Correcting an Autobiography
During this whole outbreak commotion, I have found the opportunity to read Jackie Chan’s two memoirs concurrently so as to see how they deviate from one another. Ever since I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action was published in August 1998, fans have spotted flaws which suggest that the book is not so much 100% memory recall as it is a combination of an autobiography and a biography. When his second book (Never Grow Up) came out, it became more apparent that Jeff Yang’s book was flawed. Here are the most noteworthy examples…
Jackie dismisses Bruce Lee’s knife threat to Lo Wei as hearsay: “The papers, always hungry for good gossip, printed rumours that Bruce had threatened to kill Lo with a knife. Although, when asked, Bruce responded that he’d hardly have needed a weapon to take care of his nemesis.”
My problem with this: Jackie would have known for a fact if Bruce had threatened Lo. The employees at the Golden Harvest film studio had a way of keeping everyone informed on day-to-day affairs. For example, Bruce Lee and I (i.e. Bey Logan’s Bruce Lee book) mentions that Wu Ngan called Sammo Hung to inform him that Bruce had died. Sammo believed Wu because he always perceived him as someone who doesn’t joke around.
Never Grow Up: Jackie gives the impression that himself and Lo were on speaking terms on a level that went beyond the standard formality of employer/employee. One such example: “He returned to Hong Kong after being away on a film to find his house and accounts emptied by a girlfriend. She’d quietly transferred everything to her name. Before she left, she wrote a check for $50,000 and tossed it at him, the ultimate humiliation. He cursed her, tore up the check, and flung it back in her face. She laughed and walked away. When he told me this story, he sobbed bitterly. “How can women be so wicked?” he asked.”
I Am Jackie Chan: Before the making of New Fist of Fury, Jackie knew that Lo Wei had divorced Liu Lianghua yet it would appear that Jackie never knew why (i.e. going by the lack of explanation given in the chapter or the ensuing Lo Wei chapters). You would think that Lo would have been just as bitterly candid about his wife committing adultery with Raymond Chow. In a Chinese article about Jet Li, I learned that Liu became Chow’s confidant and one of the major shareholders of Golden Harvest.
Never Grow Up: Jackie talks us through the process that Lo had put him through to ascertain his star potential i.e. changing his appearance and stage name. What I thought was truly mind-blowing was when Jackie said: “He approved of my body, but that was about it. Just about everything else needed fixing, including my crooked teeth and small eyes.”
I Am Jackie Chan: This book paints a different picture. Jackie (or Jeff Yang) quoted Lo Wei as saying: “Not bad. It ain’t Bruce Lee, but you work with what you got. Besides, when I started with Bruce, he was nothing — skinny as a stick. But after my special training program…”
Then there’s the issue of when Jackie made the ten movies with Lo Wei along with the movies that he did with the Seasonal company that share the same timeframe towards the end of his tenure with the director/gangster. A Japanese site called Kung Fu Tube details the chronicles of the productions thanks to translating newspapers. Jeff Yang’s production timeline consists of Half a Loaf of Kung Fu being made before Magnificent Bodyguards, and Spiritual Kung Fu being made before Jackie was loaned out to Seasonal for Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. Below is the actual order of when the ten movies were filmed…
New Fist of Fury: March - April 1976
Shaolin Wooden Men: June - July 1976
The Killer Meteors: September `76 - Janurary `77
Snake & Crane Arts of Shaolin: November `76 - July `77
To Kill with Intrigue: December `76 - March `77
Magnificent Bodyguards: July 5 - July 20 `77
Half a Loaf of Kung Fu: August `77 - April `78
Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow: November `77 - January `78
Spiritual Kung Fu: April `78 - June `78
Drunken Master: April `78 - September `78
Dragon Fist: July `78 - August `78
Fearless Hyena: October `78 - December `78
In the case of Half of a Loaf of Kung Fu, it would appear that the release was put on hold due to lack of funds, and extra footage was filmed to cash in on the success of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. Also, while the official story is that Half a Loaf of Kung Fu premiered in 1980, a Korean newspaper confirmed that the movie was already released in South Korea on November 11, 1978. If Lo Wei really hated the movie as Jeff claimed then he would have destroyed the footage. Anyway, the movie was then released in Taiwan on January 1979.
The Young Master and Fearless Hyena II began filming in late April `79 (the former on April 23 and the latter on April 24). On April 26, Jackie suddenly went to Australia. After that, actor/gangster Jimmy Wang Yu called Jackie every day to get him to return. On May 13, Jackie returned to shoot Fearless Hyena II - the first movie of a new contract for Lo Wei that was signed on April 3. After a while, Jackie gave up on that movie so as to focus on The Young Master. The December `79 issue of Golden Movie News (Golden Harvest’s magazine) refers to Jimmy making threats “now and then” to Jackie.
I Am Jackie Chan: Jeff’s version of events is that Jimmy only got involved with Jackie’s Triad problems towards the end of filming The Young Master. Also, you wouldn’t know from the book that Jimmy was a witness to Jackie signing his second contract to Lo’s company. In the book, Jimmy is depicted as a white knight in shining armour who came to Jackie’s rescue with the caveat that Jackie returns the favour by doing a movie for him (this would manifest itself as Fantasy Mission Force). On a Chinese blog, I found out that part of the settlement with Lo Wei involved him owning half of the world’s copyrights to Dragon Lord - Jackie’s second Chinese film for Golden Harvest after appearing in their English language movie i.e. The Cannonball Run.
Contrary to Jeff Yang’s book, Jackie’s late seventies hits were not quite the smash hits in H.K. that Jeff made them out to be. Jackie was always second to comedy star Michael Hui. The latter’s The Private Eyes (1976) grossed a whopping HK$ 8.5 million whereas Drunken Master only grossed 6.7 million. The Contract (1978) grossed 7.1 million whereas Fearless Hyena grossed 5.4 million. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow was supposed to be the moment when Jackie became bigger than Bruce Lee despite the movie grossing 2.7 million versus the 5.3 million of Bruce’s The Way of the Dragon. In the book, Jackie is quoted as saying that Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin gave him respect in the industry which he needed at that point. It’s hard to believe this since the movie was released a week after the premiere of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, which was already a hit. In fact, Jackie’s first movie for Seasonal was taken out of cinemas after two weeks, and on the same day that the other movie was pulled out - March 15, 1978. This was seven days before the release of Bruce Lee’s Game of Death.
Next, there is the issue of when Jackie made his 1985-released films. In Jeff’s book, he gives the impression that each film was made one after the other as would have been the case with Hollywood films. Heart of Dragon was not made after Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars. In fact, there’s a production photo of the latter which shows that Sammo Hung had the same haircut that he had in the former (I could tell that he was wearing a wig in the latter movie). Both movies were made around the same time since Golden Harvest needed insurance in case that Sammo’s drama underperformed. Jeff’s book also implied that The Protector was made after Heart of Dragon was released despite the fact that there are Chinese movie magazines from 1984 which show images of the U.S. movie’s production.
Director James Glickenhaus, who helmed Jackie’s U.S. comeback movie, claimed that Jackie was working on three movies concurrently when he starred in The Protector. I can safely say that the other two movies were the Chinese version of The Protector and Police Story (a movie that took so long to film that Jackie was still working on it while acting in Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars circa 1985). Jackie obviously knew from the get-go that he was going to have to minimize the perception of damage. In December 1984, Jackie finished reshooting The Protector but he now needed to participate in Sammo’s My Lucky Stars which was in itself a retooling of Winners and Sinners 2. Sammo’s movie was released on February 10, 1985.
The making of Police Story intrigues me because there was an American TV show called Hawaiian Moving Company that covered the making of the film when Jackie was still 30 years old i.e. he was born on April 7 in 1954, and the clapperboard in the blurry video footage shows that the press conference scene was filmed in 1985. The host, Michael W. Perry, makes a closing statement on the grounds of the movie being possibly released in the summer of `85. This means that the movie was nearing completion. I suspect that the reason why the H.K. release date was pushed back to December was so that people didn’t get overexposed to Jackie with the mid-July release of The Protector and the mid-August release of Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (Heart of Dragon was released in October). Back to the Hawaiian magazine show, I suspect that the episode was aired at the very latest in March since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando was filmed from April 22 to July 3. Action movie fans in-the-know will know what I’m referring to - the mall action sequences in both movies.
This leads us to the final issue - the influence that Police Story had on U.S. cinema. Jeff Yang was quick to point out the usual suspects - Sylvester Stallone’s Tango & Cash (1989) and Brandon Lee’s Rapid Fire (1992) - but he neglected to namecheck Arnie’s Commando and Will Smith’s Bad Boys (1995); especially the latter since the movie is actually a semi-remake of Chan’s classic. Starting with the premise - a detective has to look after a female witness even though the love of his life may think that he’s committing infidelity. Other similarities include the witness jumping into a swimming pool from a high height in order to escape the bad guys along with the witness later using a baseball bat to protect herself. There’s even the sight gag of the witness being handcuffed in order to protect her from danger. Another similarity is the scene where the detective has to multi-task more than one phone call.
