The Emerald forest diary : A filmmaker's odyssey

New York : Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1985, 1985. Book. Fine. No Binding. 229 pages, [14] pages of plates : illustrations ; 22 cm ; ISBN: 0571137318; 9780571137312; 0374147698; 9780374147693 LCCN: 85-45318 ; LC: PN1997.E553; Dewey: 791.43/0233/0924 ; OCLC: 12243498 ; " Trying to make an anthropologically authentic movie in a nearly impenetrable rain forest about Amazon Indians who believe they are invisible is itself a trip to the Stone Age. But it's never quite clear who's traveling in which direction. Is it the Xingu Indians who are the primitives, the uncivilized remnants of a well-forgotten past? Or are the cement and steel of the construction dams now flooding parts of the Amazon, returning land to water, closer to the Stone Age? In a sense, both the film and the making of it are a revealing two-way mirror. It is John Boorman who produced and directed this trip, in the making of ''The Emerald Forest,'' starring Powers Boothe, Charley Boorman and Meg Foster and opening Wednesday at local theaters. The movie is based on the true story of a 7-year-old boy who was kidnapped in 1972 by Indians and disappeared. The boy's father, a Venezuelan engineer, spent every summer for the next 10 years searching the forests for his son and finally found him. But when he did, he found too that the boy had become thoroughly integrated into the tribe. The father decided to leave him there rather than bring him back to the ''dead,'' as the Indians call the land of cities and polluted air and hydroelectric power projects that have left vast areas of vegetation to rot with a stench that can spread 40 miles downwind and have irreparably damaged the territories and lives of thousands of Indians. Using a screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg, Mr. Boorman shot the film in the heart of the lush, strangely musical wonder of the Indian forest, using Indian actors, a Texan (Powers Boothe) to play the part of the engineer and his own son as the boy lost forever to another culture. But, building on the original story, he set its climactic scenes close by the actual construction of the world's fourth largest dam, the Tucurui, even as the Indians' once-beloved trees were being chewed up by giant construction equipment, like dinosaurs devouring blades of grass. Mr. Boorman's described the making of the film in a series of interviews and in a diary he plans to publish in the United States later this year."--Holcomb B. Noble, New York Times ; FINE/FINE.