← DISGRACELAND
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign Elvis. I am not going to lie. I was up late last night watching playoff baseball and it has been a slog today. But I am powering through these ad reads right now. Thanks entirely to Five Hour Energy, guys. Five Hour Energy has so many flavors. 17 flavors, you're never bored. There's a variety of awesome flavors with just as much caffeine as a 12 ounce premium cup of coffee. But with zero sugar and zero sugar. Crash big flavor in a tiny bottle. That's five hour energy. The five hour energy shots pack the flavors of the season in a portable two ounce shot. Your day's fueled up nice and quick with tasty caffeine. I'm holding onto that summertime vibe even though I know the fall is here. But I'm still rocking that watermelon Five Hour Energy. I can't get enough of it, you know, as it gets cooler though, I know myself I'm gonna be migrating back toward the sour apple 5 hour energy. It gives you that sort of like that, that crisp, you know, when the air kind of starts to bite back at you for the first time. That kind of tastes tasty, but also tardy. Mostly just tasty though. Again, these are small, powerful shots of energy. Boom. You're ready to go with five hour energy. Give your caffeine a flavor upgrade with five hour energy shots. Get yours in store and online at www.5.or on Amazon today. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of a curse of a haunted legacy of a massive movie set destroying storm, a car crash and one too many eerie coincidences leading up to the strange accidental death of one of Hollywood's brightest young stars at the time, Brandon Lee. But it's also the story of a goth masterpiece, the movie the Crow. A film with a soundtrack filled with great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called as the crow dies MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Informer by Snow. And why would I play you that specific slice of Northern Cokesposure cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on March 31, 1993. And that was the day Brandon Lee's life was tragically cut short by a fatal mistake. On this episode, a curse, a goth masterpiece, an accidental death, and the Crow's Brandon Lee. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. Sam, the five year old sat in the wings as his father demonstrated martial arts moves on stage, the Hong Kong television audience went wild. Here, Bruce Lee was a massive star, unlike in America. In America, Bruce was just the sidekick. He was the other guy on the Green Hornet, a mid-60s attempt to cash in on Batman's success. But here in Hong Kong, the Green Hornet was known as the Kato show, named so after Bruce's character. Didn't matter if it was a supporting character. Bruce Lee was the star. After the applause died down, Bruce looked off to the edge of the stage. He made eye contact with his five year old son. And then he beckoned for him to come out of the dark shadows. And Brandon Lee stepped into the spotlight to thunderous applause. His father held out a board and said, just like I showed you. Bruce had been training his son in martial arts since practically before the kid could walk. Brandon braced. He blocked out the eyes. Looking at him from the crowd, he took his stance. He clenched the fingers on one hand tight, cocked his arm back straight and put his fist through the board. The audience loved it. Brandon stood there and basked in their adoration. And looking back on this moment later in life, you'd think maybe they were really clapping for his father. That he was just an extension of Bruce Lee's stardom, the way a nunchuck can extend a fighter's reach. But in this moment, Brandon Lee felt like a star. His father knew all too well about being a star. You got all the attention, positive and negative, but none of the power. Bruce took hold of little Brandon and looked him in the eye. Never become an actor. Be a producer instead. That's how you hold the real power. This Hong Kong trip was full of conflicting emotions. For Bruce Lee, the Green Hornet had been canceled after only one season. He'd failed to land any major American film roles. Here in Hong Kong, studios were ready to go to war over the actor. But back in his adopted home in America, things seemed cursed. And maybe that was why Bruce Lee decided to tell his son about an older curse. One that had haunted the family since before Bruce was born. Bruce's older brother died at just three months old. Some superstitious members of the family believed this meant that the next male child in the family would be marked for death. Bruce's mother took this to heart. And when she became pregnant with another child, she adopted a daughter in an attempt to break the streak, to distract any hungry ghosts that might try to claim another baby boy from the family. In case that wasn't enough, when she did give birth to another boy, Peter, they gave him A girl's nickname. And they dressed him in girl's clothes and they pierced his ear to trick the ghosts. But there were no superstitious rituals when Bruce was born, because Bruce wasn't born in China. He was born in San Francisco. While his father was touring the US as a stage performer, he was given an American name, a boy's name. And no one had thought to pierce his ear or address him as a girl. And maybe being born in America meant the hungry ghosts would never find him. Or maybe it would just take more time. July 20, 1973. The phone rang in Bruce Lee's Hong Kong home. Brandon, not 8, answered. It was unusual for the house to be this quiet. Bruce had converted part of it into a martial arts school. Men and women were often found training in the backyard, swinging weapons and shouting as they threw themselves at each other. All that action kept Brandon's friends away. The same violence they paid to see at the movies was a little too scary up close. In real life. The man on the line was calling from Los Angeles, the assistant director of the film that would be Bruce's major breakthrough in the West. They were currently in post production, but the assistant director had heard a rumor that Bruce Lee had died in a fight in Hong Kong, beaten to death by 20 guys. The truth, though, was much stranger, but the outcome was the same. Bruce Lee had been found dead in a Hong Kong apartment at the age of 32. Somehow, though, news had made it all the way around the world before it made it to Bruce's own home. The assistant director on the phone didn't say any of this to Brandon. He just asked the boy if his father was there. In Cantonese, Brandon replied his father wasn't home. When the director asked where Bruce was, Brandon hadn't given it much thought. His father was away most of the time. Movie, he said in Cantonese. Movie Enter the Dragon premiered one month after Bruce Lee's death and became a massive box office hit. US Studios followed it up by re releasing his Hong Kong film, Way of the Dragon. Then there was the question of the film Bruce had been directing and starring in at the time he died. Game of Death, a Hong Kong film he'd put on pause to make Enter the Dragon in the United States. And the footage Bruce shot before his death was repurposed with an entirely different plot. In the version that was released five years later, in 1978, Bruce plays an international martial arts star who gets shot during filming by a stuntman turned assassin. Pieces of a bullet lodge themselves in the actor's face and he uses the opportunity to fake his own death and adopt a series of disguises to take revenge. This meant that the studio could slap false beards and dark glasses on a Korean actor who looked nothing like Bruce Lee and complete the film using only 11 minutes of the original footage. Game of Death came out when Brandon Lee was 13 years old. By that point, his mother had moved the family back to the United States. And every time he started at a new school, there were always a couple of kids who wanted to kick the shit out of Bruce Lee's kid. But when Brandon Lee got into a scrap, other people got hurt. He'd been trained in martial arts since he was a baby, and after his father's death, he continued studying with one of his father's students. But every dojo and studio he trained in had his father's pictures on the walls, as if Bruce Lee were some kind of saint. Brandon's feelings about his father were complicated. They were still raw. Even before his death. Bruce was away more often than he was home. When he did show up. You never knew what you were gonna get. Either he was happy about a big deal going through when he came bearing expensive gifts, or he was sullen over how poorly things were going. Brandon was kicked out of high school four months by before graduation after being elected senior class president and using his office to incite a rebellion. And despite his father's warning never to become an actor, he began studying at the famed Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. He wanted to be like his father, but not that much like his father. Casting directors came to him with kung fu roles, clearly itching to bill him as the son of the greatest martial artist ever captured on film. Instead, Brandon looked for parts that would allow him to step out of his father's shadow and into the light. He was still pushing against being cast in his father's image. But with his leading role in the action movie Rapid Fire, Hollywood immediately identified him as part of a new generation of action stars and as the son of one of the best to ever do it. All the attention got him interviews, but all the interviews wanted to talk about was his dead Father. Father. In 1991, Brandon Lee was approached with a bizarre offer. Universal. The studio optioned a memoir written by Brandon's mother. The studio was going all in. They were buying up the life rights to the Bruce Lee story, and they wanted Brandon to play his dad. Maybe he was uncomfortable playing the romantic lead opposite an actress playing his own mom. Or maybe the whole idea of playing his father felt haunted. Either way, Brandon passed and the part went to Jason Scott Lee. No relation. Brandon went out of his way to make sure that Jason knew he had the family's blessing. They ate dinner at Mr. Chow, a Beverly Hills restaurant that was a hotspot for celebrity sightings. On his way to being a big star, Brandon made a grand entrance. He pulled Jason up aside and told the younger star not to try to be like Bruce Lee, just be himself. Dragon the Bruce Lee story includes a dream sequence in which an actual demon, a manifestation of the curse Bruce Lee's family believed haunted them, smashes Bruce Lee's face into his tombstone and then turns to go after little Brandon. But Brandon Lee never saw that scene or that movie. By the time the movie was filming, Brandon Lee had landed his dream role, a part that combined his physicality with his charisma. As an actor, Brandon Lee was going to become a ghost. Foreign hey Discos, if you want more Disgraceland, be sure to listen every Thursday to our weekly After Party Bonus episode where we dig deeper into the stories we tell in our full weekly episodes. In these After Party Bonus episodes, we dive into your voicemails and texts, emails and DMs and discuss your thoughts on the wild lives and behavior of the artists and entertainers that we're all obsessed with. So leave me a message at 617-906-6638, disgracelandpodmail.com or disgracelandpod on the socials and join the conversation every Thursday in our after party bonus episode. 1980 the Marine put his tumbler of whiskey down on a discarded newspaper. His ghosts were after him again. Sometimes the whiskey chased them away. Sometimes it magnified them. Like tonight when he looked through the bottom of his glass and saw an article about a couple murdered in Detroit, mugged for the girl's engagement ring. The killer shot them both. The Marine stared at the article. He read it again. It wasn't his story, but it was familiar. When he was 18, his fiance had been killed by a drunk driver. His whole life was in front of him. And now he'd wound up here, drinking in a military bar and not giving a where, whether he lived or died, wishing he could get revenge on the man that killed the woman he loved. Wishing he could get revenge on the whole world. Broken snippets of poetry floated through his drunken mind. He picked up a pencil. The ghost of all his pain, all his anger whispered in his ear as he thought about that couple in Detroit, thought about his fiance. He sketched a face, a clownish death mask in black. He thought what if he could get that revenge, what if the worst thing imaginable happened, but then you came back? Over the next several years, James o' Barr worked on the character whenever he could. His protagonist, Eric Draven, was a rock star who was murdered along with his fiance. A year after his murder, however, Eric Draven is resurrected to seek revenge. O' Barr based the character visually on the face of Peter Murphy from the band Bauhaus, combined with the wiry, muscular body of Iggy Pop. But the character's psyche, his drive for revenge, was obar wrestling with his own ghosts. The resulting black and white comic book was seeped in the aesthetics of goth subculture and music. Everyone in it was based on someone o' Barr knew and the users and Lola's he he'd surrounded himself with in his broken life. And if they weren't real, they came out of the worst parts of himself. He was just happy to get all that out of him. He didn't even care if it got published. But in 1988, the back cover of an underground comic book featured a man dressed in all black with black and white makeup, holding a shotgun and a samurai sword and proclaimed in its for some things there is no forgiveness. The first issue of the Crow came out in early 1989 and it was a massive underground hit. It got picked up by Paramount for film development and Obara was heavily consulted in casting. The movie aimed to outdo the expressionist sensibilities of that year's Batman, portraying a totally self contained, hyper real world of dark shadows and constant rain. But the production seemed cursed from the start. O' Barr nearly walked away from the whole thing when the initial script bore no resemblance to his comic. A carpenter was electrocuted when live power lines hit the crane he was working on, leaving him hospitalized for two years. On the same day, one of the film's equipment trucks mysteriously burst into flames and the film's publicist was in a car accident in the city near where they were shooting. Another construction worker slipped and put a screwdriver through his hand. A sculptor who'd been working on sets for several days lost his shit and drove his car through the studio's plaster shop. Another car crashed into one of the set's barriers after the driver and passengers had been involved in a drive by shooting. The same publicist who'd been in the car crash joked that the movie was already contributing to the cause of justice by stopping the shooters. And on March 13, three weeks before filming was filmed, finished. A massive storm destroyed several of the film's sets. As the sets were rebuilt and shooting slogged along, prop masters were getting ready for what came next. There was a particular gun that was key to the plot. One that would show up in two different scenes. First in close up and then in action in a scene that showed the murder of the main character and his fiance. That scene would be one of the last to be shot. For the gun's first appearance, they'd need a revolver that could be shot in close up. And there are two basic things you need from a prop gun. One is the flash and the bang. And for that, prop masters used blanks. A bullet cartridge that has primer and gunpowder, but no slug. There's an explosion, but there's nothing to fire. You get the bang and the muzzle flash, but there's no risk to it. But with a revolver, if you're shooting close up, you want it to look like there are bullets in the gun. Blanks don't look like bullets, since the projectile, the part you actually see is the part that has been removed. For a big budget production, the answer was to have two guns, One with blanks and another with dummy rounds. But by this point, the Crow was struggling to come in under budget. As an unidentified member of the crew set afterward, they wanted to make a $30 million movie, but they only wanted to spend 12. So the prop masters decided to improvise. They made their own dummy cartridges for the close up out of live rounds. They took out the gunpowder, but left the primer in the cartridge. This is different than what allegedly happened more recently on the set of the film Rust. When Alec Baldwin fired a gun that killed the cinematographer and wounded the director. That was apparently a live gun firing off a live round. A loaded gun that should never have been on set in the first place. That film had a licensed armorer on set. A requirement that the Motion Picture association put in place after the filming of this movie that we're talking about the Crow. But the armorer on Alec Baldwin's movie had only worked on one other film where she'd received complaints for firing off a weapon without warning. And the assistant director had been fired from another movie when a firearm went off and injured a crew member. None of those safety precautions were in place on the set of the Crow. The prop gun got used in one scene earlier during shooting when it was fired and the primer sparked. It wasn't enough to fire the dummy, but bullet, but it was enough to push the bullet out of the cartridge, lodging it into the barrel of the gun. The rest of the dummy bullets were removed. Nobody noticed. They were one short. The prop gun was set aside, and a hungry ghost was waiting for the last day of shooting. We'll be right back after this. Word, word, word.
- [20:29]
B
Living with schizophrenia isn't easy, especially when you're not getting relief from some of your symptoms. It can be hard when you're still dealing with symptoms like hearing voices or seeing things that aren't there and negative symptoms like feeling unmotivated or avoiding social situations. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to talk to your healthcare provider and explore a different kind of schizophrenia treatment. Discover your possibilities@treatingscz.com.
- [21:01]
A
The shoot was almost over. Brandon Lee was coming back to life. The production of the Crow had been grueling. A lot of that had been due to Brandon's own decisions. He'd fallen in love with the script in the comic book that it was based on. And when the character's creator, James o', Barr, threatened to walk out over changes to the story, it was Brandon who got the changes nixed. He took Chris Robinson of the Southern rock band the Black Crows as his visual inspiration for the character he was playing. Robinson was skinnier, lankier than Brandon, so Brandon put himself on a strict diet and workout regimen before production even started. For the first scene they shot, though, when Eric Draven claws out of his own grave, Brandon had bags and ice brought to the set. He plunged himself into a tub of ice naked to get himself mentally prepared. He was playing a corpse, and corpses were cold. The character's iconic makeup looks simple, but it had to be in exactly the right place to avoid continuity errors in shooting at the beginning of each day, which usually meant in the middle of the night, makeup artists laid a death mask over Brandon's face with slits cut out where the long streaks of black were filled in. And almost all the shooting was at night, in freezing winter temperatures. Brandon was often shirtless and barefoot. The script called for almost constant rain, and the weather mostly complied, but when it didn't, the crew fired up rainmakers and flung freezing water at the actors. Brandon would wake up at four in the afternoon to go into makeup, shoot all night, and collapse into bed at 9 in the morning. He got one day off a week, which, ideally, he spent with his fiance. Brandon Lee and Eliza Hutton met when she was working as an assistant to director Renny Harlan. Brandon flirted with her during the meeting, and soon the two were a regular item, with Eliza accompanying Brandon on the worldwide press tour for Rapid Fire. They moved in together, adopted a cat they named Cato a nod to Brandon's father Father. And they were engaged to be married. After the Crow was finished shooting, Eliza flew to North Carolina whenever she could to be around Brandon on set. He even got the producers to hire her as an assistant. And by the end of March, as shooting moved into its final phase, she was in California planning for the wedding. The Crow was almost finished filming, but one of the best things for Brandon was that he no longer had to sit for makeup every day. The final set of scenes were flashbacks, happier scenes of Eric Draven and his doomed fiance, all shot in rich color to contrast the rest of the film's stark grays and reds. They'd also finished most of the stunt work, which was a relief for Brandon, who was physically exhausted from weeks spent throwing himself off buildings in the rain. One particularly grueling shot involved saw Brandon's indestructible character being shot over 50 times with semi automatic weapons. And for each bullet that supposedly hit him, a squib fired off a tiny explosive device that made it look like he'd actually been hit. Most of the shooting scenes were done now and the film's weapons expert had already left the set, moving on to another project. In fact, there was only, only one more scene of violence to shoot. The murder of Eric Draven and his fiance. And after that it was just more scenes of the couple's happy days together. And it would make a great segue for Brandon out of the dark work of the Crow and into the preparations for his real life wedding. He also hoped it would be the last time he'd be involved in violence on screen. For a while, Brandon had embraced the label of action star while doing the press junket for Rapid Fire. But even then he thought of himself as a different kind of action star. Not another Jean Claude Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren. More like a Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis. A guy who could do shoot em up action on film and then turn around and play an actual honest to God Hamlet. The Crow was going to put him on the map as a serious actor and not just Bruce Lee's heir for his next film. He wanted to leave the punching aside. On the evening of March 30, 1991, the set was ready to shoot the murder scene. The scene called for Brandon to enter his apartment carrying a bag of groceries, only to be shot by a thug played by Michael Massie. Brandon was supposed to slump forward so that he could be dragged into the apartment by Massey and the other thugs. Michael Massey was Handed. The prop gun and the revolver had been loaded with the dummy bullets for a close up shot earlier in filming, one of which was still lodged in the barrel. And the revolver was now loaded with blanks, cartridges with gunpowder and primer, so that when Massey fired the gun, there'd be muzzle flash and an appropriate bang. Then Brandon would trigger a squib in the grocery bag, a small explosive to make it look like he'd been shot. But no one knew that all the necessary pieces of a live bullet were actually still lodged in the gun, all lined up, separated by just a hair's breadth. The bullet in the barrel and the blank in the chamber. The director called action. The thugs in the apartment were tossing the fiance around the room. Brandon made his entrance. Massey turned on him from a few feet away, leveled the prop gun at his chest and fired. The hammer of the gun struck the primer, igniting the gunpowder in the blank. And the explosive force of the gunpowder dislodged the dummy slug from the barrel of the gun and fired the actual bullet into Brandon Lee's stomach where it lodged against his spine. The squib in the grocery bag went off and Brandon fell backward out of the camera's frame. The director called cut. He assumed Brandon was just trying something new. Brandon regularly improvised action scenes, experimenting with falls and punch combinations. Not everything worked, but when it did work, it was brilliant. Everyone reset to do the shot again. That's when they noticed that Brandon Lee was still lying on the ground. That's when they also noticed he was bleeding. Brandon Lee was rushed to the hospital. The doctors worked on him for hours, pumping him with over 60 pints of blood as he hemorrhaged from his shredded intestines. In the California home Brandon shared with his fiance. The phone rang, not unlike the phone that had rung in the Lee family home in Hong Kong back when Brandon was 8. Eliza Hutton got on the first plane to North Carolina. She arrived the next morning. Brandon had been moved out of surgery and into an intensive care unit. The doctors had done all they could, but he'd lost a staggering amount of blood and the dummy bullet had ripped up his guts. Brandon Lee never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead the next afternoon. He was two months past his 28th birthday, three weeks short of his wedding. Brandon Lee wasn't a ghost anymore. Brandon Lee was gone in February 1993, while the crow was still shooting, producers worked to put together the soundtrack. They needed bands that matched the dark gothic tone of the movie. The Cure, Rage against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, the Jesus and Mary Chain. But there was one band whose involvement to the filmmakers was the most crucial to the movie. They wanted to get New Order. New Order was formed by members of Joy Division in the wake of singer Ian Curtis's suicide. Joy Division was a huge influence on James O. Barr when he wrote his original comic. He even dedicated the book to Ian Curtis. Chapter titles in the book, like Atmosphere and Atrocity Exhibition, were direct lifts from Joy Division songs. The cop character in the book and in the movie was named after one of the band members. So the producers reached out to the Manchester band and they provided a list of the other bands that had signed on. They sent the film's entire script, they sent a copy of the comic book, and they asked New Order if they would cover a Joy Division song. Love Will Tear Us Apart or Dead Souls. The members of New Order read the story of a dead guitarist who comes back to life. It wasn't the story of their own band, not exactly, but something about it felt too close. New Order had played their first show only months after Ian Curtis's death, adopting a new band name because as Joy Division, they swore even before Curtis's death that if any member of the band ever left, they'd stop using the name. It took them years, years to find their own sound and years to no longer be haunted by the ghost of their dead lead singer. But not long enough to forget about it all. New Order passed. Nine Inch Nails provided the bit of Joy Division the movie needed with a cover of Dead Souls. The Crow soundtrack album was released along with the movie more than a year after Brandon Lee's death. It went to the top of the charts. The movie, however, nearly didn't get finished. James o' Barr couldn't bring himself to come back to the set. He blamed himself for Brandon's death. It was like losing his fiance all over again. He wished he'd never written that stupid comic book to begin with. Brandon's fiancee and his mother sued the filmmakers for negligence and eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In addition to the settlement, it became a request requirement that all film productions have a licensed armorer on set at all times. There were strict protocols created for the handling of firearms. To prevent another tragedy like Brandon's, Paramount got nervous and dropped the movie. With the extremely violent nature of the film, there was no way they could bring it to market. It would be like some gruesome joke, a movie about a corpse played by a dead man. But then Miramax swooped in. Miramax was an independent distributor that specialized in art house and foreign films. But with the Crow, they saw a chance to walk the line between superhero blockbuster and dark, brooding art film. The studio pumped millions more into the film's budget, most of which went to CGI efforts to fill in missing pieces of Brandon Lee's performance. A fleet of writers reconfigured the script without James O. Barr's help arranging the pieces that had already been shot into a coherent story. No footage of Brandon Lee's death was used in the film. The scene in question was rewritten, with Brandon's character being stabbed and thrown out a window rather than shot. But rumors would continue that there were versions of the movie where you could see the real life shooting. When the Crow was finally released, hordes of of teenage fans lined up dressed in black, decked out in makeup to see it. It became a slow burn hit, a defining artifact of the 90s Goth culture, all driven by ghosts. By James Obar's dead fiance, by the murdered couple in Detroit, by Bruce Lee's dead brother, by Brandon Lee's dead father, and by the tragic death of Brandon Lee. Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. All right guys, hope you dug this episode. Obviously Brandon Lee left us too soon. So this week's Question of the week is it's kind of like that old Billy Joe lyric, only the good die young. Which young artists? It could be actors, it could be athletes, it could be musicians. Left us too soon and left a giant hole in your heart. Let us know. 617-906-6638 Send me a voicemail, leave me a text, hit me up and you might hear your own voice or your own text on the next afterparty episode. You can also hit me @gracelampod on Instagram x and Facebook, leave a review for the show on Apple Podcast podcasts for Spotify. Win some free merch. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland Ad Free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram TikTok Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.comisgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.