Expatriate Games : Fed up with Hollywood, Oscar-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant moved to Thailand to escape the posturing and power plays. But the very things he fled followed him there when he wrote a movie for TV

Stirling Silliphant, a fixture in the entertainment industry for three decades, disappeared from Hollywood six years ago. He was one of the industry’s most prolific screenwriters, winning an Academy Award for 1967’s “In the Heat of the Night,” the racial thriller starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.

But in the service of profit-hungry studio executives, he also churned out lots of commercial action films--from the so-called blaxploitation movie “Shaft in Africa” to director Sam Peckinpah’s violent “The Killer Elite”--and campy Irwin Allen disaster epics such as “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.”

Through it all, Silliphant grew tired of the power plays, the egos, the hypocrisy and the dictum that homage must be paid to the box office. In 1987, a dispute with Sylvester Stallone over screen credit for the championship arm-wrestling saga “Over the Top” finally pushed Silliphant himself over the top. He sold two houses, six cars and a yacht and moved to his favorite vacation spot, Thailand, where the culture and Buddhism held a fascination for him.

“I didn’t come here on a fling but to change my whole existence, my personality, my understanding of life, and to leave what I call the eel pit of Hollywood behind,” the graying expatriate said last spring, sitting in a Trader Vic’s here on the bank of the massive Chao Phraya River and gazing outward at the low-slung boats and barges passing by.

“And it feels so good to be part of the human stream, and not some Hollywood big shot who worries about what table he gets at Jimmy’s and won’t let the parking attendant touch his $80,000 Mercedes. That seems so far away now. That’s not the way we’re supposed to live.”

In Thailand, where the American dollar is strong, the people are gracious and the land is largely unspoiled, Silliphant had a vision. Using local crew and talent, he wanted to turn Bangkok, along with the rest of Southeast Asia, into a burgeoning production center for English-language TV projects and feature films that would be distributed internationally.

Little did he suspect that with his first effort, the problems he associated with working in Hollywood would track him down, 8,271 miles away: A star, Fred Dryer, got involved, rewrote the script and, in Silliphant’s view, ruined his vision. The resulting TV movie, “Day of Reckoning,” airs Monday at 9 p.m. on NBC.

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“I have seen a video of the final version,” Silliphant, 76, said in another interview last week. “I do not like it. My distaste stems not from whether the work is good, bad or indifferent. The critics and viewers will soon enough make their own decisions.

“It is simply that it is not the film I envisioned, the film about which I felt a driving passion and a long-held visionary hope--finally to capture something, even a hint, of what it is like to be an American expatriate living in Thailand. The final result, to me, is a film assembled by committee, a script hammered flat by executive fiat.”

Dryer disagrees. The action-filled NBC series “Hunter” turned the onetime Los Angeles Ram into a star with worldwide clout after it was syndicated in 90 or so countries, becoming the most-watched TV program in China at one point. The changes Dryer made in “Day of Reckoning” were to give his fans what he believes they expect in his first acting assignment since “Hunter” ended production three years ago.

“The project couldn’t have turned out better,” he said of “Day of Reckoning,” in a recent telephone interview from Colorado while on vacation with his daughter. “We think we have a real good piece.”

“Day of Reckoning,” produced as a potential TV-movie franchise for NBC, tells the tale of an American Special Forces captain who moves to Bangkok after the Vietnam War. He becomes a Buddhist and a rogue travel guide, specializing in expeditions to remote and dangerous locations in Southeast Asia.

Silliphant and his Los Angeles partner, actor Robert Ginty, spent a year trying to raise $1.5 million to produce “Day of Reckoning” themselves. But the two farongs , or foreigners, couldn’t entice Thai investors. Ginty was going to star as Jack O’Brien, the lead character, but wasn’t a big enough name.

Perhaps more significant, the once-buzzing film industry has grown anemic in Thailand, where a big-budget movie might cost $400,000, compared to $25 million or more for an American film. Flashy products from Hollywood and nearby Hong Kong have almost killed the industry, keeping smaller, local Thai productions out of the few theater chains.

“Most Thai investors would still rather fill a swamp and put up buildings than back a film,” said Silliphant, who began writing in the late 1950s on such acclaimed TV series as the police drama “Naked City” and the road show “Route 66.”

So Ginty took the project to Paramount in Hollywood. As Silliphant tells it, Ginty signed the rights away before Silliphant could object.

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“The next thing I knew, it had gone from Paramount to Fred Dryer to NBC, and suddenly we had a deal,” Silliphant said last spring when “Day of Reckoning” was still in production. As Silliphant sat sipping his tropical drink in Trader Vic’s, filming was taking place several hundred yards away in the luxurious lobby of the Royal Garden Riverside hotel. He was available for consultation, but he was so disheartened that he wouldn’t appear on the set.

“When I heard this, I was not only unhappy, I was very upset,” Silliphant continued. “And what I knew would happen has happened. Number one, the budget went from $1.5 to $4 million. And number two, we totally lost control of the project. We sold the house. And then it went into the Hollywood system. What is the Hollywood system? The Hollywood system is to come to a place like this and just use it as a background.”

He gestured out the hotel window to the Chao Phraya--a busy waterway of commerce and trade in Bangkok and the best way to avoid the snarling traffic jams that transform stifling city streets into a virtual parking lot during the day. Along the exotic green shores, beautiful resort hotels stand between rotting, wooden dwellings where naked children play in dirty water.

“And that’s not what I intended,” Silliphant said. “What we’re getting is money. Period. We’re not getting what we set out to do--which is to control the film, to invest it with the culture and the attitudes of Thailand, to make an essentially Thai-produced film. I felt a sense of great personal failure, having said ‘Screw off’ five years ago, ‘I don’t need you bastards.’ Here I was back selling them something, and it was a total denial of everything I wanted to do.”

Silliphant said he bears no resentment toward Ginty, who ended up with a supporting role in “Day of Reckoning” as Dryer’s partner in his travel business, Eco Tours. Ginty said he was simply fed up with shopping the movie around when he made the deal with Paramount.

“I’ve seen this development process go on for years, having worked in independent films,” Ginty said. “But you’ve got to get it made. You can talk about it forever. There are guys out there in Morton’s who are constantly talking about it, and guys in Spago constantly talking about it. I got impatient. I wasn’t going to wait any longer, because I knew it would sell. Between Stirling’s name and this location, I knew the story would sell.”

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Early last year, the plans Dryer carefully devised for his career were collapsing like a house of cards. When “Hunter” was nearing the end of its seven-year run on NBC, Dryer signed a three-year contract at Paramount with Brandon Tartikoff, who had recently resigned as chairman of NBC Entertainment to run the studio.

One brainchild of Tartikoff’s was to put popular TV stars, who are seen in living rooms across America in tens of millions of households, into moderately budgeted movies and watch the cash roll in. Dryer was poised to launch his feature-film career in a movie called “And Justice for One.”

But before the cameras were ready to roll, Tartikoff abruptly left Paramount, Sherry Lansing replaced him, and she put Dryer’s film into turnaround.

“Brandon loved the movie, and he wanted to do it,” said Dryer, 48. “We had it all ready to go and then he left. When he did, the impending storm hit us: the new regime. And they said, ‘We’re not interested. We’re not interested in you, and we’re not interested in the project.’ I was pretty much dead in the water theatrically.”

Paramount’s television division tried desperately to get Dryer to do a TV series, either a half-hour comedy or an hour drama. But he refused, choosing instead to focus his energy on developing his own production company. If he was going to star in television, he wanted to produce and own the programming, making sure it could play in foreign markets to address his huge overseas following.

“I do know that television drives the world,” Dryer said. “It’s a software business, and those who have a library to supply that need in the coming years will be the ones in good shape. I want to be a part of that future.”

That’s when “Day of Reckoning” was presented to him.

Although Paramount would own “Day of Reckoning,” the internationally flavored production offered Dryer a solid first project for his new company to produce and supply to NBC, where he has a three-movie deal. Dryer became executive producer, along with his partner, Victor Schiro.

The pairing of Silliphant and Dryer seemed a natural. In “Hunter,” Dryer played a maverick cop with a female partner, incompetent superiors and a massive Magnum revolver. “Hunter” was crafted after Clint Eastwood’s successful “Dirty Harry” movies, specifically “The Enforcer,” the only one to pair Eastwood with a female partner. Silliphant wrote “The Enforcer.”

But Dryer didn’t share Silliphant’s vision of “Day of Reckoning.” Dryer changed much of Silliphant’s script before he arrived in Asia, collaborating uneasily with Silliphant by fax to avoid costly phone bills.

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“There really was no story there before,” Dryer said. “It was about a guy who lived out on a rice barge in front of the hotel. He had a travel agency, with these slow-turning fans, and a lot of women taking care of him. He was a typical American expatriate who lives in Asia for specific womanizing reasons, and he was very sexist. It was very deprecating to the Thais. I brought in a guy who’s there because he has found a place in the world that fits him.”

Silliphant denies there were any sexist aspects to his original story. From his viewpoint, Dryer “slashed and burned” all of the subtleties in his script, all of the dialogue that wasn’t of the “let’s go” variety.

“I saw all the grace notes and textures of the writing and characterizations vanish one by one--the dialogue reduced to easy banality or to strong, silent looks; the story line pounded into an A-B-C linear form,” Silliphant said. “There may still be two scenes left in the entire two-hour movie in which some hint, some faint luster of the original writing, may be sensed.”

Dryer explained his approach: “I have a pretty good sense of who I am and what I want to do. I know my limitations. I know what I’m capable of doing. And I know what people want to see. So I took the germ of the idea and just started restructuring it. It’s no longer a closed mystery; it was before. Everything was very veiled. It was tough to follow. Now it’s just straight on. Everything is out in the open. You get to see the bad guys and you can follow it easily.”

Nor did Dryer feel comfortable relying heavily on the Thai film industry’s infrastructure for technical support, as Silliphant had in mind. A multinational crew came in from London, Hong Kong and the United States for filming last spring in Bangkok and the jungle mountains of Krabi to the south. The entire project was overseen by a contingent of Hollywood “suits”--studio executives at Paramount and network executives at NBC.

“In my opinion, this oil-and-water mix cost us at least $1 million more than it should have had we been able to shoot with a 95% Thai crew and not whip into the mix Brits, Yanks and Hong Kong Chinese,” Silliphant said.

Filming wrapped in June. After an inordinately long post-production period, NBC announced an air date last month. Even the title of the movie was changed at the last minute because the original title, “The Wisdom Keeper,” tested poorly with audiences and didn’t have “enough punch,” as Dryer put it.

Dryer blamed part of the post-production delays on a Thai script supervisor who did not properly catalogue the thousands of feet of film that were shot. Silliphant blamed it on the continuing divisiveness of the separate cliques pulling at the final production like taffy: Paramount, NBC, Dryer’s production company and British director Brian Grant. Neither NBC nor Paramount would make anyone available to comment on the final version that airs Monday.

In the end, Silliphant found the entire experience to be “depressing, dispiriting, debilitating,” calling “Day of Reckoning” the “most degrading period of my career.” The expatriate character of Jack O’Brien still holds untapped potential for Silliphant. He would consider getting involved if NBC wants to turn the movie into a regular franchise, but he doesn’t believe that’s likely to happen after all the hassles.

Silliphant still maintains his dream of establishing a production mecca in Southeast Asia. He’s currently networking wealthy Thais for investors, and he’s writing a screenplay called “Forever,” to be directed in Thailand by one of the country’s leading directors, Prince Chatrichalerm Yugala. This time Silliphant will work without help from Hollywood.

“The thing that bothers me about America is the American insular point of view,” he said. “Our refusal to learn languages. Our refusal to really look around and see this is one big world. . . . We are so absolutely insulated--and Hollywood, in particular. We’re like in a shell. We’re like the crab. We scuttle around on the rocks but we can’t break out of the shell to realize this is a huge world. And there are wonderful films to be made.”

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Despite their differences, Dryer sounds like Silliphant in some ways: “I left the studio system, and I’m on my own. I have autonomy now, and I have an opportunity to enter into television and all the projects I do as a free agent.”

Dryer won’t rule out working as an actor for hire--apparently plans are under way with NBC and producer Stephen J. Cannell to do a “Hunter” TV movie. And Dryer would play O’Brien again, if called upon. But Dryer said he will make his priority Fred Dryer Productions, where he has a motion picture and several TV projects in development.

“I’m trying to address a world market,” he said. “People here know who I am because of television, and people around the world in 94 countries know who I am because of it. I want to attack the world theatrical market with smaller-budget features, and then come back in a television project on a world level that is right for me. When I do, I will own that. I’m looking for ownership, not fees. I want to establish a company that’s in it for the long haul.”