SHADOW OF THE CROW

by Jeff Yang

A. Magazine's Jeff Yang, one of the last journalists. to interview Brandon Lee on the set of his final movie, looks at his life and his tragic end.

It is March and coffin-cold in the bowels of the Ideal Cement plant, an abandoned legacy of America's industrial past. The residue of honest work - pieces of junked heavy machinery, cracked and creaking formica, rusting metalwork - is strewn throughout the gutted rooms. The emptiness and space turn all sounds into ghostly effects: voices are distant, footsteps echo, the faint, chill breeze whistles and whispers. If ever there was a location to film a movie about the uncontent dead, this is it.

I'm here on assignment to cover the shooting of a new film by the hero everybody wants to happen, Brandon Lee. The film, The Crow, is a break from Brandon's past: he plays a rock guitarist, Eric Draven, who meets an untimely end, weeks before his wedding. Brought back by an othernatural force as the Crow, Draven is given the opportunity - and abilities - to avenge himself and his dead love. It is a challenging role, horror spiced with action, gothic drama married to romantic reverie. For Brandon, it is the chance of a lifetime.

It is two weeks later. Brandon is gone. Or going. Suspended in a loop of coincidence and recursion, Brandon's story goes on after his death, a puppet dancing on tabloid covers. He died. He was killed. Like his father. How strange. Was it the gangs? some ask. The Chinese Hong Kong gangs, I mean. Was he killed?

Does it matter? He died.

Died tragically. Died young. Much too young, at 28, never exacting that pound of recognition which he spent his life pursuing. Never casting off the long shadow of his too-famous father.

So he went.

Rubbing his hands from the factory's frightful chill, Brandon stalks toward his trailer, long and macabre in his matte-black Crow gear. I'm motioned to follow: You'll have 10 minutes, 15 tops, the handler says. Brandon needs his rest.

"Come in, it's cold," Brandon says, his face pan-caked pale and rouged to fright. "Sit down." He's smoking. He offers the pack around. His handler shakes his head: No, man, those things'll kill you.

"That's been the hardest thing I've had to deal with so far - the cold. There have been a couple of nights here where I've been colder than I really ever remember being." Brandon is a California boy, brought back after the death of the Bruce from Hong Kong to L.A. by his grieving mother. He was just eight at the time.

"It's kind of funny, because, you know, in this film, I play a dead man, and it wasn't like I could research - go interview people who've come back from the dead. But I read a book once, one of Stephen King's better ones, Pet Sematary, which had a scene in it with a cat that came back from the dead. And he described how it walked across the room in a very uncatlike manner. For some reason that really horrified me; the image of that cat, which is a very natural animal, not capable of artifice like a person, really stuck in my memory.

"In the scene where my character, Eric, first comes back, I wanted to play with that - the fact that his body temperature would be very low and there would almost be a rigor mortis involved."

Brandon lights another cigarette, exhales a corona of smoke.

"So when I was preparing for this scene, I went to the store and bought about 20 big bags of ice. I packed myself in them, got very cold, and came out of them and moved, to get those movements right. And now I come out here, and it's five fuckin' degrees out there. The ice would have kept me warm."

Brandon smiles. In his makeup, he looks manic, frightening; the grin is a joker's grimace. Out of makeup, he is dark and handsome and warm, touched by the southern California sun and charismatic in the carefree way of a surfer boy, a slightly smart-alecky beach rat. He's a prankster: he appears on set in an outlandish wig, looking like Cher and Edward Scissorhand's bastard son, and the crew collapses in laughter. A wit: asked about his next project, Brandon gives a wink and says, "it starts production April 17, it's all been cast, and it's going to go on for about 50 years: I'm getting married." Brandon is a true lover and loyal friend, as his family, his fiancee Lisa Hutton, and, among others, Jeff Imada - stunt coordinator for The Crow and as close as a brother for 18 years - would attest.

He is cared for. But carefree? Freedom is something that Brandon has always reached for, and not found. He has been watched since he was born; until age eight, he trained under the tough, loving eye of his father. After eight, when the eye became icon, he wore the mantle of responsibility and expectation: the footsteps of his father ahead, the memories of his father behind, he could not be anything less than a master in his father's image. At high school in Los Angeles, he was tested again and again: "I definitely got the 'hired gun' syndrome, the 'fastest gun in the West' syndrome. I was on the soccer team. Often when we played another school, there was some guy who had heard who I was, and we would have a fight after the game."

Upon attaining adulthood, that image became his prison. He attended college and studied acting, at Massachusetts's Emerson College, and took courses at the Lee Strasberg Academy. Producers assailed him with scripts. "The stories were lowbrow and beneath doing ... The only reason they wanted me was to exploit my father's name. I wanted to have nothing to do with them." He told reporters that he was tired of being typed: "I want to do many other parts. I don't want to be stuck doing martial arts parts ... I want to do all kinds of things. I don't want to be seen as Bruce Lee's son and nothing more."

There's a freedom to death, Brandon says. "I've just shot a scene where a guy's pointing a gun at me - go like this" - he takes my hand and forms it into a pistol, thumb up, pointer outstretched - "and I'm just like, `go ahead, take a shot.' And he does. Eric can do that. He's already dead." Brandon leans against my finger and takes the shot. Bang.

Thursday, March 31, a friend calls me from Hollywood to tell me Brandon is dead. An accident on the set - a simple shooting effect gone terribly wrong. I think back to the thunder and crash of exploding squibs and blank bullets that rocked the set. Fire in the hole, the cry would go out, and fingers would go in ears, and pyrotechnics would fly. Gunplay, followed by playing dead.

Friday, April 1, coroners dig a .44 caliber bullet out of Brandon' s body. It had travelled the thickness of his torso, flattened itself against his spine. The scene was being shot. Brandon cried out, and people laughed, so close to April Fool's. Brandon the prankster in a Crow Harlequinade, a corpse, a clown with a painted face. It's a joke, right? Bang.

"I had the feeling something was going to happen," says one person associated with the production, who chooses to remain unnamed. "I was in the air at the time of Brandon's death, and I somehow knew, I knew it had happened ... I don't think you cane image that kind of violence - you can't do that without paying for it somewhere. It wasn't a question of carelessness, and it wasn't anything bad about the people, but when I found out, everything about the shoot, a very difficult shoot, seemed to come together."

The week of Brandon's death, people had already been talking about curses. Entertainment Weekly had run a detailed piece called "The Curse of The Crow." An electrician had been jolted with 13,000 volts of live power, hospitalized with burns on 90 per cent of his body, his eyes fused shut. A carpenter had accidentally driven a screwdriver through his hand. A sculptor had run amok and driven a car through a studio wall. The storm, the great storm, had blown through the set and left chill and devastation in its wake.

"This movie has a haunted quality," David Patrick Kelly tells me. "A ghost-town soul." Kelly plays T-Bird, one of Eric's murderers, killed by Eric in his Crow incarnation. Kelly sees in The Crow a nest of classical references: Poe's Raven, of course, and, he thinks, Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost is about rebellion and redemption and despair. Lucifer, brightest among the angels, leads an army against the Father - demanding self-determination, free will, an identity separate from the Supreme. His success is his failure, his fall. The first son, Adam, disobeys His Father out of love for Eve, and is denied paradise. Eric is Lucifer and Adam, dark killing angel and lover exiled from Eden.

And Brandon is Eric. A bright, shining son, with an absent, other- worldly father, who died and was reborn as symbol and icon. Brandon chafed under his father's legacy, demanded to be seen as himself and not just child of the Bruce. Not one of the clones, the Bruces Le, Lai, Li who emerged after the death of the master. This film was to be his break, his resolution, at once an homage and an Oedipal thrust. You cannot mourn until the story is done.

"He said he was going to relate the loss of Shelly" - Eric's fiancee in the movie - "to the loss of his father. He was going to try to use those kinds of emotions," says James O'Barr, author of the comic book on which the film was based. "We sat in his trailer one night and talked for about four hours ... You know the first thing he said to me? A quote from Blade Runner: `It's not an easy thing to meet your maker.'"

Nor is it easy to escape him. And that is the great tragedy of Brandon' s passing, that in death, like in life, he is forever bound to the man who made him, whom he loved and was haunted by. People are talking about curses: Robert Lee, Brandon's uncle, spoke to reporters about the curse of the Lee family - "Our grandfather was told that in our family, there would be death, there would be divorce." Conspiracy theories: Brandon was killed by his father's killers, martial arts mystics who envied the Bruce's fame and swore vengeance on him for revealing secret techniques.

Does it matter? He died.

Yes, it matters. Because for Brandon, and for a generation of Asian American men, Bruce was a figure to be claimed and shunned - his power was our power, but our identity was our own. Playground fights where we struck fear in others with the Bruce's poses; chopsocky Chinaman taunts, when older, about prowess that we did not have. Brandon was buried by his family in a grave at his father's side. And perhaps the cult will rest. Perhaps, like the Crow, it will revive with vengeance in its eye - the story of the Bruce's life, Dragon, has been brought to screen; there is talk of finishing The Crow and releasing it, in Brandon's honor.

But we who wait, we wait for the story to end.

So we can mourn.

A. Magazine, © 1993