Published by: World Tibet Network News, Wednesday, May 29 1996

The Chicago Tribune

May 28, 1996

By Connie Lauerman. Tribune Staff Writer.

James Hilton's Lost Horizon," the adventure story about three men and a woman transported to Shangri-La, a mysterious utopia hidden deep in the mountains of Tibet, is one of the most enduring novels of our century.

Since its publication in 1933, millions of copies of "Lost Horizon" have been sold worldwide, and Americans still buy more than 15,000 paperback copies each year.

Director Frank Capra made a film version of "Lost Horizon" in 1937 starring Ronald Colman as protagonist Hugh Conway. It was revived in 1973 as a movie musical starring Peter Finch and featuring songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The former took many liberties with the story and the latter was simply a travesty that bombed at the box office.

But the idea of Shangri-La still resonates. The word itself has entered the language as shorthand for a haven of idyllic beauty, and a chain of resort hotels in Asia even bears the name.

Now Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri, a California-based writing team, have brought out "Shangri-La: The Return to the World of Lost Horizon" (Morrow), a sequel that tells what happened to Conway and places Shangri-La in the modern-day context of Tibet, a territory invaded by the Chinese in 1950 and marked ever since by religious and political oppression, death and destruction.

In "Lost Horizon" Hilton seems to foreshadow the tragedy of Tibet, writing that the character Father Perrault "foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered though two millenniums . . ."

This dire prediction echoes in the sequel's reference to the warnings of the 13th Dalai Lama, the predecessor of Tibet's current religious and political leader. The 14th Dalai Lama fled his homeland in 1959 and established a government in exile in Dharamsala, India.

"The predictions of the 13th Dalai Lama in real life and what Hilton had Father Perrault saying matched up, and sort of made a sequel inevitable," Cooney says.

"Dreadful things came to Tibet and so we worked the 13th Dalai Lama's predictions into the story to give it authenticity. We weren't forcing the issue at all. With any story about Tibet, it's necessary to tell what happened. A lot of people were hoping for a more romantic story but I think that would be irrelevant and a real waste of an opportunity."

From thriller to sequel

Editors at William Morrow & Co., the American publishers of "Lost Horizon" (Hilton was English) had been discussing a sequel for years. When Cooney and Altieri's proposal for a reincarnation thriller set in Tibet came into their hands a few years ago, a light bulb went on and Morrow assigned them to write the "Lost Horizon" sequel instead.

"It took a little bit of doing," Altieri says. "There were problems with Hilton's estate. Hangups about what kind of story to achieve. A lot of people say, `Oh, do you have to put military stuff in? Does it have to be this; have to be that?' Well, you can only tell the story of secretly discovering the magic land once. You have to face a new reality and there's nothing more real than what's happened in Tibet. It seemed to take forever to get approval on the story line."

Morrow also has issued a facsimile edition of "Lost Horizon" with a trompe l'oeil tattered 1933 dust jacket, but its riveting sequel can easily be read on its own. The story is set in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution comes to Tibet. A Chinese general searches for Shangri-La, desiring to plunder its riches, while Conway and an unlikely ally, the general's daughter (who also is an officer in the Chinese army), muster all their resources to keep the earthly paradise safe from destruction and desecration.

"We didn't want to make it too modern," Altieri says. "We didn't want to throw in too much sex and violence because it's not in the style. We debated a long time about showing an actual sex scene with Conway. No. No. You can't touch these sacred icons. I found it a tough project to do because you're following in someone else's footsteps."

Altieri and Cooney have written two previous novels together, "Court of the Lion" and "Deception," both set in China.

Altieri studied Chinese history and language, but when he couldn't find a teaching job, he began doing Chinese brush paintings. He and Cooney met in a Boulder art gallery and for years talked about doing a writing project together before producing their first novel, "Court of the Lion," in the late 1980s.

By that time, Cooney had worked as a radio reporter and learned that she "could write on command for money."

While Altieri provided much of the scholarly research for the first two novels, now the two share research duties equally. Each writes different sections of a novel and Cooney does a final edit to "make it seamless."

"We brainstorm on the outline," Cooney says. "Neither one of us dominates a character. We're both so thoroughly acquainted with the characters that either of us can be any one of them.

"It's a little peculiar, but it works. With these big books it's a marvelous thing to be able to brainstorm with somebody else."

Says Altieri: "We do other things separately. I'm writing modern short stories and Ellie is working on a novel, but it's more fun for us to work together. Occasionally we argue about things, but we've worked it out to a point where it's advantageous for us."

An attractive legend

Neither Cooney nor Altieri had been particularly aware of the plight of Tibet until they worked on their outline for the reincarnation thriller that led to the commission for the "Lost Horizon" sequel.

In preparation for writing the sequel, they devoured books about Tibet, a favorite destination for 19th Century explorers. They worked with Tibet House, a New York organization founded to raise awareness of Tibet's situation, which provided films about the current deplorable conditions in Tibet, including footage smuggled out by French filmmakers.

In ancient Tibetan legend, Shambala is a mythical kingdom, a paradise that may be a physical place or a state of mind. Altieri and Cooney assume that Hilton based the idea of Shangri-La on the legend of Shambala and make them one and the same in the sequel.

"It's a very attractive legend," Cooney says. "It appeals to people from all cultures because it's sort of an archetypal idea.

"The nice thing about how Hilton treated it was that he didn't make it a supernatural paradise. In other words, there are probably good, empirical, solid reasons why you can go there and live 200 years. You will die eventually but you'll age much more slowly and gracefully. What an idea! Of course, in our story we expanded the notion of Shangri-La to include all of Tibet, paradise threatened. Not that Tibet was necessarily paradise, but it was an exceptional civilization on the planet.

"Tibetan Buddhism seems to be one of the most advanced philosophies on the planet. They've made it their business to understand how the human mind works. They believe the human mind is a formidable power on this Earth and that makes a lot of sense to me."

"Shangri-La" is dedicated to the people of Tibet, and while the authors saw it as an opportunity to bring attention to the cause, they aren't heavy-handed in their approach.

"If there's a problem it seems like you can attract many people's attention if you reach them on a popular level--a movie or a novel," Altieri says.

They would like to interest Hollywood, especially actor-activist Richard Gere, in turning their novel into a film, but Altieri says that with other Tibet-related projects in the pipeline, including a film version of "Seven Years in Tibet" (Heinrich Harrer's adventure memoir of Tibet in the 1940s), moviemakers seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude.

"I would like to be able to do something for Tibet, to make the book a device (for change)," Altieri adds. "It gives a view of Tibet that people can grasp. Of course it's fictionalized, but the horrors aren't that fictional."

PHOTO (color): (``Lost Horizon'' by James Hilton.) Tribune photo by James F. Quinn.

PHOTO: In ``Lost Horizon'' James Hilton (in a 1951 photo), seems to foreshadow the tragedy of Tibet.