The Most Beautiful Crow Songs.
The Crow Fansite : Jane Siberry - It Can't Rain All The Time
The following article came to my attention when my friend Infinity,
from The Netherlands sent it to me. I found it interesting to share with co-fans.
Thank you, Infinity!! -xxx-
PEOPLE magazine edition of April 19, 1993
One day last month in Wilmington, N.C., where Brandon Lee was shooting his fourth
movie, The Crow, he strolled into the Fitness Today health club and pulled up his shirt,
then laughed loudly, "Look at this!" he said to the fitness consultant Donna Lamanna,
pointing to the fake blood that clung to his rippling, washboard stomach. "This blood is
still stuck on me!"
Blood was a constant on the set of The Crow. In the no-holds-barred action film based on
a fantasy comic book character's adventures, Lee, 28, played a rock musician named Eric
Draven who returns from the grave to avenge his own murder. Because his character was
already dead, he could--and did--absorb many bullets. "In one scene we did, I got shot 60
or 70 times," Lee told an interviewer on March 25.
On March 30, one of the few remaining scenes to be filmed involved a single shooting.
After so many complex scenes involving blazing machine guns, this trigger squeeze
seemed no cause for worry, and the people in charge of production at Wilmington's
Carolco Studios told their free-lance firearms consultant, James Moyer, that his services
would no longer be required. The regular stage crew would handle what was
to unexpectedly become one of the most grisly scenes ever filmed.
There are people close to Brandon Lee who say that for a strapping young six-footer with
a loving fiancee and a promising career, he talked about death a lot. One childhood friend
says that Brandon used to speak to him in hushed tones about "a premonition that he
would die suddenly, like his father, and on a movie set." Trying to get into character--as
an ambulatory corpse--in The Crow Lee once filled a dozen bags of ice and packed them
around his body to see how it would feel to spend a year in the cold ground. When a
producer found out, he admonished the star for risking his health.
As an actor, Lee may have had a James Dean air. But in person he was no longer the
angry young rebel who, as a teenager, once drove his car in reverse through
oncoming traffic on his high school campus.
Growing up the son of a mythologized movie legend-- Bruce Lee who died at 32, of a
brain edema, when his son was 8--had left Brandon deeply confused about his own
identity. Lee and his sister, Shannon, 23, now a singer who lives in New Orleans, moved
to Los Angeles with their mother, Linda, soon after their father's 1973 funeral. The
schoolyard challenges to young Brandon's "manhood" started immediately--and he wasn't
able to dodge and parry them the way his father could on film. When his mother took him
for martial-arts lessons, Brandon, then 9, saw a picture of Bruce Lee on the wall, started
to cry and ran from the room. For a long time, his attitude was that "he didn't need school,
and he thumbed his nose at the rules," says Jim Spaulding, Lee's chemistry teacher at the
private Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, Calif. Brandon was expelled from the school
for misbehavior in the spring of 1983, just months shy of graduation. (He received his
diploma at nearby Miraleste High School.) His close friend actor Lou Dimond Phillips
remembers Lee in his early 20s as "a boiling mass of energy".
Recently, though, Brandon had come to terms with the legacy of his father. Realizing that
he would never be a world-class martial artist ("On a scale of 10, he's maybe a 7, a family
friend and martial-arts expert said recently), he confidently turned down a plum part in
the upcoming biography of his father, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Carving a career of
his own, he was just eight days away from completing The Crow, a movie he considered
a breakthrough, or at least a step up from the martial-arts adventure movies (Showdown
in Little Tokyo, Rapid Fire) he had appeared in before. And then there was his love life.
On April 17, Lee was scheduled to marry his sweetheart, Lisa Hutton, 29, a Hollywood
casting assistant with whom he shared a home in Beverly Hills.
Lisa was in Wilmington on the last day of Brandon's life. At 8 that evening he had gone
to the gym for a grueling hour-long workout. Lee did that almost every day, even though,
with everyone under pressure to finish The Crow on time and under its $14 million
budget, the cast and crew had been working longer and later, and he had to admit he was
tired when he started exercising.
Fatigue was a constant problem for everyone working on The Crow, says a source, as it is
on most movie sets in these days of smaller bankrolls. Since this was a partially nonunion
set, reportedly the standards 12-hour breaks between work sessions were sometimes not
observed, as directors pushed to finish whatever they could. "Even on a union show," says
Wally Keske, a Hollywood craft union official, "99 times out of 100 they're working too
many hours. More stressful situations are occurring."
On March 30, the cast and crew of The Crow had allegedly come to work after having
had just eight hours off. It was shortly after midnight on March 31 when Brandon went in
front of the camera. The scene was a flashback intended to explain how his character had
been killed in the first place: A drug dealer (played by actor Michael Massee) was to fire
a .44 Magnum revolver at Brandon a he entered his apartment.
The gun--not a stage prop but a fully functioning firearm--had, like the actors
themselves, already spent considerable time on the set. The script of The Crow called for
a close-up of the loaded weapon. The crew, following standard procedure, used dummy
bullets, which are nothing more than bullets without gunpowder. When the close-up was
finished, the gun was unloaded, then reloaded with blanks. Blanks sound as loud as real
bullets, but when they are fired, only the harmless cardboard wadding with which they are
packed is ejected from the gun. This time, though, the action was far from benign. Massee
pulled the trigger, and Lee slumped to the ground, a hole the size of a quarter in his lower
right abdomen. Stunned cast and crew members rusehd to Lee's side, and Clyde Baisey,
33, an emergency medical technician assigned to the set, ordered someone to call an
ambulance. Then he began to administer CPR.
The scene bore an eerie resemblance to a cheesy 1979 movie called Game of Death,
a kung fu film that scraped together the last, disjointed footage ever recorded of....Bruce
Lee. In Game, Bruce plays an actor who is shot after mobsters substitute a live round for a
fake bullet on a movie set. In the days that followed Brandon's death, some of the elder
Lee's fans began to view the earlier film as a foreshadowing of Brandon's death and to
revive the legend of the "Lee family curse".
Shortly before he died in 1973, Bruce Lee, whose Chinese name, Lee Shao-lung, means
Little Dragon, had bought a house in a Hong Kong suburb called Kowloon tong (Pond of
the Nine Dragons), incurring, as the legend has it, the jealous wrath of the neighborhood's
resident demons. The curse lasts, it is said, three generations. The Crow seemed to be
operating under a curse all its own. On Feb.1, a carpenter was severely burned after the
crane in which he was riding struck high-power lines; he remains hospitalized in critical
condition. Then a digruntled sculptor who had worked on the set drove his car
through the studio's plaster shop, doing extensive damage. Later, another crew member slipped
and drove a screwdriver through his hand. Stories quickly spread that Lee's shooting was
still another example of otherworldly interference in a movie that probes the dimension
beyond the grave.
But the laws of physics, not metaphysics, most readily explain what happened to Brandon
Lee. It was clear by the time he arrived at New Hanover Regional Medical Center, some
30 minutes following the accident, that something had ripped through his body with great
force. Dr. Warren W. McMurry began desperately trying to stanch the bleeding, but at the
end of the five-hour operation, Lee's condition had not improved. "There was so much
blood loss, " McMurry says. "It wouldn't clot. It was oozing from everywhere."
At 1:04 p.m. Thursday, a little more than 12 hours after Lee had been shot, and nearly 5
hours before Linda, who was flying from Boise, Idaho, where she lives with her husband,
businessman Bruce Caldwell, could reach her son's bedside in intensive care, Brandon
was declared dead. At an autopsy the following day, medical examiners extracted what
appeared to be a .44 caliber bullet that had lodged against the actor's spine.
After all the talk of ominous forces and star-crossed legacies, the theory emerged that
Lee's death was nothing more mysterious than a tragic oversight. According to weapons
expert Moyer, the metal tip of one of the dummy bullets, which had been loaded into the
gun for the close-up, had somehow pulled loose from its brass casing. When the dummies
were unloaded and replaced with blanks, the metal tip remained behind in the gun's
cylinder. As soon as the blank went off, its explosive force propelled the dummy tip
through the gun barrel--and into Lee's body.
Moyer feels that the failure to notice the misplaced dummy bullet led to the tragedy. "I
guess the crew had so many things to do that they didn't pay special attention to the gun,"
he says, "I don't want to criticize anyone. Lightning can strike anywhere."
Indeed, there have been at least 11 movie-set deaths since 1982, including the fatal
accident on Twilight Zone: The Movie that year, when actor Vic Morrow and two child
extras were killed when a helicopter hovering too low went out of control and crashed
onto them. Two years later, model turned actor Jon-Erik Hexum, playfully holding a
blank-loaded pistol to his head, fired it and fatally fractured his skull on the set of the
CBS series Cover Up.
Could Lee's death have been avoided if the crew working on The Crow had not been
under such pressure to stay on schedule or if Moyer had been kept on the payroll for a few
extra days? Such questions will probably be hashed out dring the next few years, as
insurance investigators move in and lawsuits are likely filed. Neither Massee, the New
York City-based actor who pulled the trigger, nor Daniel Cuttner, the prop master on the
production, will comment on the accident. As for the production company, Crowvision,
Inc., it issued an official statement mourning the loss of Brandon Lee but pointing out that
The Crow---currently on hiatus with eight days of principal photograpy remaining---
might somehow be reedited and salvaged as----in the words of company spokesman Jason
Scott---"a fitting legacy to Brandon".
Lee's body was flown to Seattle where, on Saturday, April 3, he was laid to rest beside his
father in Lake View Cemetary. The following day, his family and friends eulogized him
at a memorial service at actress Polly Bergen's home in the Hollywood Hills. Among the
400 who attended were fellow martial-arts stars Steven Seagal and David Carradine and
Brandon's close friend Jeff Imada, who, as stunt coordinator on The Crow, had witnessed
the fatal shooting. Recalls one guest: "I've never seen anyone so shattered. He could
barely speak." Moving among the mourners, the widow of Bruce Lee and mother of
Brandon remained remarkably poised, however. "Linda kept everyone's spirits up," says
another mourner. "She told us, 'Brandon would have wanted this to be a joyful
occasion.'" And so it would be. "We're here to be happy," she said, "to celebrate his life."
· MICHAEL A. LIPTON
· DON SIDER, DAN YAKIR, and LAURA LEWIS in Wilmington
and DORIS BACON and JULIE KLIEN in Los Angeles
( Reprinted from the April 19, 1993 edition of PEOPLE magazine )
