Twentieth Century Fox sought out an isolated tropical beach in Thailand. Then they put Leonardo DiCaprio on it. And then created a vision of wilderness despoiled by a tale of wilderness despoiled. Out of which unfolds a media fable with real-life consequences in a world haunted by travelers' dreams of paradise.

By John Tayman

Reuters/Ho/Archive Photos

The heartthrob invades Thailand: DiCaprio among the Leophytes

But start earlier: Open on Phi Phi Lay, a curling slip of an isle in the Hat Noppharat Thara National Park, 400 miles south of Bangkok. Pure chance has covered Phi Phi Lay in dark green casuarinas, bamboo, pandani, and palms. It brought red jellyfish and leopard sharks and angry green crabs into the bay, and set upon these creatures the inevitable predators: hungry macaques and hornbills and Andaman kites. Decades ago chance led the chao náam—small bands of Thai nomads—to Maya Beach, only to chase them away again when a random discovery on the island yielded a bounty of fragile swiftlet nests. Boiled and served as soup, the birds' nests are worth their weight in gold to Chinese gourmands. So off were shooed the chao náam settlers, and in 1983 Phi Phi Lay was declared officially uninhabited, no overnighters—yet another law for the island, immutable as the natural ones, and enforced by park rangers policing the shoreline in belching longboats, lest a swiftlet grow disturbed in its nesting by an errant human.

John S. Callahan/Photo Resource Hawaii

Maya Bay before the studio digitally enclosed it.

Thus, inevitably, one drizzly morning in the middle of 1998 a location scout for Twentieth Century Fox motored into Maya Bay, looked around, and declared it fine. For two weeks in January of last year, a full production crew—200 bodies led by director Danny Boyle, who had explored Scotland's underbelly in the film Trainspotting—made its long way to Phi Phi Lay. Eager to spin Garland's novel into celluloid gold, they brought with them Leonardo DiCaprio, who had contracted for a reported $20 million to play the backpacker, known only as Richard. When the luxury yacht carrying the actor glided into the shadows of the island, DiCaprio hopped off, followed a boardwalk overland, and emerged from the canopy of trees onto the gentle slope of the perfect beach.

Now one more scene, several months later: The commercial harbor in Phuket, Thailand, a scrim of fog cloaking the rusting trawlers and tankers. A charter boat pulls from the dock with 40 Taiwanese tourists aboard, 20 young couples on a pilgrimage to the location of a movie they have not yet seen, based on a book they have not yet read, and starring an American actor they know mostly from Titanic, a film that still plays in theaters in Taiwan. Call it chance that I was on the same boat.

"You are going to Leo Island?" a member of the tour, a young Taiwanese woman, asks.

You mean Phi Phi Lay?

"Yes, Phi Phi Leo," she answers. It is an hour past dawn, already hot, the Andaman Sea shiny-calm except in patches where schools of fish foam, feeding at the surface. Like the other passengers, the woman wears a name tag and has dressed to match her date, in black cargo shorts and a black-and-white-striped shirt. Every few minutes a couple leaves the gently rocking deck and clutches along toward the bow, laughing. Curious, I follow.

When I reach the front the boy in the striped shirt hands me his video camera. "Would you film us?"

He and his girlfriend step their way to the bowsprit and, after signaling me to begin filming, strike a pose: the woman's arms thrown wide like wings, the boy encircling her waist, the two of them leaning face-first into the wind. The scene from Titanic. A second pair of young Taiwanese wait patiently off-camera, clapping. When the first couple finishes, the next two hand me their camera, move into position, and assume the pose. So it goes much of the morning, Leo after Leo, Kate after Kate, while the signature cliffs of Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lay gather shape on the gray horizon and a woman behind me, for the benefit of the video sound track, sings Titanic's theme song in a not-bad voice.

Here, here I am, in Dyersville, Iowa, on the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams; that's me at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, the one from The Shining; and that's me in Austria, outside Leopoldskron Palace, which was the Trapps' home in The Sound of Music. There I am in Tuscany, in the town from Stealing Beauty; and that's me in Istanbul, in the bazaar from Midnight Express; and here's me in Rockville, Maryland, the town called Burkittsville in The Blair Witch Project. Now those are the stairs from the Exorcist, and that's the crater from Starman, and that was the town from The Last Picture Show, which wasn't really a town but is now, sort of, because of all the tourists. You saw those movies, didn't you? Because then you'd recognize these places...