Cinema of Sadness
Teddy Chen’s autobiography has enough poignance that it belongs to the genre known as misery memoir. Although the English title of Teddy’s book is Cinema of Sadness, the Chinese title is Leave Your Sorrows to the Movies. The latter title is a reference to a popular Bobby Chen song called I Left Sadness to Myself. Here are some particularly poignant moments…
The disappointment of Purple Storm at the Hong Kong box office could have been redeemed: “A few months after the movie was released, Willie Chan called me one day and said an American director wanted to meet me. The person who wanted to meet me was Quentin Tarantino. It turned out that the reason he wanted to meet me was because he watched Purple Storm on the plane. He liked it very much. He also found out that the producer of the film was Willie Chan, so he made an appointment with me through him. We had a very good conversation at that time, and he even made a long-distance call on the spot to an American producer named Harvey Weinstein so that he could tell him to watch Purple Storm. It turned out that Harvey had actually watched it in the United States and had purchased the rights to remake the film.”
Where things went wrong: “The remake was to be filmed in New York and starring a white actor. During the negotiation process, Harvey Weinstein suggested that I could be considered to direct, but I could only bring three people: producer, action director and cinematographer then we had to go to New York in October of that year. We held a production meeting and discussed cooperation matters. Just when everything was ready, something unfortunate happened. In September, the terrorist incident occurred in New York. Coincidentally, the villain of Purple Storm had blown up a building in the storyline. Because of his arrogance in the movie and the conspiracy at the ending, the American film company joked to me: Never let Bin Laden see Purple Storm. In the end, the American version of Purple Storm never happened.”
When Teddy acted in Lost Souls for Shaw Brothers, he had sorrowfully finished being Jackie Chan’s personal assistant. Flashbacking to August 1978, Teddy Chen said: “My mother asked me: Do you think you are suitable to be an artist’s personal assistant? I told my mother that it shouldn’t be much different than being an assistant director! The reason is that Jackie Chan has just finished filming Drunken Master. He is so popular that he really needs a personal assistant to share the work of his manager Willie Chan. Because my mother is Willie’s Mahjong partner, he immediately thought of me. I’m in the same age group as Jackie Chan. We are only four years apart and I also know how to work in the film and television industry.”
Ted explains what was learned after his first conversation with Jackie: “He knew that I had lived in Taipei, that I could speak Mandarin fluently, and that I had worked as a screenwriter and assistant director. He thought I was very cool. It was suitable to help him. He told me that when he was a child, he didn’t have much opportunity to study reading literature at the opera school where Master Yu Jim-Yuen was a student. He was illiterate, so he needed someone to read the script to him and then help him write a review! But he studied hard with acquired hard work.”
Despite the timeframe, nothing is said about The Fearless Hyena or Jackie Chan being contracted to Lo Wei’s film company. The significance is that Teddy Chen and Jackie share the same birthday month i.e. April. Teddy was born on April 26 whereas Jackie was born on April 7. The reason why it’s significant is because April 2 in 1979 was when Willie Chan shut down his own film company so that Lo Wei wouldn’t think that Willie was about to poach Jackie. When Jackie was tricked into signing his second contract for Lo Wei, it was on April 3. In late April, Jackie began work on Fearless Hyena Part II before changing gears to work for Raymond Chow’s film company: Golden Harvest.
Nevertheless, Ted said: “During those days, I followed him. I ate and drank well every day. It was a great time. Moreover, Jackie treated me like a brother. When he bought new clothes, I would definitely choose one. Later, when he found out that I wanted to buy a motorcycle for transportation but was short on money, he asked the company to secure the down payment for me. At that time, I could be said to be inferior to one person and superior to ten thousand people (except for my agent Willie Chan). I remember once that myself and Choi Wing-Cheong, one of the bosses of Golden Harvest, sent Jackie to the airport because he was going abroad for publicity. After my eldest brother got on the plane, Mr. Choi invited me to have lunch with him at the airport restaurant. The reason was that he hoped that I could help read to him the scripts that the company wanted to prioritize filming from the pile of movie scripts at Jackie Chan’s home.”
Referring to late April 1979, Ted said: “Such happy days passed continuously for seven or eight months, and finally the filming of The Young Master officially started. I still remember that on the first day of the official shooting, I put on brand new clothes and even paired them with a pair of white leather shoes. As I walked into the studio, I didn’t expect that the first words the tea lady greeted me at the door were “Mr. Chen, the studio area is very dirty. Your white shoes will be ruined. You’d better stay in the office. The air-conditioning will be more comfortable!” At that time, I thought to myself: “Auntie, how can I learn to be a director if I don’t go to the set?” Really, I regained my mood and strode into the set. Stepping onto the set of The Young Master, I happily sat in another director’s chair next to Jackie Chan. Except for the boss of Golden Harvest and other protagonists of the movie, no-one dared to sit next to Jackie Chan.”
Teddy Chen would soon be disillusioned when it became apparent that Jackie was more interested in Ted being a tour guide for fans than an aspiring film-maker. After a month of filming, Ted had enough: “Finally, I waited until a major actor was injured and had to stop filming for a day or two. The eldest brother particularly likes the feeling of speed, so most of his cars have been modified. On Cheng Cheung Road, which is often frequented by modified car enthusiasts, there is a pavilion beside the road. Standing in the pavilion, you can overlook the night view of the entire Central. It is a famous dating spot. Therefore, this road is also called “Love Road” by couples. That night, Jackie Chan asked me to accompany him to try out the speed of his new car and the feeling of chasing the wind. While waiting, there were couples of men and women in the surrounding cars. Our car was surrounded by many loving couples who participated in different acts of love.”
Fittingly, Teddy Chen “broke up” with Jackie. The latter was kind enough to let him be an assistant director on Frankie Chan’s first movie as a leading man for producer Jackie: Read Lips (1980). Break-ups don’t last forever. One night in the summer of 1999, Teddy was preparing dinner at home alone to watch the Premier League football semi-finals. Suddenly the phone rang, and a rough voice was asking for him. It was Jackie Chan, but Teddy was bemused because Jackie hadn’t spoken to him since 1979. Jackie wanted to make up for it by inviting him to the Waterwheel House in Tsim Sha Tsui. This was a well-known Japanese restaurant with an all-female staff, but it’s closed now. Jackie told Teddy that Golden Harvest had shown him Teddy’s screenplay for The Lost City of Spies. Teddy told him that he can film whatever he wants because Jackie owns shares in Golden Harvest, but Jackie was eager to meet him. After the phone call ended, Teddy drank three large glasses of red wine in one go before ordering a taxi to see him.
The screenplay was conceived as a star vehicle for Takeshi Kaneshiro. Anyway, Ted said: “In my memory, the lively eldest brother would always bring a large group of people including his assistants, relatives, and film crew, to dine with him. Therefore, he would book the largest booth every time. When I arrived at the Waterwheel House in Tsim Sha Tsui, eldest brother was waiting for me in the largest booth, but he was the only one there. I sat down and he asked me to order something to eat first, but because I had drunk three glasses of red wine on an empty stomach before, I was actually a little tipsy at that moment. I saw a bottle of Japanese sake on the table and said nothing more. With the red wine and Japanese sake, I had probably entered another realm.”
Jackie Chan wanted to make one more movie for Golden Harvest before going to the United States in 2000, and he wanted Teddy Chen to direct. Teddy felt snubbed by Jackie over the decades. Jackie became silent for a moment, picked up his wine glass and toasted Teddy with three rounds of Japanese sake before apologizing to him. He also admitted that he had been observing Teddy’s career since 1979, and felt that Teddy had come a long way. Jackie explained that he was aloof to Teddy for such a long time because Teddy was the first and only employee to resign from working under him. The postscript to the reunion chapter was that Jackie likes to hire people whose surnames are Chan e.g. manager Willie Chan, still photographer Chan Yuk along with directors Chan Chi-Hwa, Frankie Chan and Benny Chan.
About principal photography, Ted said: “The filming in Turkey went quite smoothly until one day when we needed to change scenes, so we got two days off. I invited some new Turkish friends to go out for dinner. After I freshened up, I walked out of the hotel door. On occasion, I happened to bump into a member of the crew who was returning to the hotel. He was only about 30 steps away from me. When I was about to say hello to him, suddenly there was a loud noise from the alley next to the hotel. I saw the crew member in front of me. He happened to be standing at the intersection of the cross alley, and had a frightened expression on his face. Then he yelled, looked at me and said “Alan fell from upstairs. Come!” After saying that, he rushed into the side alley, and I immediately followed him.”
Teddy Chen indirectly explained why Alan Fung Wai-Lun stopped being a stuntman for several years after this movie: “I saw Alan lying on the ground. I rushed to his side, and he said “Director, I feel so much pain!” The blood on his body immediately flowed out from behind like a fountain. I immediately looked up and saw that he was drinking beer in the room with the crew’s make-up and costume colleagues. He accidentally fell from the sixth floor. This floor was not that high, their sixth floor is equivalent to about four floors in our modern buildings. My little brother has always been a person who sees blood in his stool, and even gets dizzy when he bleeds himself. But in the chaos, I desperately ran back to the hotel to find someone to call the ambulance. We entered the local hospital where the attending doctor told us that Alan had at least four to five fractures on his body, some of which had injured his ribs and even touched his internal organs. I don’t know whether it was Alan’s good luck or his stuntman physique.”
The aftermath: “He was temporarily cured after a month of treatment at the hospital. Later, when he was discharged from the hospital, I asked him what happened on the day of the accident. Alan told me that while he was chatting with the staff that night, he opened the window while drinking, and then held on to the railing of the window sill. But he did not expect that the railing came loose, so he lost his center of gravity and fell from the building. At the critical moment, he twisted his body in the air to prevent his head from hitting the ground first, and his back to the ground to avoid death. His quick reaction as a martial artist for many years may have saved his life! Later, a firefighter friend told me why people who fall from a building are bound to die when they exceed a certain height. It’s because people are top-heavy, when a person falls from a high altitude, he must hit the ground head first, thus injuring his brain and dying.”
Sadly, Teddy Chen was uncredited for his work as assistant director on Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story in 1986. He worked on it for 10 days. Ironically, he was fired from this role in the 1990 sequel. Teddy admitted that, because of his youth and arrogance, he offended a film company executive. From that point, he was banned from that type of job. Teddy also referred to his role as assistant director for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (1983) as unfinished. Following on from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Teddy then worked for Hong Kong’s ATV network as a director from 1984 to 1985. The happiest days in his film and TV career were in the seventies. When he was 18 in 1978, he joined Li Man-King’s RTV station where he applied for the position of assistant director. Actress Nora Miao had recommended him.
Nora’s older brother, Ricky Chan, was Teddy’s best friend. In Ricky’s house, there was a lot of sports equipment including a horizontal bar. One day in 1973, he wanted to impress his family and Teddy. The latter remembered: “He wanted to perform difficult moves on the horizontal bar to us, so we started clapping and cheering. Ricky was able to hold the bar with one hand and hold his body horizontally in the air for several seconds. However, he never expected that the lever could come loose from the wall. Ricky fell heavily, head first. He fell unconscious, and his family immediately sent him to the hospital. The X-ray report showed that there was blood stasis in the brain and a fracture in the back of the skull, requiring immediate surgery! Feeling guilty, we stood guard outside the operating room without daring to leave. I felt very heavy at that time because I kept applauding and encouraging my second brother when he performed.”
Like a gymnast, the story takes a twist: “During the six-hour operation, Nora Miao entered the hospital in a hurry, and accompanying her was Bruce Lee. They were filming in the studio at the time! My family, my classmates, and I were sitting on the wooden bench in the hospital corridor with our heads lowered. At this moment, my eyes were red and swollen. Everyone was silently waiting for the results of the operation. In addition to feeling guilty, I did not dare to raise my head to face them. At this time, Bruce Lee also slowly sat down. He glanced at us. At that moment, I still felt his strong aura and positive energy! Fortunately, Ricky’s surgery was successful and he is out of danger. Everyone finally breathed a sigh of relief! When Bruce Lee left the hospital, he walked up to Ricky and I then patted both of our shoulders. Although he didn’t say anything, he just nodded vigorously, but he seemed to be saying to us - This was an accident, not your fault!”
