirren still considers home. There, she’s theatrical royalty, named a Dame of the British Empire in 2003. Yes, she’s met the queen. “It was at a polo match,” Mirren says. “I had all of a minute with her. I was with Chloë Sevigny and Chloë and I were being introduced at the same time. And I said to the queen, ‘This is Chloë Sevigny. She’s come all the way from Los Angeles. And I’m Helen Mirren and I’ve come all the way from Battersea’.” That got a smile.
