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Premiere Magazine
July 1993

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Why was the gun loaded?

By Jeffrey Goodell

Things got off to a slow start that night on stage 4 at Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. The cast and crew of The Crow should have been ready to go at 7:45 P.M, but it was almost 9:30 before the board finally clapped down for the first shot.

It was day 50 of a scheduled 58-day shoot, and the crew were bon-tired. They were shooting a flashback from the life of the movie's hero, Eric Draven, played by Brandon Lee. In this weird, violent urban fairy tale, Eric, who has been brutally murdered by a gang of drug dealers, comes back to avenge himself on his killers.

Tonight there were nine small sequences on the schedule, none more than a couple of minutes long.

 The set was appropriately eerie, a large open loft with industrial-style support beams and dusty antiques, a kind of retro-futuristic rock 'n' roll lair. Then here were the drug dealers, led by a couple of trashy-looking punks named T-Bird, played by David Patrick Kelly, and Fun-Boy, played by Michael Massee.

Since Lee wasn't needed in the first couple shots, he didn't arrive on the set about near midnight. He appeared pale and thin, like he had for the entire production. He had modelled the look of the character on Chris Robinson, the lead singer for the Black Crowes, and he had lost sixteen pounds to give himself a suitably ghoulish air. He was dressed in a black leather jacket, black boots, tight corduroys, and a T-shirt with the name of his character's band in big block letters across the front : HANGMAN'S JOKE.

While wardrobe was taping the top of his boots down right against his legs to give him a sleeker look, he chatted with Sara Seidman, one of the stand-ins. He told her that, for the first time in weeks, he had been able to get a full night's sleep. " He was in great spirits," Seidman recalls. " He said, I feel like a real person again.'"

A few minutes later, they called him onto the set to rehearse the murder scene. It was fairly simple shot, and they ran through it a few times: Massee and Kelly and the other thugs have broken into the loft and are attempting to rape Eric's girlfriend, played by Sofia Shinas. They're fondling her breasts… the door opens. Lee talks in unexpectedly, carrying a bag of groceries. (Implanted in the bag is a squib, a small explosive device used to simulate a bullet hitting its mark.) Massee whips out his pistol, wheels around in a drunken stagger, fires off a shot…Lee falls to the knees then stumbles forward, his face toward the camera. Kelly runs over to Lee's body, improves some lines of outrage, and the scene ends. Maybe two minutes of action, total. Usually in rehearsals, a fake gun is used while the real one is kept locked up until needed. But on The Crow, they cheated a little, perhaps just to save time. Massee was rehearsing with a real gun, a beautiful silver .44 magnum with a white handle.

After the first run-through, there was a little debate between Lee and director Alex Proyas. This was the first American feature for Proyas, an Australian known for his slick, atmospheric commercials and music videos, and he wanted every detail right. Lee worried that his character would be able to hear his girlfriend's screams, so they decided that he should be wearing a Walkman.

Finally, they were ready to go. Daniel Kuttner, the prop master, went on to Massee, carrying a plastic bag full of blanks. He took the gun from Massee, and, in a lapse that may haunt him for the rest of his life, he neglected to check the gun barrel for obstructions. Perhaps it was another little cheat to save time. Maybe it was inexperience or even fatigue. Kuttner loaded the .44 magnum with a single blank shell, then snapped the cylinder closed.

"Okay, everybody, full load!" he yelled, alerting all present that the blank had as much gunpowder as a real bullet. Anyone who had any experience with guns on movie sets would have known that this was a dangerous amount of explosive to use at such close range- Lee would be maybe twelve feet from the end of the barrel when the shot was fired - but no one raised an objection. It was the final lapse in a tragic series of mistakes and misjudgements, setting the stage for what was to come.
 

Steve Andrews, the first assistant director, yelled,

"Quiet on the set!

" Rolling!

" Action!"

The scene played out exactly as it had in rehearsals. The commotion of the actors on the set…the door opening… Lee stepping into the room…Massee turning around, staggering, a wild look in his eye, pulling the gun out of his belt. He did not take careful aim. In fact, he may well have intended to aim a few inches to Lee's side. But the scene was so quick and he was so off-balance that he just pointed the gun in Lee's direction and pulled off a shot. There was a flash in the muzzle and a terrific bang, amplified by the cavernous set.
As planned, Lee detonated the squib and the groceries went flying. Except this time, Lee didn't fall forward. He spun around and doubled over, his hand grabbing his stomach. He winced and crimpled to the floor, his head wedged against the door. Kelly approached him, as he had in rehearsal, looked him over, and then shouted back at Massee, improvising. " Oh, man, you fuck, you shot him! Now what are we going to do? You stupid fuck, man!"

The scene was chaotic, with Kelly pacing back and forth, ranting, Shinas screaming, one of the thugs trying to shush her. Lee motioned with his arm, trying to signal his distress, but everyone was too involved in the action to notice. He ended up on his left side, his feet facing the camera. One crew member remembers thinking, " That's strange, that's totally different than the way he did in in rehearsal." Others just thought it was extraordinary good acting. One person who was on the set would later remember hearing a faint call from Lee as he lay clutching his belly on the floor: " Cut, cut, somebody please say cut…" But at the time, too much was happening too quickly for it to register.

Finally Proyas yelled, " Cut!"

The chaos subsided. But unlike in the rehearsal, Lee did not get up. He just lay there with his head against the door, his chin on his chest, eyelids barely open. Clyde Baisey, the medic on set, rushed to his side: " Brandon, are you all right? Brandon?"

Suddenly, the set was dead quiet. Artifice was peeled away, and reality seeped in.

At that moment, says one crew member, " We all knew that something had gone, very, very wrong."

The Crow was going to be Lee's big break. Even before the movie was completed, he was gearing up for the publicity machine: photo shoots, phone interviews, chats with journalists visiting the set. This was going to be his moment, and he knew it.

That is not to say The Crow wasn't a risky venture. This was a strange, cartoonish horror flick that didn't fit into any neat category - no one really knew what it would do at the box office. But it did have Ed Pressman, one of the most respected independent producers in Hollywood, behind it, as well as Paramount Pictures, which has signed on to distribute the film. The screenplay - based on a comic book by James O'Barr, who wrote it after his girlfriend died in a car accident - was written by sci-fi novelist John Shirley and by David J. Schow, horror novelist and champion of the splatter-punk genre.

Lee first read the script last summer and lobbied hard for the part. But Pressman's first choice was Christian Slater. When Slater passed, Pressman took another look at Lee.

It didn't hurt that he came comparatively cheap - he was promised $750,000, plus a small percentage of the gross (considerably less than Slater's going rate). Lee was so enthusiastic about The Crow, he'd signed on for two sequels.

Eight years old when his father died, Lee spent most of his life trying to comes to terms with a man he hardly knew. Speculation still whirls about Bruce Lee's sudden death, but most people who were close to him (including his widow, Linda Lee Cadwell) accept the autopsy findings that death was caused by brain swelling due to an allergic reaction to a painkillers. Whatever the cause, it hit young Brandon hard: " To explain to this child that the hero of his life could no longer come home was incomprehensible to him, "

Linda wrote in her book, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, which later became the basis for the movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.

For Brandon, it was not easy being the fatherless son of a legendary fighter. " When I was growing up, we moved around a lot, and whatever I'd get to a new school, there'd be somebody there trying to kick my ass," Lee said last year. But his desire to become an actor like his father wavered, and after he finally graduated from high school (he'd dropped out twice), he studied drama at Emerson College in Boston and then took acting lessons in Manhattan. He was intent on becoming a serious actor.

Still, it seemed that everywhere Lee went, he was immediately pigeonholed as Bruce Lee's son. He finally gave in to the inevitable. In 1985 he made Kung Fu: The Movie, a TV film with David Carradine. Then in '87 came his first martial arts feature, Legacy of Rage, in Hong Kong (entirely in Cantonese, which he spoke fluently). Next he did Laser Mission('89) and then Showdown in Little Tokyo, with Dolph Lundgren. " While we were shooting Little Tokyo," recalls Pat Johnson, fight coordinator on the movie and a long-time friend of the Lee family, " Brandon said to me, ' You know, for years I was in my father's shadow, and I resented it. I wanted to be an actor, not do martial arts films. But it finally dawned on me - I am who I am, and I might as well accept it. Once I realized that, doors started to open for me. I'll go in and do what they ask of me, and I'll use it to get to the kind of movies that I want to make.'"

Little Tokyo wasn't exactly a smash, but it got him a toehold in the business. And after so much struggle, he wasn't shy about flaunting his success a little: with his first paycheck, Lee brought himself an $80,000 Acura NSX sports car. That year, he met Eliza Hutton, who was working for Director Renny Harlin at the time and who later became a story editor for Stillwater Productions, Kiefer Sutherland's company.

Lee was immediately smitten, and the two were soon very much in love.

Rapid Fire, released in August 1992, was Lee's first staring role and yet another step up the ladder. He signed a three-picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox, then plunged into a worldwide publicity tour to promote the movie. " He was living for this,: One friend says. All the attention was a kind of vindication, the escape from his father's shadow that he'd coveted for so long.

By Thanksgiving, most of the principal casting of The Crow was finished, and a production office was open in Wilmington. The Carolco lot isn't exactly a vision of Hollywood glamor. On a road lined with empty office buildings and industrial warehouses on the outskirts of town, it could easily be mistaken for the local UPS distribution center.

But for many in Wilmington who make their living in the movie business, it's a mixed blessing. They all know the main reason producers come here is that it's cheap and workers have no recourse against demands for long hours and low wages.

"You know that sometimes you're being exploited," says one Wilmington veteran.

"But nobody wants to stand up and say anything about it for fear of scaring business away." Attempts at unionzing have been rebuffed. " The real problem is that people down there believe that if they start to demand higher wages and better working conditions," says Bryan Unger, an organizer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees in New York, " they'll stop making movies there. And that ain't necessarily sp." (This same fear, in fact, is the reason most crew members on the production declined to be quoted by name for this article.)

Like many movies, The Crow brought in its own crew for the top-level jobs but saved money by giving inexperienced people their first break, a common practice on non-union shoots. The theory behind is that the crew people will be so grateful for the opportunity, they won't say no to anything. For example, art director Simon Murton recommended his friend Daniel Kuttner to be the prop master. Kuttner, 28, was an eager hardworking guy but with considerably less experience than is usually needed for the complication production like this. Kuttner, in turn, hired his girlfriend, a former set dresser and sound person named Charlene Hamer, as his assistant.
 

When the production got to North Carolina, the roaster was filled out primarily with non-union locals: grips, gaffers, camera assistants, etc. Adopting another common practice on non-union shoots, they tried to save additional money by short-crewing. Some of it was just penny-pinching. For example, instead of having on stand-in for ever actor in a scene, they rarely had more than two on the set at a time. Sometimes they came close to flouting the widely accepted guidelines of Hollywood's Industry-wide Safety Committee: for instance, instead of paying for a full second camera unit at union scale, they let some assistant do it on the sly.

" They wanted to make a $30 million movie," says one crew member who quit a few weeks into the shoot, " but they only wanted to spend $12 million to do it."

On Februrary 1, the first say of shooting, things got off to an ominous start. While working up in the bucket of a crane on the back lot, a carpenter named Jim Martishius accidentally backed into some high-tension wires, suffering severe burns on his face, arms and chest. The mood on the set sank ever lower, according to observers, when word got around that in the midst of the turmoil, production manager Grant Hill was less than tactful about asking a crew member whether they would have electricity for the rest of the day.

Morale plummeted. Cast and crew were spending twelve, fourteen hours a day on the set and then coming back the next morning with only an eight- or nine-hour break. No one felt the pressure more than Kuttner and Hamer. Jim Moyer, a local firearms specialist, had been brought in for a week during which most of the weapons used were automatics, but the rest of the time, the handguns were left to Kuttner and Hamer - along with every other prop, from cigarettes to silverware. Understaffed and overworked, they often spend their days shopping for upcoming scenes, leaving little time for sleep. When a crew member noticed Kuttner " running around like a madman" one night, he asked him why they didn't hire someone to help with the shopping. " Danny just shrugged and said, ' No money in the budget.'"

Not surprisingly, little accidents started happening. One crew member hammed a screwdriver through his hand. A stuntman, who had worked nine hours straight, fell wrong during a sword fight on a roof, got caught on the roof's edge, and broke a couple of ribs." You work that much for that many weeks in a row, safety is the first thing to go," says a crew members about the production in general.

But despite the dangers, no one on the crew complained. " If you tried," another crew member adds, " they would have looked at you and said, ' So where are you working tomorrow?'" No one wanted to risk being labelled a troublemaker.

The only thing that kept them going was that the dailies were terrific. Lee was superb, and the dark, weird look that they were all suffering so much to achieve was coming to life up on the screen.

But the pressure got turned up another notch when, about a week before Lee's death, Film Finances, the completion bond company, started visiting the set. That in itself is not unusual, but for this beaten-down crew, it just made matters worse. That week was the toughest shoot, as they were working in an old cement factory on the outskirts of town, where every kick step kicked up a mouthful of lung-choking dust. There were lots of stunts, explosions, and automatic weapons firing in every scene. The camera assistants put in 90 hours on the set that week.

It's one of Hollywood's dirty little secrets that cocaine is often the stimulant of choice in tough shoots. On The Crow, " it was so obvious, it was a running joke," says a crew member. " One night, we were at the cement factory when someone sneezed. A friend of mine said, ' Whoops, there goes 50 bucks,' The guy said, ' Yep.'"

Some crew members noticed that others would disappear briefly from the set at 3 or 4 A.M. and return wiping their noses, full of energy. The behavior further alienated an already highly demoralized crew. Wilmington is in the middle of the Bible Belt, after all, where drug use - or even the perception of drug use - is not take lightly.

That Saturday, four days before he died. Lee called Jan McCormack, his manager and one of his closest friends, " He told me that for seven or eight days straight, he had had next to no sleep," Mc Cormack recalls. " He said, ' Jan, I can hardly talk, I'm so tired,' He said conditions on the set had become subhuman. That was the word he used: subhuman."

On Monday, Mc Cormack and Mike Simpson, Lee's agent at William Morris, called Ed Pressman to lodge a complaint. Pressman told them to call producer Robert Rosen, who was in charge of the production in Wilmington. Rosen was abrupt with them, says McCormack, arguing that they had a movie to finish and were pulling out all the stops to get it done. " So I said to him, ' Bob, I don't care about your damn movie. You guys are killing Brandon down there,'" McCormack recalls, her voice welling up with emotion. " I didn't mean it to be prophetic."

When Lee was shot, he fell against the only door on the set. To get out, the crew had to file past the barely conscious actor, his face a pale grayish color. There was no blood on the floor, just some spilled milk from the grocery bag. One crew member recalls looking down at his wound as she walked past: " I'll never forget what it looked like - it was eye-shaped, about an inch below his belly button on his right side. There was blood pooling behind the wound but nothing pouring out. It just looked like a tear in the skin."

Outside, the crew waited in the darkness for the ambulance - there was no real sense of danger yet. Most thought it was just a squib that had misfired and torn into his flesh like a piece of shrapnel. One crew member remembers seeing Massee, the actor who pulled the trigger," He was in shock. I don't think he knew what happened."

It only took a few minutes for the ambulance to arrive. When they brought Lee out on the gurney, it was suddenly hit home: this was no flesh wound. Paramedics were putting inflatable trousers around Lee's legs to keep blood pressure steady and had inserted a tracheal tube, and set medic Baisey was giving him CPR(later crew members would learn Lee's heart had stopped once on the set and a second time on the way to the hospital). Still, a lingering faith remained.

When the ambulance left, the crew dispersed. About 30 people went to New Hanover Regional Medical Center and waited in the emergency room, trying to hold it together, hoping that their collective energy would give their friend strength. They waited around until morning, when a doctor finally came out and told them he had done what he could, but that the object - he didn't say bullet - was lodged against Lee's spine. I had severed a major artery and severely damaged internal organs, and he had lost a tremendous amount of blood. It didn't look good.

Lee's close friend, stunt coordinator Jeff Imada, immediately flew to Atlanta to meet Hutton, who was coming in from L.A. and had no idea how badly her fiancée was hurt.

Gently, Imada broke the new to her that Lee's injury was much more serious than they had at first realized. Only three days earlier, Hutton had been laughing with friends as she opened gifts at her bridal shower at the posh Hotel Bel-Air, looking forward to building a new life with Lee. Now that life was about to end. When they landed in Wilmington around Noon, Imada took her directly to the hospital where Lee was intensive care. An hour later, he was dead.

The next morning, Lee's body was taken to the nearby city of Jacksonville for an autopsy. The results were released that afternoon at a press conference at the Wilmington police station. The big news: a bullet had been found. Instantly, a storm of speculation raged through the press and brought journalists flying in from all over the world. Variety quoted Lee's publicist as calling for a murder investigation, and the New York Post headline screamed: THE GUN WAS LOADED. Was the Chinese mob involved? Or was there a second gunman, perhaps a sniper, in the rafters? It was tabloid heaven.

But the crew knew otherwise. Over the next few days, the details of what happened began to emerge. It started three weeks earlier, when the second unit needed the gun and six rounds of dummy bullets - that is, bullets that look like the real thing but have no powder inside - for close ups. It was a routine request. Except that the prop department didn't have dummies for the .44 magnum. Instead of waiting till the next day to track down professionally made dummies at a local prop shop, Kuttner and Imada, along with Bruce Merlin, the special effects lead man, decided to make their own, using live ammunition that Imada had in his trunk. Merlin pulled the live bullets apart with pliers, empted out the powder, and jammed them back together. Because, unlike real dummies, these contained a residue of powder along with a live primer, after loading the gun, one of them fired it several times to discharge the primers. Except somehow, when the gun was sent to the second unit, one of the primers was still LIVE.

It was not yet a tragic oversight. Ordinarily on a movie like this, the gun would have been transported to the second unit, by an experienced prop person, who was responsible for its care and safekeeping. But on The Crow, there was no such person. The gun was lent out like a teapot or a watch and taken to the second unit by visual effects consultant Andrew Mason, who handed it to the camera operator and disappeared.

The camera shot the close up looking straight down the gun barrel - just a quick flash for the final sequence to show the cylinder turning and the hammer going down. While they were setting up the shot, the stand-in squeezed the trigger a few times to get comfortable with the gun. He later recalled hearing a little pop and alerted the camera operator. But since neither was a weapons expert, neither knew what to make of it. In fact, this was the fatal moment: one of the primers had gone off in the dummy, igniting the residue of gunpowder, which caused just enough of an explosion to propel the bullet partway down the barrel and lodged it in there. (For ballistic reasons, the barrel of a gun is slightly smaller than the bullet.) An experienced gun handler would undoubtedly have understood what the sound meant, looked down the barrel, and spotted the dislodged bullet.

The shot proceeded as planned. At one point, the camera operator reportedly noticed one of the tips missing and asked the stand-in to rotate the cylinder so the camera wouldn't pick it up. Yet again, it was a detail that would immediately have alarmed anyone who knew guns. Instead, the shot was completed, the gun emptied and no one mentioned the missing tip. Gun and bullets were returned to the prop truck.

 Still, Lee's death was not yet a foregone conclusion. Guns are usually cleaned whenever they are returned to the prop truck. But because the gun had not actually been fired, Kuttner and Hamer saw no reason to bother.

Several weeks later, when Hamer went to get the gun off the prop truck on that fatal night, she opened the pouch in which the gun was kept and a single dummy bullet tumbled out. Not thinking anything of it, and in a rush as usual, she checked the cylinder - but not the barrel - and handed it to Massee for rehearsal. At this point, the four other dummies and the empty casing were still in the pouch, which Hamer placed on the prop cart.

A few minutes later, Kuttner arrived on the set with the blanks. He noticed the gun pouch on the cart and even noticed that one of the casing was missing a tip. Perhaps he recalled that the gun had been to the second unit several weeks earlier, but surely if they'd had any problems, he would of have heard - he was only a radio call away. But apparently no one had said a word. Perhaps if all five dummies plus the single casing had been in the pouch, he would have understood. Instead, he took the gun from Massee and loaded it with a blank. Unbeknownst to him, the bullet tip was still in the barrel, just waiting to be fired into Lee's belly. "This accident is like the sinking of the Titantic, " says Ron Greenwood, a veteran Hollywood prop master. " So many things went wrong, and there was so much negligence, as to defy belief."

Lee was buried on Saturday, April 3, at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, next to his father. The following day, Lee's friends collected at the Los Angeles home of Polly Bergen, with whom Lee used to play backgammon. The family were there, including Lee's mother, who told guests she wanted the gathering to be " a celebration of Brandon's life." Three hundred or so attended, including people he'd known in the martial arts world, and a few celebrities like Kiefer Sutherland, and Steven Seagal.

Friends told funny stories about Lee, trying to keep the mood upbeat. Imada and Hutton, however, were too broken up to speak. An anguished Imada told one guest, " I just keep seeing it over and over again."

Pressman and Rosen both attended, stony-faced and solemn. At one point, Rosen approached McCormack and offered his condolences. " I don't have any words to console you." He said.

Indeed he did not. For those who were close to Lee, the long process of coming to terms with his sudden death was just beginning. It seemed impossible that a man so strong and so in love and so hopeful about the future was gone. " Some days the sorrow suppressed the rage, some days the rage suppresses the sorrow." For her, the most difficult thing to grasp  is the senselessness of Lee's death. " It is so awful and so stupid," she saud. " It's one thing if he's died doing a dangerous stunt, falling off a building or something. It is another to die walking through a door, carrying an armful of groceries."

Now the finger pointing begins. " Brandon Lee's death was the result of ignoring basic and well-recognized safety guidelines," says District Attorney Jerry Spivey, who may bring criminal charges against one or more members of the crew, depending on what the investigation concludes. As of this writing, the DA was considering charges of negligence against the entire production company. The insurance company, the completion bond company and the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration are all conducting their own investigations. In the flurry of lawsuits that are bound to erupt, there will undoubtedly be many attempts to rewrite history, to paper over the details. Many crew members fear that one person is going to take the fall, when they all know, given the abuses that occurred on the set, that everyone is guilty, from the top down. As one crew member puts it: " It's like the classic question in a murder trial: who is more responsible, the person who pulled the trigger, or the one who ordered it?"

Many in Wilmington, proud of their hard-won skills in the movie business, are afraid that Lee's death is going to put a stigma on their town - even though none of the people directly involved in the incident were locals. In the week following Lee's death, rumors were flying that the next production had already been scared off, that the livelihood of the local film crews would soon dry up. The unions have tried to use this accident - and the subsequent publicity about the lack of safety on non-union productions - as a way to gain a foothold in North Carolina. So far, they haven't had much success.

But if nothing else, Lee's death has changed the way people think about guns on movie sets (motivated, at least in part by fear that insurances rates will sky-rocket). Most firearms expert agree that there should be better gun education for actors. They are ultimately the ones who hold the weapon, who pull the trigger - and so it is up to them to make sure it's safe. Also, every show should have an armorer, a person explicitly in charge of all weaponry. Pistols shouldn't be viewed as props, in the same category as watches and ashtrays and hairbrushes

But most important of all, Lee's death may give people the courage to raise their voices against excessive cost cutting and whip cracking excessive cost cutting and whip cracking on movie sets. " Hopefully, what happened to Brandon will make it easier for crew members to stand up to producers and say, ' This is not safe'" says John Perkinson, a veteran Wilmington camera assistant. " And if the producer keeps pushing, all we have to ay is, ' Brandon Lee'"

There is one final eerie twist to this tragic story. The last couple of scenes of The Crow were scheduled to be completed in early June, reportedly using a double for Lee. If the movie ever does get released, according to the shooting script, the first image of Brandon Lee we will see is of the young actor in his grave, kicking mightily, trying to break out.een four years of w

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