Literally literary in Kata
Ed Vaughan met Marlon Brando. Big deal? Yeah? Well I bet you never did.
Years ago, before Hilton, Marriott and all the other giant chains arrived, at a time when the fanciest homes (sorry, “villas”) on the island cost 10 million baht, not six million bucks, The Boathouse in Kata was the nearest Phuket had to a centre of culture and other good things for foreigners.
For example, The Boathouse (now called Mom Tri’s Boathouse) pretty much started people drinking wine. Until then, the choice was Singha or Sangsom-Coke. The taxes on wine amounted to about 300%, so it was expensive, but The Boathouse became very creative at finding good wines from places like Chile and Australia at low prices, then almost gave the wine away in order to get people hooked on it.
It is the only place in Thailand to have won the Wine Spectator’s highest accolade, the “Best of Award of Excellence” in 2006, 2007 and 2008, for its excellent cellar.
It also had the first art gallery on the island, which had regular shows, mostly of Thai or Thailand-based artists. It still does.
He played and taught Flamenco guitar...
And it had the Chaophraya Literary Society, at which a succession of writers, novelists, journalists and other scribblers were trotted out to explain why they did what they did, and the huge amounts of money they earned from it. Or not.
The CLS suffered a hiatus for a couple of years, but was revived last year (under the rather more mundane “Boathouse Evening” moniker) and usually attracts a couple of dozen interested local expats.
Adding to the attraction of the intellectual pyrotechnics are the special bar prices, which acknowledge that fact that scribblers generally have thirsts that far outreach their wallets.
The next speaker to bare all will be Ed Vaughan, who spent 25 years in Hollywood, then 20 more escaping from Tinsel Town by sailing round the world.
He will talk about the art and science of writing, marketing and selling a feature film screenplay in today’s market; the difference between screenwriting and the writing of novels or short stories, and the importance of structure and character development in screenwriting – and how both can be easily identified and understood.
He will look at the reasons for the success of specific motion pictures such as the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, written by David Peoples and talk about the ways marketing movie work have changed with the advent of the Internet; how to get your script read by the right people by using the Net; how to protect yourself from intellectual theft. And he will, of course, answer questions.
...and he went surfing in a tux. Why? We have no idea. Ask him yourself.
Ed’s a been-there-done-that kinda guy. He worked for 25 years in TV production, starting at age 23 as producer on a Los Angeles surfing show called Surf City on KTTV Channel 11 (making him Hollywood’s youngest producer at the time). He later worked on such classics of TV as Ironside, Dragnet, McCloud and Knots Landing, among many others. Finally, in 1996, he produced a successful feature film titled The Spitfire Grill. (His full credits can be seen here.)
He then bought a 13-meter sailboat and sailed it around the world 1½ times, engaging in a new pursuit: underwater photography. His work has been published in The Costeau Calender and the Audubon Society Book Of Marine Wildlife, as well as Scuba magazines around the world. His sailing took him to more than 50 countries over 22 years before finally ending in Phuket, where he now lives.
The evening will start at 7pm on April 23, lasting roughly two hours. It is open to all. For more information, contact Lisa Sol, PR Manager of the Boathouse, by email to pr@boathousephuket.com
A question for Ed (which I’ll pose Thursday night): are there any active screenwriters in Phuket?
The island’s an ideal location for writers in general – when the Internet works – but screenwriters are a different breed…
[...] is life outside Patong. (The most recent speaker was former Hollywood producer Ed Vaughan; see here for our story on [...]
[...] this blog for a while you may recall an ex-Hollywood feller by the name of Ed Vaughan, who gave a talk to the Literary Society at Mom Tri’s Boathouse in Kata a while back. He’s at it [...]