The notion of The Crow being in some way a cursed production inevitably dies hard. Much of this comes from the lore surrounding Bruce Lee’s death from a brain haemorrhage 20 years earlier, caused by a freak reaction to an analgesic. In his biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), released mere weeks after Brandon’s death, there’s even a creepy climactic scene in which young Brandon is stalked by the demon that’s just attacked his father.
After the news of Brandon’s death began to be reported, conspiracy theorists came out in force with wild tales of ninjas in the rafters, a sniper attack by Chinese Triad agents, and so on. The wider public didn’t even realise, perhaps until they subsequently saw the film, that Lee had been shot dead at the exact moment in the story when his character is; or what bizarre, three-way art-life parallels there are with O’Barr’s tragic backstory, the impending wedding of Eric and Shelly (Sofia Shinas) written into The Crow, and the fact that Lee was due to marry his own fiancée, Eliza, in Mexico on April 17th that year.
Brandon Lee in Rapid Fire
This is all stuff for fetishists of the macabre. The real solution to Brandon’s initially-baffling demise was a one-in-a-million instance of the wrong gun being unloaded on him, at the wrong time, and in the wrong anatomical place. The Magnum .44 which Funboy (Michael Massee, who has sadly died at the age of 61) points at Eric had been used two weeks before on a second-unit shoot. Close-ups had been taken of bullets being loaded into it – dummy bullets, with a quarter of the charge a full-load blank has.
Both dummies and blanks, though, in contravention of usual safety procedures, had hastily been fabricated by taking out the gunpowder from real bullets because of the time pressure crew members were under. Somehow, the lead tip added to one of these dummies had become lodged down the barrel during the second-unit shoot, because the quarter-charge wasn’t sufficient to propel it all the way out.
It’s unbelievably depressing to play the what-if game with what subsequently occurred, because any one of the following conditions would have saved a young man’s life. What if correct procedure had been followed and proper dummies used in that previous instance? What if a cleaning rod had been pushed down the barrel, either after the second-unit shoot, or at any point before the gun was brought back on set?
What if any of the prop handlers had so much as looked down the barrel? What if poor Massee had aimed the shot at the apartment wall, rather than Lee himself, since he wasn’t required to do so? Perhaps most fatefully, what if he’d pointed a mere centimetre to the left or right?
Michael Massee as Funboy
The lead tip of the bullet, pushed out by the blank charge, scratched the bottom of the shopping bag before perforating Lee’s navel, and managed to puncture the stem of the aorta where it branches to provide blood supply to the legs. The pinpoint deadliness of Massee’s aim was a particularly hideous fluke. Understandably, though no one has ever blamed him for Lee’s death, Massee has struggled to recover from the incident ever since. “I don’t think you ever get over something like that,” he said in a 2005 interview.
According to Baiss, co-screenwriter John Shirley, who left the film before the final drafts, has rued the day he was let go from the project, because his own less violent script would have never had that gun going off when it did. Virtually to a man, everyone on the production spent a long time racking their consciences for ways to undo what couldn’t be undone.
After the tumult of confusion and shock following the accident, in which Lee’s near and dear – such as Eliza – were among the last to know what had happened, the producers and Proyas also faced the grim dilemma of whether they could or should bring the film to completion.
James O'Barr's comic The Crow
With at least 8 days left to shoot, including key dialogue scenes for which stand-ins wouldn’t work, it was initially felt that abandoning The Crow was the most logical and tasteful directive. The insurance company underwriting production was willing to stump up for the entire cost thus far and pay off the bank loan, or to pay for the film’s completion, depending entirely on how its makers wanted to proceed.
After Lee’s funeral, a different mood prevailed – a desire, among the cast and crew who’d become closest to him, to get the film put together in his honour, since he’d dedicated so much stamina to starring in it. This required a combination of rewrites, reshoots and digital workarounds using techniques that counted as experimental for their day. Explanatory dialogue was shifted, cleverly, to the voiceover Eric’s teenage friend Sarah (Rochelle Davis) now has in the finished film.
The filmmakers had to digitally 'resurrect' Brandon Lee to make the film work, but this was a precursor to the methods used when Paul Walker died during Fast and Furious CREDIT: REX
Obviously, the footage of Eric’s shooting, locked down in a vault and barely viewed by anyone to this day, would not be incorporated. For years a myth persisted that the scene of Lee’s death was actually visible in the finished film, which is nonsense. Stunt performers Jeff Cadiente and Chad Stahelski, cast for their resemblance to Lee, were used in a reconceived version of that crucial flashback, shot chiefly from Eric’s point of view to avoid facial close-ups.
The most laborious task was one obligatory shot of Eric staggering back to the apartment a year later, which was digitally lifted from an unused alleyway sequence and superimposed on an “empty” hallway shot. In effect, they had to resurrect Brandon Lee to make this whole sequence work. That, and the shots of Eric applying his trademark makeup in a smashed mirror, are precursors to the methods used after Oliver Reed died during Gladiator (2000) and Paul Walker during Fast and Furious 7 (2015).
Even now, coping with a dead star is no one’s idea of easy. In 1993 it was close to impossible, and pushed the film’s budget up considerably. To the huge relief of all involved, they pulled it off. Though Paramount declined to pick up what was now a markedly different proposition from the one they’d agreed to, Miramax bought the rights instead.
The Crow got unexpectedly strong reviews – Variety’s was an outright rave – and became a $115m, franchise-spawning worldwide hit, which can’t only be put down to ghoulish curiosity. It launched Proyas’s career as a mainstream filmmaker, and is remembered with a lot of respect, even an awed respect, by genre fans.
Brandon Lee in The Crow
Though it’s hard, while watching it, to separate the dreadful circumstances of Lee’s death from the morbidity of the actual story, this double image has given the film a curiously poetic afterlife. It exerts a gloomy if unintended fascination as an epitaph to its very talented star.
Though Brandon’s fiancée petitioned to have gun safety regulations tightened after his death, accidents through negligence on film sets are anything but a thing of the past, as proved by the recent case of Midnight Rider, a 2014 drama that halted production indefinitely when a camerawoman was killed by a freight train on the first day of shooting.
Talk of a Crow remake has bubbled up for years, first with Stephen (Blade) Norrington keen to direct in 2008, and Mark Wahlberg rumoured to star; successively, Bradley Cooper, Jack Huston and Luke Evans have all dropped out. The original film’s producer, Edward R Pressman, is still supposed to be pressing ahead, with Corin Hardy (The Hallow) now directing and Aquaman's Jason Momoa reportedly in talks to star. But does anyone want this role?
Currently the reboot is in the kind of purgatory its main character well understands. James O’Barr, for one, is certain it will rise again. When it does, you can guarantee the prop guns won’t be left lying around, and that everyone on set will say a quiet prayer before the cameras roll.
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Originally Posted by GeneChing
