From "South Pacific' to "Blue Hawaii'
to "Jurassic Park,' Kauai is
Hollywood's idea of primordial paradise

JOHN FLINN
EXAMINER TRAVEL EDITOR

Sept. 6, 1998



DESTINATION HAWAII

KAPA'A, Kauai - Heads bowed reverently, we
stand in a tight circle in the dining room of the
storied Coco Palms Hotel, contemplating an
antiquated, dark red, half-dollar-sized carpet stain.

"Every day during the filming of "Blue Hawaii,' Elvis
would sit in this very spot and eat his
cheeseburger," intones our guide, Bob Jasper.
"Some people believe this is Elvis' actual ketchup
stain."

One might be forgiven for believing that there is not
a single inch of the island of Kauai - condiment
splotches included - that is not imbued with some
connection to a Hollywood legend.

From "South Pacific" to "Jurassic Park," the island's
dazzling white beaches and emerald,
waterfall-ribboned mountains have been the motion
picture industry's location of choice whenever it
needs a backdrop of primordial paradise. Over the
years, Kauai has stood in for the lush rain forest of
Costa Rica, Vietnam's rice paddies and the
impenetrable African jungle - as well as Bali Hai,
Fantasy Island and Peter Pan's Never-Never Land.

Since 1933's "White Heat," well over 60 movies
have been filmed here, including "King Kong," "The
Thorn Birds" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." And
who could ever forget "She Gods of Shark Reef?"
(Well, who besides me?) So frequent is the traffic
between Hollywood and Kauai that United Airlines
recently took out ads in the Los Angeles Times
touting its flights here to movie location scouts.

All this has led to a thriving spinoff business: a
movie site tour. Which is what we're engaged in as
we stand in the Coco Palms dining room, gazing
down upon the purported Elvis stain and waiting for
our goose bumps to subside.

Jasper, who had been hanging around the edges of
the entertainment business for years, and his wife,
Jerri Wassink, who worked in Kauai's tourism
industry, founded their business two years ago after
being asked incessantly for directions to various
movie sites. From the start, they knew were on to
something. Business has been so good that they
recently added a second 12-person van. Even so,
tours are regularly booked solid 10 days in
advance.

Inside our van are a psychologist and her daughter
from Los Angeles, a retired couple from Ohio, a
couple in their 50s from Maryland, a young couple
from Missouri and two women friends in their early
50s.

We're now trundling through a residential
neighborhood near the Lihue airport, toward
Hanama'ulu Bay. Jasper turns on the van's video
player to show a scene from the 1962 film
"Donovan's Reef," with John Wayne and Lee
Marvin as the owners of a South Sea island bar.

"The story goes that Marvin and the Duke were
having a fistfight in one scene, and when John Ford,
the director, yelled cut, they didn't stop fighting,"
Jasper tells us. "Mr. Wayne hurt his back during the
filming, and he was never the same again."

Jasper, who looks and sounds a bit like "The
Newlywed Game" host Bob Eubanks, has a
bottomless fount of Hollywood lore. A member of
the Screen Actors' Guild, he has worked as an
extra in several movies filmed here and hopes one
day to land a speaking part; his curriculum vitae
lists several years running "Western Onion," a
singing telegram business, and a stint playing Julius
Caesar at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

We arrive at Hanama'ulu Beach, a county park,
and spill out of the van. The bay, we notice, looks
exactly as it did in the 36-year-old film clip, except
that the line of swaying palm trees on the left skyline
is gone. Victims of Hurricane Iniki?

"No," says Jasper. "They were Hollywood props.
Fakes. They were originally brought over here - an
entire shipload of them - for South Pacific in 1957.
When they were done, they loaded them back on
the boat and took them back to Hollywood. John
Ford brought them back here for "Donovan's
Reef," Rob Reiner used the same ones for "North,"
and they were used again in "Six Days, Seven
Nights." After each picture they pack them up and
ship them back to Hollywood. They're getting a
little worn-out-looking."

So many movies have been filmed on the island that
their histories keep tripping over each other. Before
John Wayne left his footprints in the sand on
Hanama'ulu Bay, Jasper tells us, Boris Karloff was
here in 1956 for the filming of "Voodoo Island"
(with a plot summed up in the Kauai Movie Book
as: "Resort developers disappear trying to exploit
Pacific Island that's home to voodoo worshipers
and chauvinistic woman-eating plants." ) Before
that, Esther Williams, Rita Moreno and Howard
Keel used the pier for 1950's "Pagan Love Song."

As Jasper tells his stories, tour clients wiggle their
toes in the sand and take turns posing for
snapshots, framed by the same tropical backdrop
that once framed John Wayne. Down the beach,
native Hawaiians lean against the back of pickup
trucks and look on with bemusement.

We head north on the highway, into the town of
Kapa'a, and Jasper shows us a scene from
"Honeymoon in Vegas," with Nicolas Cage on the
phone, trying to locate his wife: "Is that Kapa'a or
Kapa'a'a?" We pause briefly at a kayak rental
stand that was transformed into a an outdoor cafe
in Central America for a scene in "Jurassic Park."
As it turns out, it's the only "Jurassic" site we see on
the tour.

Minutes later, we pull into the parking lot of the
Coco Palms Hotel, which, frankly, has seen better
days. Battered mercilessly by Hurricane Iniki in
1992, the hotel has yet to be repaired due to a
longstanding legal squabble between its
Singaporean owner and his insurance company.
Sheets of plastic cover the bungalow roofs, and the
swimming pools are empty, save for the husks of
falling coconuts.

But this, more than any other site in Kauai, is
hallowed ground for movie buffs. Security guards
regularly turn away curiousity seekers, but Jasper
has special permission to take his tours inside. As
we stroll through the grounds, dodging the
occasional dropping coconut, Jasper reels off a
long list of movies filmed here: " "Miss Sadie
Thompson,' "Bird of Paradise,' "Jungle Heat,'
"Naked Paradise' . . . "

Nobody's listening. There's only one film worth
talking about here: "Blue Hawaii." This is what
brought Judy Boggs of Snow Camp, N.C., on the
Hawaii Movie Tour. This is what brought her to
Kauai, and this is what brought her to the Hawaiian
Islands for her first and perhaps only visit.

"I begged my husband to come so we could renew
our wedding vows on the wedding raft like Elvis,"
Boggs tells me, "but I couldn't get him on the
plane."

Instead, she has come with her friend, Irene Smith
of Denver, who, as we shall see later, has her own
agenda. Boggs and Smith were so determined to
take the movie tour that when they learned there
were no openings during their visit they changed
their flight and stayed in Kauai an extra day.

Jasper points across an artificial lagoon to the
bungalow on the end. "Right there, that one was
Elvis' bungalow," he says. He shows us the palm
trees planted by Jackie Kennedy and Bing Crosby
(they have plaques). Elvis never got around to
planting one.

"I've worn out two copies of "Blue Hawaii' on
video," Boggs confides to me. "My husband always
picks at me, telling me I live in fantasy, not reality.
But I always said that one day I'm going to go
there. And now I'm here."

Jasper leads us inside to the palm-fringed bar, to
the very spot where Elvis leaned in one scene. "If
you want to feel the vibes of Elvis," he says, "lean
here."

Boggs, who doesn't need to be told where Elvis
stood in the film, leans against the bar and has her
friend Smith snap her picture.

We move into the Lagoon Dining Room, and
Jasper explains how Elvis sat at the same corner
table every day, ordering bacon and eggs for
breakfast, a cheeseburger for lunch and another
cheeseburger for dinner. Sometimes when the
restaurant got busy, Jasper says, the future King
would jump up and bus tables, to the great
amusement of hotel guests. He launches into
another story about Elvis engaging in some
chauvinistic behavior, but Boggs interrupts.

"Every man," she says with a smile, "should take
lessons from Elvis."

Once we've all inspected the alleged Elvis ketchup
stain, we move over to the long, open window
overlooking the lagoon. Parked at one end is the
wedding raft - a platform spanning two outrigger
canoes - that bore Elvis and his bride in one of the
most memorable scenes in "Blue Hawaii." It is
available for real weddings, and perhaps one day
Boggs will renew her vows here - if her husband
back in North Carolina ever gets in touch with his
inner Elvis.

Soon we're back in the van and pulling out onto the
highway. As we do, Jasper points out the window
to Wailua Beach, where Frank Sinatra nearly
drowned in 1964 while taking a break from
directing "None But the Brave." As Jasper tells the
story, practically half the population of Kauai
plunged into the surf to rescue him - among them a
county supervisor, several firefighters and the
assistant manager of the Coco Palms.

"Could you imagine the PR nightmare for Kauai,"
says Jasper, "if we'd killed Mr. Sinatra?"

Up the highway we turn into Aliomanu Estates, a
stretch of sugar cane fields being subdivided into
lots for luxury homes. The van's video screen
shows pilot Harrison Ford juddering down a
Tahitian dirt runway in a scene from "Six Days /
Seven Nights." The movie's tin-roofed terminal is
actually a shack in the subdivision; the dirt runway
is the road we're driving on.

We park at the edge of a cliff overlooking a
gorgeous little cove with its own white-sand beach
- Papa'a Bay, it's called. About a third of "Six Days
/ Seven Nights" was filmed there, Jasper tells us,
including the nightclub scene in which he and his
wife got work as extras.

Rob Reiner came to Papa'a Bay, too, to film
"North," starring Bruce Willis and Elija Wood. But
former studio executive Peter Gruber has bought
the property, and, according to Jasper, has
declared the cove off limits for future filming. To get
a glimpse of it, we have to peer through barbed
wire.

Back in the van, as we roll past emerald, scalloped
mountains, the video screen shows a real rarity: the
original pilot for "Gilligan's Island." Inexplicably, it
has a Calypso-style theme song - even though the
story takes place in Hawaii - and unfamiliar actors
filling the Professor, Ginger and Mary Ann roles. It
was filmed at Moloa'a Beach, where we're now
parking. As we file out and walk the same shore
where the S.S. Minnow washed up, Jasper tells us
that the crew wrapped up filming here on a fateful
day - Nov. 22, 1963. "Nobody felt like being funny
that day," he says solemnly. "But they were pros,
and got the job done."

When CBS picked up the show for a full run, it
moved production from Kauai to a Hollywood
sound stage to save money. But Gilligan's beach
later served as the backdrop for scenes in "The
Castaway Cowboy" and "Lt. Robinson Crusoe,
U.S.N."

Next stop is Anini Beach, where Jasper leads us
down the sand to gawk at the lavish beachfront
home where James Caan tried to seduce Sarah
Jessica Parker in "Honeymoon in Vegas." It looks
pretty much as it did in the movie.

Our energy is starting to sag, but it revives quickly
as the van tops a crest and descends into the
Hanalei Valley, one of the most jaw-droppingly
gorgeous spots in the Hawaiian islands. To our left,
taro fields line the lazily snaking Hanalei River;
ahead of us, silky waterfalls streak down the faces
of mountains straight out of a Gaugin painting; to
our right, white-sand beaches glisten along the
shores of Hanalei Bay.

Standing like a sentinel at the head of the bay is the
spiky green peak known to locals as Makana and
to moviegoers all over the world as Bali Hai.

Hanalei has served as the backdrop for countless
movies - "Bird of Paradise," "Miss Sadie
Thomspson," "Pagan Love Song," "Uncommon
Valor," "Beachhead" and "The Wackiest Ship in the
Army," among them - but there's only one that
matters to the film fans in our van.

"South Pacific' is the movie that showed Hollywood
how gorgeous Kauai is," Jasper tells us. "That was
in 1957, and they've never stopped coming."

We drive through the sleepy, New-Age town of
Hanalei - Jasper leads us in a round of "Puff the
Magic Dragon," who, as you may recall, lived "in a
land called Hanalei" - and park near the town's
pier.

Moviegoers recognize the spot as if it were their
own backyard. Over there is where Ray Walston
and the others sang "Ain't Nothing Like a Dame."
Just down the beach is where the cast performed
"Bloody Mary" and "Bali Hai."

We walk out to the end of the pier and look to the
far end of the bay, to Lumaha'i Beach, where Mitzi
Gaynor sang "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right
Out of My Hair." (The Kauai Movie Book tells
how, while filming the scene, Gaynor got shampoo
in her eyes and nearly went blind. A crew member
saved the day by rushing back to Lihue to buy what
was then a brand-new product: Johnson's and
Johnson's Baby Shampoo.)

Irene Smith, who has been quietly humming songs
from "South Pacific" since we arrived, strikes a
Gaynor-like pose and has her friend Judy Boggs
snap her picture with Bali Hai / Makana in the
background.

"South Pacific came along at a romantic time in my
life, when I was so young and impressionable," says
Smith, who now owns a manufacturing business in
Denver. "I'm still looking for a guy to wash right out
of my hair."

We ride back in silence, each of us lost in our own
cinematic reverie. Me, I'm just thankful the janitor
at the Coco Palms didn't wash that ketchup stain
right out of his carpet.








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