Doom or bloom? A screenplay in four Acts--Thomas Schmid traces the development and anticipates the future of Thailand's film industry, which reads like a movie script itself.(Film special: market analysis)(Industry Overview)(Cover Story)

Prologue: Where are we going?

"Thais love movies. They always have. In fact the local industry is only a few years younger than when the Lumiere brothers invented the film camera," says Scott Rosenberg, managing director of AMW International, a Bangkok-based consulting company.

But since then, Thai film has had its ups and downs. In the industry's heyday in the 1970s, the industry churned out up to 100 flicks every year, then went into a steep decline in the following decade, with both volume and quality output suffering greatly.

The economic downturn of 1997 ...

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