The Boys From Bangkok

This story ran recently in the Sunday Morning Post in Hong Kong. It's the story of four gentlemen who have forgotten more than most of us know about movies and television, and a lazy Sunday afternoon spent on reminiscences, predictions and looking back, rarely in anger, at their various careers on stage, silver screen and goggle box. 


'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' was a game which captured the popular imagination for a time. The universal law that underpinned it was that you could link any celebrity back to Kevin Bacon in six moves or fewer, thus illustrating the incestuous and tangled web that connects the entertainment world, or perhaps just the ubiquity of the Footloose star.

BANGKOK LANGOROUS: (L-R) JIM NEWPORT, KEVIN 'BIG NUTS'
CHISNALL, MARK HAMMOND AND LES NORDHAUSER
CHILLING AT THE FRIESE-GREEN CLUB. photo: William Vaughan

Between the four gentlemen gathered in Bangkok's Friese-Green Club, a private cinema club in Sukumvit Soi 22, one or perhaps two moves would do the trick.

Collectively, the fellows sipping iced water and exchanging the latest showbiz banter, have done just about every conceivable job in the film, television and theatrical worlds in the course of four very different but equally colourful careers. They have mixed it with the best of Hollywood and European cinema, but choose to base themselves in Bangkok, at least when their peripatetic work schedules allow.

All are true believers that the Asian Century which is upon us marks this part of the world as the place to be for opportunities, challenges and buzz, bullish that the best is yet to come for the silver screen in the Land of Smiles. And each has a well-stocked supply of anecdotes about their lives in entertainment that would keep the most casual cinephile enthralled for hours.

Greenlight Films boss Les Nordhauser, Soho Films partner Mark Hammond, special effects wizard Kevin 'Big Nuts' Chisnall, and ace production designer, published author and self-professed 'blues shouter' Jim Newport have the easy cameraderie of men who have been in the trenches together.