Hawaii Movie Tour Resurrects Hollywood Ghosts
HANALEI, Kauai - You haven't lived until you've wiggled your toes in the same sand where Mitzi
Gaynor sang I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.
We could be taking the Universal Studios Tour. Instead we are in Hawaii, riding through the jungles
of Kauai in a tour van.
As we leave the beach where they filmed the pilot episode of Gilligan' s Island, we roll into Hanalei
Valley as we listen to Peter, Paul and Mary coo Puff the Magic Dragon on the van's stereo speakers.
The famous mountains of Bali Hai shimmer across the water as we walk out the pier near Lumahai
Beach and imagine the sailors of South Pacific singing There Ain't Nothing Like a Dame and Rossano
Brazzi crooning Some Enchanted Evening to Gaynor.
This is also the spot where scenes for King Kong, Miss Sadie Thompson and Wackiest Ship in the
Army were filmed and where Olympic champion Esther Williams showed off her
synchronized-swimming talents in Pagan Love Song.
In the movie, the pagan island is supposed to be Tahiti. Welcome to the real paradise.
If you're a movie buff, you'll feel as though you've died and gone to Hollywood when you take the
Hawaii Movie Tour. It's the newest kick for jaded tourists who have seen it all.
Entrepreneurs Bob Jasper and Jerri Wassink operated a bird shop in Maui and dabbled in time-share
vacations until they decided to launch a five-hour tour of movie locations on the Garden Isle.
It was fertile ground: Kauai offers such lush beauty that more than 60 movies and TV shows have
been filmed here, from White Heat in 1934 to the more recent Raiders of the Lost Ark, Outbreak,
The Thorn Birds, Jurassic Park, Mighty Joe Young and Honeymoon in Vegas.
"We've been running this tour for two and a half years, and we're booked every day," says guide
Layne Beck, a refugee from Malibu, Calif. "Some days, we have three tours running. And we have a
deluxe tour that includes a helicopter ride and a boat ride up the Wailua river to the Fern Grotto.'
TV discovered the islands decades ago. Hawaii Five-O is long gone, but Baywatch arrived on Oahu
two months ago. "That's quite a coup for us," Hawaii travel agent Lori Evans said. "We haven't had a
long- running TV series in a long time."
We drive by a site where Disney will shoot background scenery for its next big epic, Dinosaurs.
Nearby, a crew is building the largest movie sets ever erected in Hawaii for an IMAX feature titled
Legacy. Later this year, Disney is coming to film Nemo, as in Capt. Nemo.
My wife and I, along with traveling companions Corky and Barb Kohls from Dayton, discover that it's
a small world as the tour van pulls up at our hotel. Riding in the same van are Jack and Marlene
Snodgrass from Newport, Ky. - he's the clerk of Campbell County - and a couple from Cleveland.
One of our first stops is the Coco Palms, Kauai's first-ever resort. In 1961, Elvis Presley put the Coco
Palms on the map with Blue Hawaii. Elvis came back to Hawaii to film Girls, Girls, Girls and Paradise
Hawaiian Style.
About She-Gods of Shark Reef and Seven Women From Hell, two other films made at the Coco
Palms, the less said the better.
The now-decrepit resort has been closed since Hurricane Iniki tore through Kauai in 1992. The hotel's
fate has been stuck in courtroom hell by an insurance dispute. Nonetheless, after watching Presley
balance on a double-outrigger canoe and croon a few bars of Blue Hawaii on the van's TV screen,
we go in search of his ghost.
We find it in the dining room where, as Beck notes, "Elvis would snack on deep-fried peanut butter
and bananas, with a cheeseburger for lunch and a cheeseburger for dinner. That's a horrible diet. If
you eat like that, you'll turn into a bowl of cholesterol and die at 42.'
Elvis has left the building but if you're getting married, you can still arrange a Blue Hawaii wedding on
the same double-outrigger platform.
We travel to the site where John Wayne and Lee Marvin filmed Donovan' s Reef in 1963.
"Sparks flew - those two men did not get along at all," Beck says. "They'd be doing a fight scene, the
director would yell 'Cut!' and they'd just keep going at it. John Wayne actually injured his back in one
of those fights.'
In between stops, Beck regales us with insider information about the tricks of movie-making.
"When they made South Pacific, they brought in a boatload full of nothing but fake palm trees," she
said. "When they ran out of palm trees, they dug up real ones and transplanted them. When they were
done, they shipped all the fake trees back to Los Angeles."
Two years ago, when they filmed Six Days, Seven Nights with Harrison Ford, they brought a
boatload of the same metal trees, quite rusty by then.
"They were 40 years old and had not grown an inch," Beck quipped.
We look over the cliffs at Papaa Bay where Ford crashed his airplane in Six Days, Seven Nights - a
scene made possible by paying the local surfers $20 a hour to take a break while they filmed.
As we return to our hotel and the Hollywood ghosts begin to fade over Poipu beach, all of us agree
the Universal Studios Tour was never so droll.
"I think it was wonderful," Snodgrass says. "You find out a lot of stuff you never knew. And you just
don't realize how many movies were made over here."
Copyright © 1999 Cox Interactive Media Inc.
Tom Hopkins DAYTON DAILY NEWS, Hawaii Movie Tour Resurrects Hollywood Ghosts.,
07-11-1999.