It was 1993 and I was just starting my film career. An executive who I had met at a different production company and now worked at Paramount Films called me in to talk about an idea that I had pitched to her a few months previous. Her plan was to use my pitch to capture the heart of an elusive actor named Brandon Lee who had done a few B-movie actioneers and was primed for takeoff to the A-List. She thought my concept would help facilitate that ascension.
Perhaps it would have but Brandon decided against my project and did "The Crow" instead. Unfortunately.
Brandon had undeniable charisma and talent. He hadn't done much in the way of weighty dramatic roles but he lit up the screen when he was on it. And his martial arts skills were real and unique. He wasn't perhaps as talented as his amazing father, Bruce Lee, but he had a different focus in life that Bruce didn't necessarily have.
To Brandon, serious acting was the goal. He studied it, went to school for it. He told me in our meeting that was just the two of us in the exec's Paramount office, that he wasn't interested in action roles anymore. He wanted more from his acting. He had already done several films and some TV and was hungry to prove to everyone that he needed to be taken seriously as an actor. He wanted to be Robert Deniro.
In person, he was gracious and funny - a guy you could really like despite all the trappings of his celebrity. That was definitely part of his draw as an actor - he came across that same way on screen, even when he was playing a role. The meeting we had was quiet and personal - just two young men talking about a lot of things, film being only one of the subjects. We chatted about martial arts, his father, literature - a lot that had nothing to do with the purpose of why we were given the exec's office to use. He told me he wanted to do Hamlet. That he hadn't even spoken English until he was eight and he considered the Bard to be a personal challenge. He smiled broadly at that as if processing some internal joke. It made me laugh to see him so amused, and even though he was basically saying no to my pitch, I was thrilled to sit and just talk to him.
"The Crow" made Brandon a posthumous superstar. It showed that even though the Lee name was known for martial arts, Brandon had other skills. The Crow's main character, Draven, and his tortured soul were a good showcase for Lee's acting abilities. What a tragedy that he never lived to enjoy the fruits of that success. He was killed on the set in a bizarre accident at the age of 28, eight days before filming was to wrap.
Based on the comic book and series by James O'Barr, the film tells of metal rocker Eric Draven who is killed trying to stop his community-activist girlfriend from being raped and beaten by outlaws working for Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) a crooked (goth-like) developer. Draven and his fiance are killed on Devil's Night, the night before Halloween where buildings are burned and hell is raised...
In this case, almost literally.
Draven's death leaves behind a mystery and a friendly cop played by Ernie Husdon who can't seem to solve it. A street urchin named Sarah, (Rochelle Davis) whose mother is a junkie and who has no time or inclination to be a proper parent, is another mourner. Draven and his fiance had taken Sarah under their care. She is more than devastated by their deaths traveling the ugly, rat-infested streets on her skateboard, basically without a home. She is also our narrator who opens and closes the film with her observations.
One year after Draven's death, on Devil's Night, his 'ghost' rises from the dead to seek revenge on the men who killed him and his future bride. He's aided by a crow which gives him supernatural powers and at times acts as his eyes seeing into the darkness of the city streets. Sarah narrates the concept in the beginning:
"People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right."
And so it goes as Draven walks the Earth again, reliving the painful past and taking great glee in making the murderers pay for their crimes in unique fashion.
This film showcases a lot of what Lee was good at - his martial arts are fast and furious and his acrobatics show that he had the Lee Family skillset firmly in place. Other films like "Rapid Fire" and "Showdown in Little Tokyo" have more and cleaner fight scenes but the few that you can see (this film is very dark both in tone and cinematography) are solid and fun.
Speaking of dark-themed, this film is ultra-violent and features challenging overlays like incest, drug addiction, mothers who'd rather do their junkie than their kid's laundry, etc. Directed by Alex Proyas I think it was one, if not the first, to take a video-game-like approach to story telling. It's very stylish and stylized with leather outfits, cities that never have daytime, sunlight, or clement weather, and features an ax-wielding superhero - in this case, the ax being a guitar.
Some of the set pieces in this film stay really with you. There's a scene where Draven draws a crow-symbol in fire that's pretty cool and also a fight scene in a warehouse boardroom where all the lords of crime gather that is bloody violent and well-executed. Plus, some of Lee's moments where he's by himself, living through the pain of his and his loved one's death, are wholly memorable.
Had Lee lived, no doubt this would have opened the floodgates for him. He was rough in spots, dramatically, struggling perhaps with the arch material derived from the comic book, but there were moments when the actor he was and could be shown through clearly. The quiet scenes with Sarah (the little girl) and with Ernie Hudson were terrific. Not so good was the crappy dialogue he had to deliver when he was killing the individual members of the gang to satisfy the faux-ironic witticisms someone shoved in his character's mouth.
The character who could actually make that sort of dialogue work was Top Dollar played by Wincott who makes his over-the-top personna as an incestuous, coke-sniffing ganglord fit like a Rodeo Drive, custom-designed t-shirt. He is perhaps what makes those parts of "The Crow" sans Lee tolerable because he just works as this larger-than life character.
The stunt work and fight scenes were skillfully choreographed by the legendary Jeff Imada who was a friend of Lee's and studied Jeet Kun Do with him under Dan Inosanto. Imada was recently the primary fight choreographer for the Bourne films - some really great movie fighting. Imada has done nearly two hundred films as either a stuntman or fight/stunt coordinator.
To finish the film, the producers had to double Lee and I had always heard do some additional CGI of some of his scenes. That perhaps excuses some of the awkward transitions and missing narrative. A lot of what was supposed to be interaction between Lee and his fiance (actress Rochelle Davis) was to be shot at the end of the production, after all the action scenes, so Lee didn't have to wear makeup on the latter parts of the film. His character looks a lot like The Joker in Batman and that white paint had to be a major pain to put on each day. Those dramatic scenes went unfinished, even despite a double, because Davis left the production and went back to Hollywood after witnessing Lee's death on the set.
There are varying stories about the accident but the one most consistently told is that a cartridge (primer loaded only) had lodged in a gun on the set on a previous day. And when some blanks were loaded into a gun by a non-gun handler who didn't check the barrel as he was supposed to, the charge blew the jammed cartridge out and it hit Lee. Also, according to reports, the gun wasn't fired directly at Lee but the shattered projectile curved toward him, lodging in his spine and killing him twelve hours later. This, if true, almost gives credence to the supposed curse on the Lee family that allegedly killed Lee's father at the age of thirty-two and him at the age of twenty-eight. If you're interested in any of this, there's the biopic "Dragon, The Bruce Lee Story" which details Bruce Lee's life (and the alledged curse) and also lots of documentary information to be found everywhere. One of the sites that covers a lot of this information is brandonleemovement.com here.
March 2013 marks twenty years since Brandon Lee's death. Not much time goes by that I don't remember the nice guy with the great sense of humor who made me feel special while turning me down. We had a good meeting and had promised to stay in touch. Hell, we might have even worked in the future on the movie that transformed both our lives (not named "The Crow.") Maybe I would have even baptized one of his children and been the uncle-friend who comes over for barbecue. Who knows?
I was lucky to have met Brandon just months before his death. I do think of that meeting on occasion wishing that he had done my film instead of "The Crow" for a lot of reasons but for one main reason - that he might still be alive today, no doubt by now having garnered several acting awards and continuing accolades as a Hollywood figure.
As Sarah from the film puts it:
Sarah: [voiceover] If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.
We don't have Brandon anymore but we have his work and that superstar smile that could light up a movie screen or make a beginning screenwriter feel awfully good about himself even as he's being gently rejected.
Word is, there is a re-boot of the movie in the works. I'm sure it will be well-done but I probably won't see it.
I just couldn't picture anyone else but Brandon Lee in this role.
The one that defined him.
Forever.
