How to Drop the Big One : Movies: Disney makes a leap of faith with ‘Free Willy’ director Simon Wincer--and two life-like, animatronic elephants--in ‘Operation Dumbo Drop.’

So who’s the biggest star in Hollywood right now? Stallone? Carrey? Streep? Sorry, but those puny humans, with barely a quarter-ton between them, could hardly tip the scales against the undeniably huge star of Disney’s new “Operation Dumbo Drop”: Tai, the 8,000-pound elephant.

The movie, which opens Friday, is based on a real and little-noted event of the Vietnam War. During the summer of 1968, in order to repay the inhabitants of a remote Montagnard village for their support during some especially fierce warfare, the Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces arranged to have a large, prized elephant airlifted straight to the villagers.

The movie was filmed primarily in the remote hillsides of Thailand, where cast, crew and elephant endured some grueling weeks of harsh weather and limited movie-making resources. When a very real drug war erupted near intended locations, the production came back to the United States to shoot some final scenes.

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The pivotal elephant, called Bo Tat in the film, was played by Tai, a talented Asian elephant belonging to trainer Gary Johnson. Tai, currently a California resident, was flown to location in a custom-built cage aboard a 747 (and, to complete the film, was actually Fed-Ex’d to Florida). During the shoot she was as pampered as any self-respecting leading lady--requiring hundreds of pounds of fresh hay, bananas and melons each day, along with hundreds of gallons of safely boiled water for drinking and bathing.

Smaller members of the “Dumbo Drop” cast include Danny Glover, Ray Liotta and Denis Leary, but it is Tai who is at the center of all the action in this elephantine star vehicle. All the action that is, save for the actual, climactic parachute “Drop,” for which remarkably life-like, full-sized animatronic elephants were substituted.

“I was a little intimidated by the elephant at first,” Liotta says. “When I first got to Thailand, I went over to where she was living and was just shocked. She was so big and she wasn’t on a chain or behind a fence. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. But I just visited her every day and developed a real respect and affection for her. By the end of the movie I was the one picking grass off of her so that she’d look good in her close-ups.”

Despite the film’s combat backdrop, it is a typically breezy Disney romp, offering about as much dark insight into the Vietnam War as “Hogan’s Heroes” did for World War II. But, with its intended younger audiences, the film is likely to make its parachuting elephant as popular as the tongue-waggling orca of “Free Willy.” Not surprisingly, the director of “Dumbo Drop” is also the man responsible for the first “Willy” film--Simon Wincer, who’s now become something of a large-mammal specialist.

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Wincer says with a laugh that Tai was probably the easiest “person” to deal with on the set, although her size occasionally led to some unforeseen difficulties.

“The main problem with an elephant is that she weighs four tons--you can’t just put her anywhere. When we were shooting in some rice paddies, she’d walk out right where she was supposed to on cue, but she’d start to sink into the ground. We had to reinforce everything she was going to step on. A boat, a truck, a cargo plane. It was simply more of a logistics problem than an acting problem.”

The greatest logistics problem of the film involved shooting an elephant making a sky-dive from 10,000 feet with Liotta’s character. That’s where creature-builder Rick Lazzarini’s pair of computerized animatronic elephants--painstakingly detailed doubles of Tai--were put to use. His pair of mechanical elephants came equipped with a truck-sized shock absorber in each foot, and were powered by generators hidden inside the creature’s torso, accessible through what was known technically as “the butt flap.”

“We were filming among Thai villagers who had never seen a movie, let alone participated in a production,” producer Diane Nabatoff says. “They thought we were all crazy in general, but I think they were particularly puzzled by Rick’s habit of reaching into an elephant’s rear-end to get a motor started.”

Using a gigantic parachute that took a team of four people six hours to pack, Lazzarini’s creatures were dropped a total of 18 times--occasionally crashing through trees or sinking into mudholes--to get footage for the film’s attention-grabbing finale. He and his crew of puppeteers used radio controls to keep the faux-elephant looking alive, and understandably surprised, during its free-fall. A professional sky-diver stood in for Liotta, who says he’s afraid enough of heights to avoid glass elevators.

Lazzarini says he felt proudest of his animatronic work when it passed a real elephant’s inspection. “I think I bonded pretty well with Tai, and I know that she actually bonded with her double. We brought her into our workshop in Thailand and her trunk was sniffing all over our animatronics. She’s an intelligent animal and you could almost see her thinking, ‘Hey, wake up! What’s wrong with you?’ ”

For close-ups of the drop, Tai and Liotta were filmed on a blue-screen sound stage in Florida. These shots required that Tai be harnessed in to a sophisticated crane rig--a rig she enjoyed quite a bit. “When she got used to it, she discovered it was like a big swing,” Wincer explains, “and she really liked to swing. We had to get some wires up pretty quickly to stop her from swinging all over the place.”

Wincer says he’s probably through directing animals much bigger than himself but believes that Tai’s got a promising leading-elephant career ahead of her. He even saw her develop some improv ability in “Dumbo Drop.”

“In the last scene of the film, where everybody is shaking hands to say goodby, she started waving her trunk around at all the actors,” he explains. “That wasn’t on command--it was just instinct. The trainer might have had to work with her half a day to get that just right if we’d asked him to, but she instinctively seemed to know what was required in the scene.”

And without hesitation, Liotta also enthusiastically praises his co-star’s acting abilities. “No question, she gives a great performance. She was what the movie was about and she was there. I don’t think we ever had to do any retakes because the elephant missed her mark. The humans were the problem.”