The Royal Treatment

The mass kowtow is not going well. A young woman marches down a long corridor, barking into a megaphone in Malay. She is trying to get 896 extras--farmers and traders from surrounding Malaysian villages--to fall to the ground in sequence, like a wave. Dressed in traditional Thai draped culottes, hair shaved in 19th- century-style mohawks, the courtiers are milling about in front of a sparkling Thai palace made of Styrofoam and real marble. This is the set of "Anna and the King," the fictionalized story of the real English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens, who traveled to Siam in 1862 to teach in the royal court of King Mongkut. The extras are supposed to show their reverence for the king, played by Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat, as he walks toward Anna, better known as Jodie Foster. Instead, they look as if they are collapsing in the blistering Southeast Asian heat. "The wave is on Prozac," director Andy Tennant says with a sigh.

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 Hollywoodmovies 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."