Allied Rivals
Billy Chong and Conan Lee had similar trajectories in the Hong Kong film industry. What they had in common was that they were Kung Fu movie stars who were not raised in Hong Kong. Billy Chong was an Indonesian named Willy Dozan whereas Conan Lee was a Chinese-American named Lloyd Hutchinson. When they became stars in Hong Kong, it was through the same organization but different fronts. Willy was contracted to Eternal, and Conan was contracted to Seasonal, but both companies had the same staff. The main common denominator was a producer named Ng See-Yuen. It’s a sign of how intertwined those two companies are that Willy Dozan referred to the making of Crystal Fist (1979) as a “Seasonal” production even though the credited company is Eternal. Unfortunately, you don’t get any behind the scenes info on Willy’s Instagram page beyond basic captions.
Not content with just having “Billy Chong” as the rising star for Eternal, Ng See-Yuen deliberately set out to find a Jackie Chan lookalike for Eternal’s satellite company. Lloyd Hutchinson was not a martial artist but he became one in 1981 thanks to the Seasonal team (they also sent him to drama class). 1981 was when Seasonal began making Ninja in the Dragon’s Den, and when Eternal began making Willy’s A Fist Full of Talons. Both films were made in Taiwan. For Jackie Chan, 1981 was cause for concern. On Instagram, Willy Dozan uploaded a 1981 photograph of himself alongside Jackie’s Taiwanese girlfriend: Joan Lin Feng-Jiao. She first met Jackie in 1981 when he was filming Dragon Lord in Taiwan. Joan Lin became Jackie’s wife in 1982. More specifically, she gave birth to his son, Jaycee, on December 3 of that year. Jackie and Joan were secretly married in America.
Back to Willy Dozan, the photo of himself alongside Joan must have caused some jealousy in Jackie since Willy had a more handsome face and a better physique. After Joan married Jackie, she retired from the film industry. 1982 also marked the end of two promising film careers. Willy Dozan as “Billy Chong” and Lloyd Hutchinson as “Conan Lee” had the potential to work together on a Hong Kong movie like the Chinese equivalent to Miami Vice had somebody put two and two together. On the Indonesian web, it was claimed that Willy had left the Hong Kong film business after narrowly escaping being slashed to death by Katana-wielding members of the Chinese mob. This sounds like sensationalism had it not been for Jackie experiencing something similar years down the line, as he had noted in his second memoir: Never Grow Up.
In his own memoir (Ask a Loyal Heart), Donnie Yen talked of personally witnessing a Katana-carrying Taiwanese Triad leader during the making of Shaolin Drunkard (1983). Similar to how it took too long for Willy Dozan’s A Fist Full of Talons to be released (i.e. April 1983), Donnie’s Drunken Tai Chi was released in May 1984. It may seem out of left field for myself to bring Donnie into all of this, but his official site (from eons back) referred to Drunken Tai Chi being “delayed from filming” to the point that he was asked to work behind the scenes on “Miracle Fighters 2” (which is the alternate title to Shaolin Drunkard). Both movies were made by Yuen Woo-Ping, but Shaolin Drunkard was released on August 1983. In his memoir, Donnie remembered that the first film set that he ever visited was Yuen Biao’s The Champions (which started production in July 1982). This was released in October 1983. In 1982, Donnie had signed a three year contract. After finishing Mismatched Couples in 1985, he didn’t do any more movies until 1988.
On the Chinese web, the story of Conan Lee’s blacklisting is that it was due to an innocent misunderstanding. After the box office success of Ninja in the Dragon’s Den in July 1982, some members of the Chinese mafia went up to him to make an offer but he said that they should go through Ng See-Yuen first. This was somehow taken to mean beat him up. According to a DVD interview with Ng, he claimed that a member of the Taiwanese Triad had approached him about wanting Conan for a movie but Ng told him that he could only work with Conan after Ng made one more movie with him. On a later day, a group of gangsters had almost beaten Ng to death, and it took half a year for him to fully recover. Back to the Hong Kong Legends DVD of Ninja in the Dragon’s Den, Ng claimed that Conan’s success went to his head, and he didn’t realize how much of the success was due to the people around him.
One of Seasonal’s bosses, Roy Horan, claimed that Conan began to rethink his contract to the point of wanting to renegotiate it if not break it. A dispute happened where legal action was threatened against Conan, but it was decided that it would be easier to let him go despite the fact that he had signed a “very, very strong contract” or so Roy said. Bearing in mind that the contract was signed in America by a man who was one of the top lawyers in Los Angeles. Compare this with Jackie Chan - a dyslexic who signed his second contract for director Lo Wei’s company after achieving success with Seasonal. Jimmy Wang Yu had personally overseen the signing of this contract, but it was Michael Chan Wai-Man who actually protected Jackie during the making of Dragon Lord in 1981. All Jimmy Wang Yu did, film-wise, was getting Jackie to appear in one of his own films as a favour i.e. Fantasy Mission Force. It was made after Dragon Lord came out in January 1982, and it was released in Hong Kong on February 1983.
In the July 1990 issue of Combat, Ng See-Yuen talked of both Taiwanese and Hong Kong gangs wanting Jackie to break his contract. Apparently, some gang members headed to Lo Wei’s office but Lo had fortified himself with protection in the form of fellow cronies. It got to the point that Lo was taken to court. This is why Ng didn’t go through with poaching Jackie. It’s in Bey Logan’s interview with Ng that we learn that Conan Lee had signed a contract for six movies, like Billy Chong before him when he signed his contract to Eternal back in 1978 (i.e. following the final date of the Hong Kong release for Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master). Not only that, but Ng offered to increase Conan’s salary to half a million Hong Kong dollars. Conan countered that some Taiwanese people had offered him the full million. Had he not been so greedy, Conan’s next film for Seasonal would have been about the Chinatown mafia in Europe. It was to be filmed in France and England. In the interview, Ng said nothing about being beaten up (Roy never corroborated it in his interview).
Conan’s Chinese name was the same as a folk hero named Lee Yuen-Ba. The fable goes that the warrior did not like it when the thunder woke him and disturbed his sick mother, so he threw his sword up to kill the god of thunder…but he ended up killing himself. Life imitated art because Conan’s official excuse for leaving Hong Kong was that he wanted to look after his ailing mother. When Conan came back to Hong Kong to co-star in Tiger on the Beat circa 1987, it was a Lau Kar-Leung film for Cinema City. When Willy Dozan came back to appear in Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit circa 1988, it was for the same man and the same company. Even Conan appeared in that one too, as if Lau was trying to make a point. Conan and Willy left in 1982, but Alexander Fu Sheng died in 1983. Like those two, Alex had the potential to become bigger than Jackie Chan. Lau was gravely affected by the death of his colleague. Coincidentally, Willy uploaded a photo of himself visiting the set of a 1988 film directed by Lau’s brother i.e. Lau Kar-Wing’s The Dragon Family. Lau Kar-Leung worked on it as the stunt coordinator.
When Conan returned to Hong Kong for Tiger on the Beat in 1987, it was an experiment by Cinema City to see what would happen if Chow Yun-Fat made a movie with Jackie Chan. Willy Dozan was the Indonesian Bruce Lee, so Lau Kar-Leung could and should have turned Tiger on the Beat 2 (1990) into that type of combination instead of having Conan team up with prolific cop actor Danny Lee. Back in 1982, Willy and Conan essentially worked for the same corporation. I can imagine that Willy wasn’t happy that less money was put behind his latest film with Eternal than Conan’s first film for Seasonal. Willy had been around longer and was a genuine martial artist but he had never starred in a movie that was as profitable as Ninja in the Dragon’s Den. Imagine how he would have felt about having a lesser role than Conan in Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit. There are Indonesian YouTube videos whose comment sections claim that Willy left Hong Kong because he didn’t like the fact that Triads extort money from actors.
You can’t make light of being blacklisted in the Hong Kong film biz. In 1988, Bruce Leung Siu-Lung was starring in a co-production between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese companies. The film was a remake of a Shaw Brothers classic called The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. Although born in Hong Kong, Bruce Leung’s ancestral home was the Guangdong province of Mainland China. At a press conference in the Mainland, Bruce announced that he had secretly hoped that his homeland country’s economy would blossom. His comment couldn’t have come at a worse time since the Mainland’s rival country, Taiwan, were mourning their president (who died in January 1988). The Taiwan Free Trade Union asked Bruce to write an apology letter but he refused. This was a big mistake because the Hong Kong film biz greatly depended on Taiwanese financiers. Things got so bad that a senior actor advised him to rethink his decision, but Bruce remained firm and didn’t do any movies until Stephen Chow invited him to co-star in Kung Fu Hustle (2004).
By 2003, the Taiwanese stronghold on Hong Kong films had dwindled as the film-makers relied on other foreign forms of revenue thanks to the growing international success of Chinese talent. In this instance, Kung Fu Hustle was financed by the Asian subsidiary company of a U.S. major (Columbia). Conan Lee had a similar kind of long-term resurgence. His last Hong Kong film in the 20st century was Dragon Killer circa 1995. He returned in 2017 to play a small role in Sons of the Neon Night. It finished filming in 2018, but the film has yet to be released despite Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Lau Ching-Wan and Louis Koo gracing the cast. If I had to think of a reason, it may be because Conan Lee saw Lau Kar-Leung’s 2013 funeral as a photo opportunity. That event graced the likes of Fung Hark-On, Jason Pai Piao, Donnie Yen (small world) and Lo Mang. Basically, the funeral was a who’s who of real-life tough guys in the martial arts movie world…along with miscellaneous faces.
