The Ugly American is the title of a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It became a bestseller, was influential at the time, and is still in print.
The novel describes how the United States is losing the struggle with Communism—what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds—in Southeast Asia, because of arrogance and failure to understand the local culture.
The book takes place in a fictional nation known as Sarkhan. In the novel, a Burmese journalist says "For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious." The phrase "ugly Americans" came to be applied to Americans behaving in this manner.
Ironically, the "ugly American" of the book title actually refers to one of the heroes, a plain-looking engineer named Homer Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and gives genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they practice tactics similar to Atkins'.
According to an article published in Newsweek in May 1959, "The Ugly American," himself, was identified as an ICA technician named Otto Hunerwadel, who served in Burma from 1949 until his death in 1952.
Another of the book's heroes, Colonel Hillandale, appears to have been modeled on the real-life Air Force Lieutenant General Edward Lansdale, an expert in counter-guerrilla operations.
An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace. Despite his knowledge, once he's there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism. He can't accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism. So, he breaks from his friend Deong, a local opposition leader, ignores a foreman's advice about slowing the building of a road, and tries to muscle ahead. What price must the country and his friends pay for him to get some sense? Written by
No sound was recorded on location, all of it was recreated in post-production, key sound being done Foley (pack of cookies, book, newspaper), others being taken from a sound effects library.
There were actually two cuts of the film. The finished and released version of the film is a video edit cut by Christopher Flynn. As a requirement for the project, a cut & spliced version had to be submitted as well. That version, edited by Paul Giobbe, was only screened once (per the requirement), but Flynn allowed Giobbe to keep the editing credit due to the intense difficulty Giobbe faced in hand-splicing reversal film negative with outdated reel-to-reel editing equipment (no Steenbeck), while trying to match the frame accuracy of Flynn's Digital Betacam edit. "He earned it."
