Archive: Brandon Lee, Mar.31, 1993
deb...@comcast.net
by Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly
When he was asked where he'd like to end up, he laughed, "Oh, in a
little urn about this big".
On the last night of his life, Brandon Lee decided to stop off at
Wilmington's Fitness Today health club for a quick workout before
heading to Carolco Studios for what promised to be an arduous evening
of filming. Lee looked
exhausted; in the three months since the 28-year-old actor had arrived
in North Carolina to star in The Crow,
his punishing schedule had taken a toll. The movie, a bleak, dark
action melodrama about a rock musician who
returns from the dead to avenge his and his girlfriend's murders, had
been a brutal shoot even for an actor
in Lee's superb physical condition. Almost all of the filming took
place at night, with Lee outdoors and
sometimes shirtless and barefoot in subfreezing temperatures. The
script called for so much rain that when the skies
didn't cooperate, stagehands would turn mechanical rainmakers on the
shivering actors.
On top of that, the $14 million production had been plagued by a series
of freakish incidents that ranged from
the near electrocution of a carpenter to a storm that inflicted costly
damage on the sets.
The stress of making The Crow had thrown Lee's body clock into havoc;
he would wake up at four in the
afternoon, work all night, and collapse into bed at 9 a.m., six days a
week, "and on the seventh day," he
joked, "I drink." His workouts - half an hour or so on the StairMaster,
then some light barbells - kept him
relaxed without turning him into the kind of muscle-bound action-film
actor he detested.
Lewis E. Davis Jr., the health club's owner, walked over to greet the
young man.
"You look tired," he said. "How you doing?"
"Great," said Lee.
"I thought you'd be gone by now."
"No," said Lee, "I've got until April 8."
Lee and Davis chatted a while longer, mostly about the actor's upcoming
marriage to Eliza Hutton, a onetime
story editor for Kiefer Sutherland's Stillwater Productions, who had
been shuttling between L.A. and Wilmington
so that the couple could spend time together. Their wedding was to take
place on April 17 in Mexico, a week
after The Crow wrapped. In just a few more days, Lee's work would be
done, and the coming week looked
to be blessedly easy. Most of the scenes left were flashbacks to
happier times for the character Lee was
playing - meaning no rain, no freezing outdoors in the middle of the
night, and less of the heavy black-and-
white death-mask makeup he had to wear for much of the movie.
But the shoot awaiting Lee on the night of March 30 promised something
more difficult - a scene in which
his character was to be gunned down by Funboy, one of The Crow's
villains.
After finishing his workout, Lee left Fitness Today and headed to
Carolco's soundstage 4.
Less than 24 hours later, he was dead. Coroners in Wilmington removed
what appeared to be a .44-caliber
bullet that had lodged against his spine, then released the body to his
family.
Earlier in the making of The Crow, one of Lee's friends had quizzed him
about the film's plethora of complex
action sequences.
"No, man," Lee reassured him. "Nobody ever gets hurt doin' that stuff.
They've worked it out."
In the week since Brandon Lee's certainty about his own safety was
proven tragically wrong, speculation
about exactly how he came to be fatally wounded while filming a major
motion picture has encompassed everything
from a vendetta by the Chinese Mafia to a curse on his late father, the
martial-arts star Bruce Lee.
But in all likelihood, the cause of Brandon Lee's death is simpler, and
so perhaps more horrifying:
Somebody made a mistake.
At about 12:30 in the morning on March 31, cameras began to roll on a
scene in which Lee's character, Eric,
carrying a grocery bag, comes through a door and is shot several times.
Alex Proyas, an Australian music-video director making his first
American feature, had cameras capturing two different angles on the
scene, as well as a video camera recording the action for quick
playback. Actor Michael Massee, who played Funboy, was supposed
to fire his .44-caliber revolver at Lee from a distance of about 15
feet, at which point Lee would detonate a "squib"
(a small explosive charge) planted in the grocery bag to simulate the
rip-and-shred effect of the bullet. As risky as that may sound, it was
nothing compared with a scene that had been filmed just a week earlier
in which Lee had
been shot - and "squibbed" - about 50 times per take. The Crow's
special-effects man, J.B. Jones, had years of
experience dealing with weapons on the TV series Miami Vice, and stunt
coordinator Jeff Imada was also on the soundstage and had attended
rehearsals of the scene, offering advice. However, since all the work
involving semi-automatic weapons onThe Crow had been finished days
earlier, the film's weapons specialist had already left the set.
As a crew of between 75 and 100 people looked on, Massee fired the gun,
the squib in the grocery bag detonated on cue, and Lee fell to the
ground. Not until the scene ended and Lee failed to get up did anyone
realize he had been
shot. "It didn't really appear to the people on the set like anything
was wrong," said one eyewitness.
What the cast and crew of The Crow saw soon enough was that Lee was
bleeding profusely from the right side
of his abdomen. An ambulance was called, and emergency medical
technicians raced the unconscious actor to Wilmington's New Hanover
Regional Medical Center. When he was brought in shortly after 1 a.m.,
doctors
discovered a silver-dollar-size entry wound in his stomach, stabilized
him "as best as possible," and rushed him
into an operating room. During the five hours Lee was on the table,
surgeons tried to repair extensive vascular
and intestinal damage and stem bleeding that was so severe that Lee was
eventually transfused with 60 pints
of blood - the equivalent of a full supply for five grown men.
Lee's fiancee had flown to Wilmington as soon as she heard of the
shooting. By the time she reached the
hospital, Lee had been moved to the Trauma-Neuro Intensive Care Unit.
He never awakened. With Hutton at
his side, Lee died at 1:04 p.m. According to a source, the cause of
death was disseminated intravascular
coagulopathy - put more simply, unstoppable internal hemorrhaging
caused by the blood's failure to clot.
Within hours of Lee's shooting, an astonishing array of rumors - many
of which had lain dormant since Bruce
Lee's mysterious death from a brain edema in 1973 - were breathlessly
revived and circulated. Brandon Lee, it
was said, was murdered by the Triads, a group of organized criminals
with ties to the entertainment industry
in Hong Kong and Taiwan, who were angry that Lee wouldn't work in their
films. Others pointed to an almost
uncanny similarity between Lee's killing and a scene in his father's
final film, The Game of Death, in which
Bruce Lee's character, shooting a movie-within-the-movie, gets hit by a
real bullet while pretending to die of gunshot wounds.
A two-decade-old tabloid favorite, the idea that the Chinese Mafia had
killed Bruce Lee as punishment
for his exposure of ancient martial-arts secrets on film, was dusted
off and attached to his son.
Even Brandon Lee's uncle announced his belief that the family was
cursed because Bruce Lee's body had been
buried in a Catholic cemetery next to a young boy's.
On the set of The Crow, meanwhile, speculation took a more practical
turn. From the scene of the shooting, Wilmington police confiscated
film and video, the revolver, and two empty shell casings, one from a
blank and one from a "dummy" bullet - film-industry terminology for a
cartridge that has no gunpowder and is intended for use when a
filmmaker requires close-ups of realistic-looking bullets. Within days,
a detailed theory about what
might have gone wrong emerged, as follows:
While preparing a gun for use in a close-up, second-unit crew members
on The Crow may have altered a dummy
bullet that didn't fit the revolver by cutting off its end and placing
its lead tip in the chamber. When the close-up
was finished, the gun may have been handed off to a prop man who put it
on a truck, then refilled it with blanks, inadvertently leaving the
lead tip deep in one chamber. When Massee eventually fired the gun, the
lead tip
would have flown out, propelled by the blank with some, though not all,
of the impact of a loaded .44.
But even assuming that that accidental scenario is correct, some
troubling issues remain to be resolved.
In Entertainment Weekly's interviews with Secret Service agents as well
as special-effects, props, and firearms experts within the film
industry, the following questions were raised:
Why wasn't Lee given a protective vest, the standard industry
practice whenever an actor is within 20 feet of
a firearm aimed toward him?
Why was the bullet able to hit Lee when almost all weapons and
effects experts advise actors to aim away,
knowing that film directors can then "cheat" the shot to make the
actor's aim appear dead-on?
Was J.B. Jones, The Crow's special-effects man, shortcutting industry
practice by doubling as a weapons
supervisor on the night of the shooting?
Was the fact that much of The Crow's crew was nonunion and working,
by some accounts, exceptionally
long and late hours a contributing factor?
Why, given the potential danger to Lee from both the gun and the
grocery-bag squib, was no weapons specialist
- the final arbiter of a gun's safety - present on the set? Was it
because the film's producers were trying to save
money by reducing the number of days the specialist was paid?
Most important, how could the safety net on The Crow have fallen
apart to such a degree that a prop gun
was allowed to become a lethal weapon?
A chain of coincidence as elaborate as those questions suggest is one
reason that some in the Wilmington Police Department have left open the
possibility of foul play. But if, in fact, Brandon Lee was killed by
accident, a more wrenching question lingers: Was the actor's life lost
simply because somebody, heedless of risk in the most
dangerous of on-set situations, cut one corner too many?
Brandon Lee's death brought to a grimly abrupt conclusion the
production of a film that had already seen more
than its share of disasters. "Pictures have personalities, and there
are some that don't want to get made,"
The Crow's executive producer, Robert L. Rosen, said last month. "I
would certainly put this one into that
category." Indeed, "the curse of The Crow," as some of the film's crew
members labeled it, had cast a pall over
the set since Feb. 1, the first day of principal photography, when Jim
Martishius, a 27-year-old carpenter, was severely burned by a live
power line that hit his crane. That same evening, the production's grip
truck, parked
on the Carolco backlot, caught fire. "After that," says the film's unit
publicist, Jason Scott, "people started
keeping track of everything that happened."
The list of bizarre incidents quickly grew. A construction worker
accidentally put a screwdriver through his hand;
a disgruntled set sculptor rammed into The Crow's plaster-sculpture
studio with his car; a drive-by shooting
occurred just blocks from a Crow location. Soon after, some crewmen on
The Hudsucker Proxy, a dark comedy starring Tim Robbins and Paul Newman
that was sharing studio space with The Crow, began keeping tabs on all
of the catastrophes that were emanating from the set next door. ("It
was kind of a hobby here for a while," says
one Hudsucker crew member.) On occasion, The Crow crew even joined in
the smiling-through-chaos spirit. "I told them our unit photographer
had broken a tooth on a craft service bagel," says production
coordinator Jennifer Roth.
Just when the man-made accidents seemed to abate, natural disasters
joined in to make the remainder of the
shoot as difficult as possible - notably a March 13 storm that
destroyed the set. "My next movie," joked producer Rosen after that,
"is gonna be two people in a phone booth."
But none of the rigors of shooting The Crow fazed its energetic star in
the least. "I'm really enjoying it," said
Brandon Lee in one of his final interviews. "It's an opportunity for me
a plum role. It's got a haunted quality that
I really like." Ten years after dropping out of high school, Lee was on
the verge of realizing his dream - a chance to star in a movie in which
his role did not depend on the martial artistry he had been learning
since he was 2 years
old. By last summer, Lee had become so determined to build a reputation
on his own that he turned down a chance
to play his father in Universal's biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
(the film opens in May with Jason Scott Lee
- no relation - in the title role).
The Crow promised Lee something different - a brooding, mood-heavy
adaptation of a cult comic book (see sidebar) that would rest more
heavily on his acting skills than on his athletic prowess. Lee, who had
been working hard on scenes from David Rabe's play Hurlyburly in his
acting class, longed to portray what he described as "a character
driven to the edge of his capabilities who has so much to deal with
(that) he can't respond rationally anymore."
Among those under consideration for the role had been River Phoenix,
Christian Slater, and singer-guitarist
Charlie Sexton. But Lee's affinity for the part was so evident that
executive producer Edward R. Pressman began
to think of The Crow as the potential opener to a whole series of films
starring the darkly handsome actor.
Standing 6 feet tall and weighing a lean, tautly muscled 160 pounds,
Lee had a physical resemblance to the agile,
dark-browed comic-book character that was astonishing. Beyond that, he
had a bent for a kind of brashly morbid
wit that suited The Crow perfectly. Lee used the 1986 earnings from his
first film, the Cantonese Legacy of Rage,
to buy himself a 1959 Cadillac hearse. His attitude, however, was
jaunty rather than doomstruck: When a reporter asked him where he'd
like to end up, his reply came casually: "Oh, in a little urn about
this big."
Arriving in Wilmington in January, Lee first rented a house on Figure
Eight Island and then moved to Carolina Beach, which was closer to the
set and enabled him to travel without a chauffeur. As filming began, he
did his best
to accommodate himself to the long nights and sound-asleep days of The
Crow's schedule. "In the past few months, I've been realizing that I'd
like to see the sun for once," he complained late in the shooting,
adding wistfully,
"I haven't done anything here except make the movie."
When Lee did have free time, he would sometimes drop by The Mint Julep,
a downtown hangout favored by the
film's crew and extras, who would often show up still in costume as
menacing motorcycle thugs; there, he would
shoot a game or two of pool, keeping to himself. Lee also spent a good
deal of time at the health club, where he
would indulge his delight in macabre humor for a small but impressed
audience. "He came in one morning," says owner Davis, "with a
bloodstain on him, and he said, 'Oh, look, I've been shot!' He held up
his shirt and said,
'I can't get this stuff off my stomach!' They'd put dye on it or
something." On another day, Lee came in still
wearing the latex scars that The Crow's makeup men had glued to his
torso and arms. "He worked out all
that night," says Davis, "and all the stuff fell off onto my floor. To
help him, we had to pick up his scars."
Lee also spent time with J.K. Loftin, a local musician and teacher who
helped the actor prepare for a couple of
scenes in which he had to play the guitar. "He was always wearing black
jeans and a black T-shirt, and he had this guitar - actually kind of a
cheap guitar - that they got him," says Loftin. "I gave him three
months' worth of lessons in two weeks, and he sucked it up. He was just
so sharp. He was very aware of where he came from - how could you not
be? - but he was really a regular guy."
Loftin and his wife, Cathy, became friendly with Lee and Hutton, who
told them of their plans for a large and festive wedding in Ensenada,
Mexico: They wanted to charter a bus, take 45 of their friends over the
border, and marry on a walkway to the beach. "They'd rented an entire
hotel in Baja California," says Loftin. "They were very sweet together.
But she was handling most of the day-to-day preparations so he could
work."
In fact, Lee was devoting most of his energy to the role he felt would
be his professional breakthrough, and was evidently touched by The
Crow's themes of loss and resurrection. "It's a great part," he said a
few weeks before his death. "My girlfriend keeps telling me that (my
character) Eric is the symbol of a man who can come back and get
justice for all the people who never got it. I don't know - that sounds
a little heavy to me - but in a way I guess it's true. Eric and (his
girlfriend) Shelly were engaged, and at a crucial moment, it was taken
away. There are wonderful people everywhere who have awful things !
happen to them, who are never given a chance to do anything about it."
Two days after Brandon Lee died, director Proyas and producers Rosen
and Pressman met with the crew of The Crow and told them that any
decision on whether the film could or should be completed would take at
least a month.
Some actors had already left Wilmington, and Massee, who fired the
pistol, was said to be devastated and in
seclusion. "We've had nothing but support from the insurance company
and the completion-bond people
(who serve as on-set monitors of a film's expenditures and budget),"
Rosen told the assembled group.
"It is our hope that if the film can be completed," said Pressman, "it
is done in a way that Brandon would be proud (of)."
But according to some reports, within days of Lee's death, there were
already plans afoot to refashion The Crow's remaining scenes so that
Lee's role could be shot around or cast with a double. That apparent
urgency testifies to a long history of bottom-line decisions about the
completion of movies whose stars die suddenly; when at all possible,
the movie is finished by any means necessary. (The most recent major
example, MGM's 1983 thriller Brainstorm,
was extensively restructured after one of its stars, Natalie Wood,
drowned three weeks before the end of shooting.) The Crow, however, may
face another hurdle; Paramount, which planned to release the film on
Aug. 20, has an out clause that allows it to reject the movie if it is
not completed to the studio's standards, a tactic some Paramount
sources say the studio may use to avoid the appearance of ghoulishness
or eagerness to capitalize on a tragedy.
On April 3, as screenwriters reportedly began work retooling The Crow,
Brandon Lee was buried next to his father
in Seattle. The next day, 200 relatives, friends, and colleagues
gathered at the Los Angeles home of actress Polly Bergen for a
memorial. Among those in attendance were Lee's mother, his sister
Shannon, Eliza Hutton, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, David
Hasselhoff, and Steven Seagal. The nondenominational service lasted a
little over an hour. As the guests left, each one carried a glossy
photograph of Lee. According to the limousine
driver who escorted Hutton to the service, she was "kind of like
somewhere else - she's not here. She's lost.
She doesn't believe it yet."
Most of The Crow's cast and crew have left Wilmington after a harsh and
embittering spring. Before she returned to Los Angeles, though, Eliza
Hutton took the time to telephone Loftin and offer him the guitar he
had taught Lee to play. Loftin decided to accept the memento, but not
before wrestling with his emotions. "At first I thought that'd be
really great to have. But then, I didn't know if I wanted something
like that around to remind me of this. Something that should have
been," he says, "and never will be."
deb...@comcast.net
week before Brandon Lee died. It detailed what a trouble plagued shoot
"The Crow" was. The article ended with someone saying, "We'll be lucky
if no one gets killed before this is over"!