Calgary Herald, Monday November 6, 1995

Jeff Adams Banff Festival of Mountain Films, Banff, Alberta

BRAD PITT's name didn't mean anything to Heinrich Harrer a few months ago. But now the 83-year old mountain climber and writer, whose Seven Years in Tibet has been translated into 48 languages and sold more than three million copies, is counting on Pitt's Hollywood sex appeal to turn a film version of Harrer's book into a box office hit - and a cruical vehicle to publicize Tibet's problems.

Harrer said there are millions of people who still aren't aware that Tibet has been occupied by Chinese military forces since 1949, and that the only way many Tibetans have managed to survive is by escaping to bleak refugee camps in India and Pakistan.

"A movie like this can make their story known overnight," he said during the 20th-anniversary Banff Festival of Mountain Films. Pitt - of Thelma and Louise, Legends of the Fall and most recently Seven fame - has signed with TriStar Pictures to play Harrer in a film to be made next year in India about the Austrian-born adventurer's life. Harrer was a 27-year-old climber, travelling in India in preparation for a Himalayan expedition, when the Second World War broke out in 1939 and he was imprisoned by British forces there. He escaped five times during the next 4-1/2 years, intent each time on travelling through the snow-capped Himalayas to reach the isolated and unknown world of Tibet.

Harrer's final escape - which will be featured in the film - succeeded after he and another POW disguised themselves as barbed wire repairmen and slipped outside the fence. It still took 21 more months - until early 1946 - before the two men finally made their way to Lhasa , or Tibet's Forbidden City that had been shrouded from the outside world for centuries.

The Dalai Lama, then a curious 13-year-old, learned of the white-skinned newcomers and arranged to meet them. Harrer became his informal tutor, introducing him to Western culture, including many ceremonies that had never been seen by foreign eyes.

His time in Tibet enabled Harrer, upon returning to Austria, to paint a literary portrait of Tibetan life in unprecedented detail - one the rest of the world was eager to see. He used the sale proceeds from Seven Years in Tibet to finance other mountaineering expeditions, which in turn led to the writing of other books. His current total: 600 expeditions and 19 books.

Although Harrer is too old now for serious climbing, he still writes and makes occasional public appearances - reminding people that when he was a refugee in 1946, the Tibetan people welcomed him and "now the day has come when they are the refugees."

This message can reach an entirely new - and younger - audience through Brad Pitt.

To highlight this potential, Harrer recalled a recent trip to the small Austrian village where he grew up. While visiting the mayor at this home, Harrer mentioned a movie would soon be made about his life - and that a young American named Brad Pitt would portray him. Neither man in the village of only 1,000, high in the Austrian Alps, was aware of Pitt's box office appeal.

But when the mayor's 12-year-old daughter heard the sultry actor's name, she let out an adolescent gasp and ran for her bedroom - returning with a large poster of Pitt.

That kind of world-wide recognition, Harrer readily admits, can do more to publicize the sorry plight of Tibetan people than all his books and public appearances put together.