Being the story of how Alex Proyas's adaptation of James O'Barr's dark fable would end in tragedy. First published in Empire Magazine, 2013
“Clusterfuck (slang, chiefly military) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure or a complex environment.” – Wiktionary.org
Before we start, a few terms of the armourer’s art. What is often referred to as a bullet is in fact more properly referred to as a shell or round and is composed of three elements. At the tip is the slug. Manufactured from a lead alloy they are often shrouded in a copper coating and come in various shapes depending upon the degree and type of damage they are intended to cause. The casing, most often brass, contains the propellant, usually a nitrocellulose compound. At the base of the casing is the primer. This is a small disc containing pressure sensitive explosive. When hit with a weapon’s firing pin the primer explodes sending superheated gas up into the casing and igniting the propellant which in turn fires the slug through the gun barrel towards its target.
Blanks are essentially identical to live rounds apart from the absence of a slug. They can be bought relatively cheaply or, by anyone moderately familiar with ammunition, homemade. Pliers are used to carefully pry the bullet from the casing which is then either crimped shut or, more rarely, a small piece of wadding is inserted in order to keep the propellant in place. In either case, it is impossible to visually mistake a blank for a live round. Blanks are manufactured in a range of strengths delineated by the proportion of a full charge they contain. A quarter-strength blank will provide a satisfying bang but film directors are prone to demand full-strength blanks, since only they deliver muzzle flash, that Christmas tree-shaped lick of fire that plays so well on the screen.
A dummy round looks identical to a live round but it is inert. These are used on movie sets when close-ups of ammunition are required, for instance during a scene in which a weapon is being loaded. These again can be purchased or, homemade. The slug is removed, the propellant disposed of and the primer is then carefully detonated. After this, the slug is reinserted into the open end of the casing. A dummy could easily be mistaken for a live round and vice versa. In fact, that is precisely its function. For this reason, it is strictly prohibited for live rounds to be present anywhere on or near a movie set, thus precluding the possibility of such a deadly confusion.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway.
The Crow was born in a frenzy of grief. Written and drawn in 1981 by 21-year-old James O’Barr it was an anguished response to the killing of his girlfriend three years earlier by a drunk driver. O’Barr had joined the US Army shortly after the accident in an attempt to exorcise the demons that still plagued him and while stationed in Berlin began work on what would become his magnum opus. “There was nothing in my future but nothingness,” O’ Barr wrote in 2010. “I’d hoped that by putting all my murderous fury into ink on paper that somehow, magically, all the pain, hurt and self-destructive behaviour that followed would dissolve. If there was no justice in the real world, I would invent some.”
Retribution, then, is the theme of the piece. Eric Draven (in the film a rock musician though in the source material his profession is never made entirely clear) and his fiancee Shelley are attacked by a mob of thugs when their car breaks down. Paralysed, Eric is forced to watch Shelley raped and murdered before he himself dies. Subsequently resurrected by a mysterious Crow, which acts both a guide and as a kind of feathered Greek chorus, he exacts bloody vengeance on his and Shelley’s murderers; vengeance inevitably accompanied by tar-black bon mots. O’ Barr’s book was, stylistically speaking, well ahead of its time and it took over half a decade for the work to find a publisher. Strikingly drawn in black and white and flamboyantly gloomy, it slowly found a cult following among intelligent young miserablists. But what it wasn’t was obvious movie material. The template for the comic-book movie had been set by Richard Donner’s Superman The Movie in 1978 and more recently tinkered with only a little by Tim Burton for his Batman a decade or so later. The formula – A-List stars (Hackman/Nicholson), big budgets, expensive special effects and a blitzkrieg marketing campaign – was honed in order to capture the summer teen market, then establishing itself as pretty much the raison d’etre of the Hollywood studios. Ripe, unapologetically rococo, dialogue along the lines of: “I am pilot error, I am foetal distress, I am the random chromosome . . .” (Book 2: Fear) would likely send the average studio exec running for his Xanax.
But Edward R. Pressman was not your average studio exec. A veteran of the indie scene he had midwifed the careers of among other mavericks Terrence Malick (exec producing Badlands), Brian De Palma (Phantom of the Paradise) and Oliver Stone (Wall Street). Pressman was brought the project by tyro producer Jeff Most and novelist and screenwriter John Shirley (the final screenplay would be credited to Shirley and Critters screenwriter David J. Schow). Pressman liked the dark tone of the material and was even more intrigued after Most brought on Alex Proyas, a director of striking Australian commercials, to helm. But they were still in need of a star. According to journalist Bridget Baiss, in her account of the making of the film, names such as Christian Slater, Johnny Depp and River Phoenix were batted around but rejected when Most and Shirley saw Brandon Lee in Rapid Fire, a US-made actioner with Powers Boothe. Most, who was keenly aware of the potential for the character to degenerate into a kind of Terminator-style killing machine, saw not only the right physicality but a sensitivity, vulnerability and humour that would go someway towards offsetting the otherwise relentless violence of the piece. (It would of course be churlish to point out that Slater/Depp et al were established A-Listers while Lee could be had for $750,000 and a modest back-end.)
Lee, meanwhile, had been struggling to escape comparisons to his superstar father for most of his life. “I would be talking with people and they’d invite me out for a drink,” he told Black Belt magazine in one of his earliest interviews. “I’d be thinking does this person really like me or are they just screwing with me because I’m Bruce Lee’s son?’” The industry had seemed determined to screw with him, sending him endless screenplays for low-budget fight-flicks no doubt planning to promote them off the back of his lineage. “[A lot of] the scripts were lowbrow and beneath doing. I wanted to have nothing to do with them. I don’t want to be seen as Bruce Lee’s son and nothing more,” he said. When he was offered the lead in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story the previous Summer he had turned it down. The Crow, then, seemed to be an ideal opportunity to take the kind of (mostly) martial-arts-free role that would further distance him from the chop-sockey scene. Eric Draven was going to be his big break. His final escape from the shadow of his illustrious father.
With director, star and key crew in place, Pressman finally greenlit the film with a budget just shy of $15 million.
“Pictures have personalities. Some just don’t want to be made. This was definitely one of those.” – Robert L. Rosen, Executive Producer, The Crow
Wilmington is a medium-sized port city on the southeast coast of North Carolina. For years its key industries were driven by its proximity to the Atlantic and its role as a transport hub, but from the mid-1980s onwards a new, and welcome, business sprouted there: moviemaking. In 1984 legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, in town to scout locations for Firestarter, purchased an old brick tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of the city, demolished it and build a state-of-the-art studio complex from scratch. DEG studios, as it became, would see the likes of Blue Velvet and King Kong Lives shot there. In 1990, after De Laurentiis went bankrupt, it was bought by Andrew Vajna and Mario Cassar becoming Carolco Studios.
There are many reasons why a production might choose to film away from the heart of the American film industry. Locations, weather and talent demands are among them. And more than a few directors relish working away from the prying eyes of studio executives. But the key consideration, as with almost anything in the movie industry, is money. The most important fact about Wilmington as far as The Crow and the many other films that have made it their home was that North Carolina is a “right-to-work” state. While Hollywood is heavily unionised – hire a non-union director of photography there and you are compelled to hire a second union-approved DoP grip to sit around and do nothing – the unions have no such power in RTW states. The result is that crews hired in Wilmington could be worked harder (16-hour days were not unusual) for lower pay and that young, ambitious but often inexperienced workers could be appointed to positions way above those they might expect on a union production.
In the case of The Crow, one of these was Daniel Kuttner who, despite having limited experience was appointed property master, a taxing job at the best of times. Responsible for all the props on a heavily designed production he also periodically found himself supervising the many firearms, an area in which he had no experience whatsoever. As journalist Jeffrey Goodell reported when one crew member spotted Kuttner rushing around shopping for props he asked why he didn’t hire extra staff. 'No money' was the stressed reply. “They wanted to make a $30 million movie,” one disenchanted crewmember said after quitting the film. “But they only wanted to spend $12 million to do it.” Corner-cutting was, according to some, the norm and not the exception.
It was possibly not surprising, then, that the shoot was physically gruelling and, more alarmingly, accident-plagued from the start. The schedule had been front-loaded so that the outdoor, Detriot-set sequences would be shot first. Proyas had the Carolco backlot almost entirely rebuilt (it had last been renovated several years previously for Year of the Dragon) and strung the gantries with rain machines which were in almost permanent use. Shooting solely at night, and in temperatures near to zero, the constant deluge often froze as soon as it hit the ground. Delays were common as cameras froze up and grips used blowtorches to de-ice the dolly tracks. Even when the production finally moved inside Proyas kept the production on a debilitating night schedule, the likely reason being that turning a production round from nights to days entails 24 hours of downtime, time Proyas couldn't afford. Coffee was, it was later alleged, not the only stimulant that some crewmembers turned to in order to cope with the gruelling conditions. Crewmembers would retire to the bathrooms or dark corners of the set and return significantly perkier, rubbing their noses. “It was so obvious it became a running joke,” one anonymous crewmember told journalist Jeffrey Goodell in 1993. “One night we were shooting in a cement factory and someone sneezed. A friend of mine said ‘Whoops. There goes 50 bucks.’”
The first accident happened on day one. A crane which was carrying carpenter Jim Martishius collided with overhead power lines carrying 700,000 volts into the centre of Wilmington. Trapped alone on the crane’s platform he writhed in agony, consumed by flames while below, unable to act until he had been lowered to the ground, a process which took agonising seconds, the crew looked on in horror. Martishius survived, but suffered burns to 80 per cent of his body and was still having surgery five years later. After that, the shoot was beset by a litany of snafus: the grip truck was set on fire mysteriously, a construction worker managed to drive a screwdriver through his hand, a drive-by shooting happened within earshot of the set, a truck was rammed into the plaster-sculpture studio. The crew of The Hudsucker Proxy, shooting on the stage next door, started treating the jinxed production as a gag, tallying the catastrophes. Well, they did until an unexpected storm destroyed much of the Crow’s backlot sets and took some of Hudsucker’s with it. Even before Lee’s death Entertainment Weekly had run a piece entitled The Curse of the Crow charting the production’s by now much remarked upon disasters.
No criminal charges were ever brought over the death of Brandon Lee, so the exact timeline has never been tested in court. But almost everyone agrees that the sequence of events was set in motion weeks before the accident. At some point during the shoot the props department, seeking brik-a-brak to dress a pawn shop set, had either rented or bought a consignment of pretty much random objects from a local business. In among them was a box of live .44 ammunition, not a particularly unusual occurrence in the US but utterly verboten on a movie set. Spotting the rounds, stunt coordinator Jeff Imada immediately took the ammunition off the set and locked it in the trunk of his car.
Weeks later the second unit asked props to provide a .44 Magnum plus six dummy rounds for a close-up shot. Kuttner realised that they didn’t have any to hand. Buying some would have cost time the shoot simply didn’t have, so at some point he, Imada and a special effects technician decided to manufacture some. This would not have been possible had Imada not remembered the live rounds in his trunk that he had taken off the set. The slugs were pulled out of the six casings and the propellant disposed of. The casings were then loaded into the gun and the weapon was repeatedly fired to discharge the primers and clear any powder residue. The slugs were then reinserted into the casing. But, crucially, one of the primers had failed to detonate. The gun was then dispatched along with the dummies to the second unit. There, in the noise and chaos, nobody noticed the pop of a primer detonating and igniting powder residue with just enough force to propel the slug into the barrel of the Magnum but no further. At the end of the night, the gun was returned to the props department where it was stowed away.
The next time it would be taken out would be two weeks later, on the night of Brandon Lee’s death.
On Tuesday, March 30th the crew started work at 9 pm as usual. The sequence to be shot was a flashback to the murder of Draven and Shelley, relocated by screenwriter David J. Schow from a car breakdown to Draven’s apartment. There was, however, a degree of confusion over how exactly he was going to be killed. The shooting script had him stabbed and then shot, but Proyas, as was his habit, vacillated and changed his mind a number of times as the crew rigged the scene. Finally, it was decided that Draven would be shot through a grocery bag he was carrying. The special effects crew no doubt sighed, abandoned the special harness that had been designed for the stabbing and rigged the grocery bag with a squib and blood bag. Accounts differ as to whether a bulletproof vest for Lee was ever discussed. He had used one earlier in the production, but in that scene he had been wearing upwards of 40 squibs. In this sequence he was only near one. And anyway actor Michael Massee, who played his killer Funboy had no doubt been instructed, as all actors are in such circumstances, to avoid pointing the gun directly at Brandon, but instead to aim to the side, to “cheat’ the angle. (Massee later denied that he ever received any such direction.)
The .44 Magnum was delivered to the set, again unchecked, loaded with the full-strength blanks that Proyas had asked for and handed to Massee. It’s difficult to stress the horror of what was now happening. A .44 round, which had been painstakingly disassembled and rendered safe, had now, through a ghastly confluence of accidents, been all but fully reassembled and what was being passed casually from hand to hand on the set in Wilmington was, for all practical purposes, a loaded gun.
There may have been incompetence. Communication has certainly failed.
The environment has become complex.
“Action!”
DRAVEN walks into the shot through the apartment door wearing walkman headphones and carrying a grocery bag. He reacts with horror to the chaos that greets him.
FUNBOY wheels round and spots him. Waving his gun wildly he fires off one shot.
DRAVEN Spins and clutches his side before falling and wedging himself in the doorway. He appears to gasp a few words but in the noise no-one immediately hears him. (“Cut, cut, please somebody say cut . . .”)
TOP DOLLAR : Fuck! Oh fuck! You fucking shot him! Now what are we going to do? You stupid fuck!
“Cut”
It takes a few seconds for people to realise there is something horribly wrong.
Brandon Lee was declared dead at 1.04 pm on March 31st at New Hanover Regional Medical Center. The cause was disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. He had bled to death internally. The .44 slug had lodged next to his spine and despite transfusing over 60 pints of blood the surgeons had been unable to repair the damage or staunch the bleeding. His mother subsequently launched a negligence suit against Edward R. Pressman film corp. which was settled for an undisclosed sum. Lee was 28 and due to be married a week after concluding shooting in Wilmington. Including The Crow, he had completed just 5 films. The same number as his father, next to whom he is buried in Seattle.
The Crow, completed with the use of doubles and digital effects, was released the following year and grossed $50 million in the US.
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