Free Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book by Ric Meyers

at about four o’clock in the morning. “Brandon Lee is dead,” a crew member whispered to me. “He was shot.” I couldn’t comprehend it. I had only recently met Brandon during the promotional campaign for Rapid Fire (1992) — the movie in which he had finally stopped trying to get out of his father’s shadow. Instead, he had embraced it, and come out, whole and happy, on the other side.
    My colleagues and I had agreed: energetic, goodhearted, and talented, Brandon Lee was the next great hope for the American martial arts action film. But now he was dead — killed in an implausible accident on the set of his breakthrough film, The Crow (1994). A crew member quickly and quietly gave me the particulars: they had been working all day and all night for weeks to get the movie done. The production’s official “gun wrangler” had already left the production for another job when the film went overschedule. A prop gun, supposedly loaded with blank cartridges, had fired.
    In the days to come, a more complete picture was supplied by the local police, who had reportedly taken over the gun-wrangling responsibilities. According to press reports, a hunk of bullet padding — usually used as a wall between the gunpowder and the shell of a regulation cartridge — had lodged in the barrel of the on-set weapon. It was the wadding that was allegedly propelled by the powder of a newly loaded blank.
    Some time later, I commiserated with a friend: “If only the actor playing his killer had been off by just a few inches.” My friend said he knew the actor who had used that gun. “He was a method actor,” my friend said with awful irony. “He had been practicing how to shoot to kill for days.”
    Brandon had died three months shy of the twentieth anniversary of his father’s death, and just weeks before the release of Dragon : the Bruce Lee Story — a role he was supposedly offered, and which might have saved his life had he not turned it down. But his career had been fashioned to skirt his father’s shadow. Brandon was eight when his father died, but he had already appeared with him on Hong Kong TV, successfully breaking a board at the tender age of six.
    “Could you imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t broken the board?” he asked later. But he had, and despite his best efforts, it set the tone for his entire career. For years he was adamant in his refusal to mirror his father’s moves and attitude, wanting to be accepted and applauded for himself, not for a happenstance of birth. Finally, however, Brandon’s need for cinematic exposure took precedence over his hopes. Brandon went the way of his father, taking the leading role in a cunningly designed Hong Kong action film Legacy of Rage (1986), arguably the best movie of his truncated career. Here, Brandon played a kindhearted, though supremely athletic, construction worker who is forced to slaughter his family’s oppressors — but only after he is brutally pushed way beyond endurance.
    The true sign of Brandon’s acceptance of his destiny came with his next casting choice: to co-star opposite the man whom executives had chosen instead of his father to star in the television series that had been created to showcase Bruce Lee . Brandon played a Shaolin assassin in Kung Fu: The Movie (1986) … which should have been called Kung Fu: The TV Movie, since it played on network television. Wherever it played, it remained a fairly pedestrian vehicle, but one well-suited to show Brandon’s talent and dedication.
    His next starring role was in the cheap and tacky Laser Mission (1989), a U.S./South African/German co-production whose writing and direction reflected its fractured origins. Brandon plays an espionage operative who teams with a tough and resourceful female agent (Debi Monahan ) to rescue a laser expert, amusingly played by the always game Ernest Borgnine . It did little more than pay the bills, as did Brandon’s next starring vehicle, Showdown in Little