Hollywood bosses bow to the power of the rising yen: Phil Reeves in Los Angeles on how a film's villain ceased to be Japanese

A PROVOCATIVE thriller-polemic about the Japanese in America, which made headlines around the world, is at the centre of a fresh controversy - this time over the film based on the book.

The film adaptation of Michael Crichton's Rising Sun includes serious alterations to the novel, which shot to the top of bestseller lists last year, became a talking point in American political circles, and led to allegations that its author was 'Japan-bashing'. But for once, Hollywood has not hyped a subject: it has played it down, apparently fearful of causing offence.

The most startling change concerns the race of Rising Sun's murderer, whose crime forms the core of a Los Angeles-based plot that Crichton uses as a vehicle to argue that the Japanese are seizing control of important US industries, while aggressively protecting their own. According to sources close to the film, the villain is no longer Japanese, but Anglo-American.

Twentieth Century Fox paid Crichton dollars 1m (pounds 670,000) for the rights to adapt the book, which some in Hollywood earmarked as a sure-fire box office hit and a possible Oscar contender next year. Big stars - principally Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes - were recruited, along with a world-class technical team.

However, it is understood that Crichton is deeply galled by the manner in which his material has been handled, and has told friends that he dreads seeing the finished film, due out this summer.

The alterations to the Rising Sun appear to derive from a general desire by the director, Philip Kaufman, to avoid allegations of anti-Japanese racism at a time when the question of race is a matter of great sensitivity in the United States. Even his detractors say he is unlikely to bow to political pressures from outside interests (the Japanese have no money invested in the film).

Kaufman and Crichton were either unavailable or unwilling to comment, but one source said: 'There is a rumour that there was a lot of money floating around Hollywood to change the ethnicity of the murderer in Rising Sun from Japanese to Korean; but, even if this was true, Phil Kaufman would be completely unresponsive to this.

'However, he does not relish controversy, which he tends to shy away from. He is not an Oliver Stone. Also, there is a strong desire when you take over a project - particularly one that's successful - to make it your own, and that means changing it. That's what I think happened in this case.'

The Japanese are not in a mood to throw their weight around at present, having experienced a deeply disappointing initiation into Hollywood, with box office flops, spiralling costs and expensive legal battles. According to a survey this week by the Wall Street Journal, Japan's investment in Hollywood is frozen; its companies accounted for only an estimated dollars 20m to dollars 30m of the total financing for the production of films, compared with some dollars 1.25bn in the late 1980s.

Ironically, Crichton may have been the victim of the power of the yen in America for a different reason. When the rights to Rising Sun were up for sale, Japanese- owned Columbia, Universal and TriStar would have nothing to do with it, leaving Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox as the only bidder.

In the end, he received only two-thirds of the sum he banked for his less successful Jurassic Park, now in the hands of Steven Spielberg.

The making of Rising Sun has not been a particularly happy affair. Initially, it was adapted by Crichton and a co-screenwriter, Michael Backes, whose script was faithful to the book. But Kaufman demanded five separate rewrites of the first 40 pages, and even then was dissatisfied.

Eventually the pair left the project altogether, amid considerable bitterness, and Kaufman, whose adaptations include The Right Stuff and Henry and June, set about finishing the screenwriting himself.

According to sources, much of the Rising Sun's polemic about Japanese trade practices has also been cut. Much to Crichton's irritation, Kaufman made one of his main characters, a police liaison officer with the Japanese community, into a black (Wesley Snipes), although he is white in the novel.

Given the tensions between the Japanese and blacks, such an appointment is highly unlikely in reality. (A Japanese politician was quoted recently by a Tokyo news agency as saying that when he shook hands with a black he 'felt his hands getting black'.)

If Rising Sun does turn out to be a disappointment - and it may yet succeeed - it will be quoted as an example of the current tendency of big studios to make pig's ears out of silk purses by riding roughshod over original material. Hoffa, another film that Fox executives hoped would be a smash hit, flopped amid criticism that it distorted history and failed to exploit a potentially excellent story. And Spike Lee's Malcolm X was accused of being an unduly simplistic rendering of a promising, but complex, subject.

Perhaps this helps to explain why the stars who will probably carry off the Oscars next week will not be honoured for big studio productions, but for their work with small, less cynical, independent companies.

(Photographs omitted)