American Filmmakers in Thailand: The Making of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

Thailand has become a frequent location for the shooting of American films. Its iconic settings and imagery of Southeast Asia makes it especially popular with productions looking for locales deemed exotic for American and international audiences. Thailand also benefits from a solid core of well trained film technicians as well as skillful and talented cinematographers, art directors, production designers, assistant directors, and line producers. The costs of working in Thailand, moreover, also makes the country advantageous to Hollywood producers and directors.

But long before any of this became commonplace, two American adventurers and novice filmmakers traveled to northern Thailand to make one of the most enduring cinematic records of Thailand in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The filmmakers were Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. And the film they produced was Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927). Just six years later, Cooper and Schoedsack would go on to make the landmark adventure film, King Kong (1933). The experiences the duo encountered while making Chang would prove important in the later lessons applied to King Kong, or what Cooper doggedly referred to as his “monkey film.”

Siam, as Thailand was still known in the 1920s, not only provided an exotic jungle landscape for Cooper and Schoedsack but a real life adventure in simply getting into the remote wilderness of northern Thailand.  In fact, the harsh filming and living conditions alone would have made the project a non-starter for most filmmakers. But Cooper and Schoedsack were special. Both men had been combat pilots in World War I. And Cooper, in fact, was shot down and captured by the Germans. Miraculously landing his plane while it was engulfed in films, only quick medical attention at a German military hospital saved Cooper’s life—although he was left with severe burns. After the end of World War I, Cooper then volunteered to fight with the fledgling Polish air force in that country’s war with the Soviet Union. Again, he was shot down and captured. Although there was a bounty on his head, dead or alive, Cooper avoided identification and made an escape overland; the escape itself was arduous, danger-filled, and made over a considerable distance.  Even today, Cooper is recognized for his service to Poland.

Following their wartime exploits, Cooper and Schoedsack undertook yet another challenge, a venture into the South Seas, Indian Ocean, and beyond on a schooner, the Wisdom, captained by Edward A. Salisbury.  Their origin had been Los Angeles, and the goal was to return through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic back to the United States. But the vessel never made it beyond its passage through the Red Sea. Along the way, however, the crew did visit the Society Islands (Tahiti and Bora Bora), the Marquesas, American Samoa, New Guinea, the Solomons, the Andaman Sea, and eventually Abyssinia, where the then regent, later emperor, Haile Selassie, provided a personal tour and access to filming the kingdom’s ancient rituals and cultural practices. A book, The Sea Gypsy, resulted from these adventures. Salisbury was given credit for the authorship but many sources claim it was actually written by Cooper. What is more important, however, is the initial experience and experimentation both Cooper and Schoedsack gained in photography and filmmaking.

Their new found interest in filmmaking would soon result in two groundbreaking documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang. Grass followed a tribe of Persian nomads making their annual trek across the Zagros Mountains. As with their visit to Abyssinia, the filmmakers gained unprecedented access to the Bakhtiari tribe’s way of life through a relationship with the tribe’s leader, Haidar Khan. Filming occurred during 1924, and Haidar Khan died the following year. But the film remains a testament to a “lost empire” of sorts, a world vanishing before the very face of modern times. Shortly after the filming, in fact, a new, modern roadway would eclipse the traditional caravan route, making the annual nomadic trek obsolete.

For Cooper and Schoedsack, Grass marked their inaugural effort at filmmaking. The effort is all the more remarkable when considered along with the fact that until that time Cooper had not even seen more than a handful of films on screen. The lessons they learned in Persia would soon be applied to their ambitious scripted documentary shot in Siam.

The team’s fourteen month journey into Siam is one of the epic adventure stories of the twentieth century. The first part was easy, traveling by rail from Bangkok to central Siam. Soon thereafter things became much more difficult. Crossing jungles, streams, and rivers, Cooper and Schoedsack eventually made their way to Nan, in the far north of Thailand. All the while, they had to port heavy, cumbersome early twentieth century movie cameras, tripods, and rolls of film. (A likely spoof of the filmmakers’ journey actually appears in the 1938 movie, Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, where the Japanese detective encounters two comic American filmmakers recording a documentary in what today would be Laos and Thailand. By that time, of course, both Cooper and Schoedsack were widely known and influential figures in the Hollywood film business.)  Eventually, they headquartered in the house of a Protestant American missionary and then set about making what still remains a rare look at traditional ways of life in Siam, especially among the people in the north of the country.

Chang itself documents the life of a family of Lao tribesmen, Kru, his wife, and child, who strike out from their village to build a home in the wilderness. The theme of taming the wild was actually something designed to appeal to American audiences, who would have immediately recognized in Kru’s struggles a similarity in conquering the American frontier. Along the way, the family is beset by leopards, snakes, tigers, and, most threatening of all, a herd of enraged elephants (the Thai word for “elephant” is chang). By film’s end, the family has retreated to their home village, which in turn is attacked by the elephants. Clever thinking on the part of tribesmen quickly reverses the situation, and the elephants are captured in a kraal and put to useful work once more taming the land and clearing the jungle.

The footage in Chang reflects realty—many, many animals are killed and captured. Cooper and Schoedsack went to extraordinary lengths to set up vantage points for the cameras that brought them into contact directly with wild creatures. In one shot, a leaping tiger actually puts its nose against the lens of the camera. Other shots capture sun bears, water buffaloes, pangolins, gibbons, and monitor lizards, all in situ. But the family drama, and family itself, is fictional. The filmmakers worked to emphasize primeval struggle, to provide a relatable storyline. Kru and his “wife” were not actually married. Yet the circumstances of their house, its construction and the living conditions are accurate, although the anthropomorphizing of the gibbon as a member of the household probably went a bit too far.

The response to Chang was exceptionally favorable. It received an Academy Award in 1929. The film also established a blueprint for both documentary filmmaking and fictional jungle adventure stories. For example, the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s with Johnny Weismuller would owe much of their setting and encounters with nature and family life to Chang. And Cooper and Schoedsack, as mentioned, would go on to produce one of the greatest landmark jungle adventure stories in the history of the cinema, King Kong. They would also team up to produce The Most Dangerous Game (1932), another film of Darwinian survival taking place in the jungle (its sets were also used for King Kong), and Mighty Joe Young (1949).  

Both filmmakers continued to work in Hollywood for many more years. But Cooper’s career eventually eclipsed that of Schoedsack. He became the head of production at RKO, was instrumental in pushing for the use of technicolor in filmmaking, and also worked at Pioneer Pictures, Selznick International, and MGM. Outside of Hollywood, Cooper maintained his interest in aviation, becoming a board member of Pan American Airways. When World War II started, Cooper left Hollywood to serve in the Flying Tigers, the American flight group fighting the Japanese in the China theater.

After World War II, Cooper formed Argosy Films with John Ford to produce landmark Westerns such as Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Cooper was also part of the postwar effort to shift motion picture exhibition to widescreen with Cinerama. Cooper himself died in 1973, but the Cooper family saga was not yet complete in Thailand. For during the Vietnam War, Cooper’s son, Richard M. Cooper, was a pilot and stationed in Udon Thani. He flew 500 combat missions, including over 200 combat missions over North Vietnam. Still, it is a little acknowledged truth that one of the most influential and important filmmakers in Hollywood essentially establish his career in Siam in the 1920s.