There’s a long history in Hollywood of shelved projects, abandoned franchise dreams, stalled careers, and entire genres that lost favor or profitability. 9 times out 10 these problems and failures are the result of a myriad of complex issues and contributing factors. Sometimes though… Sometimes you can pretty much pin everything on one film that fucked it up for everyone. Whether it’s a movie that killed a rival project, destroyed a filmmaker’s career, squashed some brilliant idea, or took the shine off of an entire genre, this CHUD List will catalog the films that were just total, unapologetic Cockblocks.
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Day 1 (Dinosaurs)
Day 2 (Halloween)
Day 3 (Mistress of the Seas)
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Day 2 (Brandon Lee’s Future Cockblocked!)
David Oliver
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THE COCK: Brandon Lee’s Everything: Future, Career, Marriage, Life
The story’s a well-known Hollywood tragedy: Brandon Lee, the 28-year-old son of the legendary martial arts master, Bruce Lee, followed in his father’s footsteps to become an actor. After a couple of action films, including Showdown in Little Tokyo, with Dolph Lundgren and Rapid Fire with Powers Boothe, Lee signed on to star in an adaptation of a dark comic book written by James O’Barr in what promised to become a breakout role. He later signed a multi-picture deal with 20th century Fox. Sadly, though, like his father, he would die young before seeing the success that that breakout role would bring. At the time Lee was engaged to be married to fiancee Eliza Hutton, whom he had met three years prior.
THE BLOCK: The Crow (1994)
The aforementioned adaptation and subsequent cause of Lee’s untimely death via a piece of a dislodged bullet from an improperly maintained gun used as a prop. Ironically, the film concerned a protagonist who was also shot, but returned from the grave to seek revenge for himself and his likewise murdered fiance. The Crow was directed by Australian filmmaker, Alex Proyas, written by David J. Schow and John Shirley, and featured cinematography by Dariusz Wolski and production design by Alex McDowell. At a budget of approximately $15 million, the film would go on to gross a total of $50 million, in spite of – or due to – the specter of Lee’s tragedy hanging over it even to this day. But Lee’s performance was widely praised, as was other elements of the film such as the as the look, tone, camera work and action. To date The Crow is still widely considered to be a genre classic.
How it Went Down:
On March, 31, 1993, the film was late into the shooting schedule, with most of the principal photography completed. A scene where Lee’s character, Eric Draven, was to walk into his apartment to see his fiancee, Shelley Webster (Sofia Shinas) being attacked by four hoodlums was being filmed. In the scene, Lee was to walk in and be shot by one of the thugs, Funboy (Michael Massee). Reportedly, the second unit was behind schedule and decided to make dummy slugs from real cartridges by removing bullets from the slug casings, emptying the gunpowder, then replacing the bullets into the casings. Earlier, the dummy slugs were used in a closeup scene of bullets being loaded into the same gun that was later used in the fateful scene with Lee. Later, as the gun was being loaded with blanks for the scene, one of the dummy bullets, or a piece of it, had become lodged into the barrel. So when the gun was loaded with blanks for the scene with Lee, and one was fired, the lodged bullet was propelled into Lee’s abdomen. He was rushed to New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, NC, where he died despite a six-hour operation to remove the bullet.
How the bullet actually became lodged in the gun was never clearly determined. After the investigation was completed, Lee’s mother and Bruce Lee’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, settled a lawsuit against the production company. However, she supported Proyas’ decision to complete the film, which was done via the use of body doubles, some rewriting and digitization of Lee’s face in some scenes. Michael Massee was the actor who fired the gun and spoke about the experience to Extra in 2005 (go to the 1:16 mark) for the first time:
Bullet Dodged, or Greatness Robbed:
After the accident, conspiracy theories sprang up that Lee was the subject of the same curse as his father. Another was that he was possibly murdered. Yet another rumor was that Lee knew something was going to happen during the shooting of the film. A less salacious rumor was that, had he lived, Lee was to be up for a role in Mortal Kombat. What is certain, however, is that this remains one of the more notable tragedies in move history, made all the worse by the fact that it was a very preventable accident that took the life of a talented young man needlessly. A bullet that shouldn’t have been there was and tremendous potential was snuffed out as a result.
Verdict: Greatness Robbed.
The Alternate Universe:
Brandon Lee didn’t take the obvious path expected of him. For instance, he was offered the role of his father in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story but turned it down. However, assuming he liked working with Proyas, maybe we could have had the following:
Remains:
was never as good as 
Background:
– Behind The Death of Brandon Lee by Dave Brown
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13 comments
This… was not the best story to discuss, in this format. I feel incredibly bad for laughing when I hit the “Bullet Dodged, or Greatness Robbed” header.
Definitely not a bullet dodged.
Yeah, the Bullet Dodged/Greatness Robbed thing in this one is more than a little inappropriate. The title of that category suggests there’s a debate regarding the given subject of the article. In the sad case of the death of Brandon Lee, there is no debate. It’s a tragedy pure and simple, and clearly greatness robbed. And perhaps the best thing to have done if you were gonna bring the subject up would have been to wait until the anniversary of his death next month and perhaps just do an article of appreciation. That would have been so much better because I think Lee had endless potential (and in just this one film showed so much more acting ability than many other so-called martial arts stars)and the resulting Crow film was amazing to me and still is. This was wrong, Chud.com.
The Sting bit at the end made me laugh.
The format was established well before this article, and no joke was even made or acknowledged. If hypersensitivity over a nearly 20-year-old tragedy is your thing though, CHUD is a place that will often make you uncomfortable methinks.
There are surely more reports of roles Lee was eyeing after “The Crow”, right? Not just cut and paste suppositions. I mean, someone at Chud’s gotta’ have the connections to find out more, right?
I thought Massee came off as a prick in that video clip. Seemed to me he was putting the blame on Proyas. Not that Massee should be blamed, but to say “the director changed it” is pretty bullshit. Say it’s a tragedy. Say you’re haunted to this day. Say you wish it never happened. Don’t say you weren’t supposed to be handling the gun until the director changed it. Nobody blames you, so don’t you blame somebody else.
“A less salacious rumor was that, had he lived, Lee was to be up for a role in Mortal Kombat”.
That sounds like some crap, and not even GOOD crap, as the MK movies didn’t really do anything for anyone, though it could have led to a long partnership with Paul WS Anderson. Yeah, we could have had Brandon Lee in “Soldier”, “Alien vs. Predator”, and “Death Race”. It’s not like he was being offered the role of James Bond or something.
As far as the claim not sounding right at all, it’s because Mortal Kombat had just debuted in arcades a mere 7 or 8 months before Lee’s death, so I doubt that they were that far along in any sort of movie talks. On top of that, it sounded like the kind of movie that he wanted to avoid making and probably would have turned it down anyway. I’m sure that ANY name actor with a history in martial arts was being asked to be in the Mortal Kombat movie, and that some would have considered it…before “Street Fighter” came out.
Given that scenes where someone fires a gun at someone else in a movie or TV Show must happen thousands of times a year without incident at least, it makes this event particularly needless and tragic.
Actually, tons of regulations were put in place in the film industry after Lee’s death. You can’t point a gun directly at someone (trick angles are used), you cannot allow the barrel of a gun to cross directly at the camera crew or any person on set (mirrors are used in cases where the gun looks directly down the barrel).
Lee’s death was needless and tragic, but it ensured that there’s minimal chance of it ever happening again, save an extreme case of gross negligence.
I remember reading at the time Rob Reiner almost cast Lee as one of the Marines on trial in A Few Good Men. That would have been neat. Having been a Bruce Lee fan and also a fan of Brandon’s performances in Big Trouble in Little Tokyo and the fights in Rapid Fire, I was all over this story for my high school mass media program. A year later The Crow was a big deal and I got some sort of credit for having followed the story from the beginning, haha.
That’s good to hear but I imagine if proper procedure had been followed in the first place, he wouldn’t have been killed, especially with the incident of that piece of metal being left in the gun that would go on to kill him. I imagine the majority of countless similar scenes shot preceding this accident in numerous other productions avoided accidents for the same reason, that people were more careful.
Just because the format was already established doesn’t make this a good editorial decision and readers are within their rights to question its appropriateness without being told that CHUD probably isn’t for them.
Quite apart from the fact that this entry feels thin, with no real insight or context, it clearly doesn’t fit with the stated theme of the list. Brandon Lee wasn’t cockblocked by The Crow. He was killed by a bullet. If you’re casting the net that wide, why not a column about how Steve McQueen was cockblocked by cancer?
In theory, the list is stronger than some of the recent efforts. Jurassic Park’s impact on Dinosaurs Attack is interesting. The story behind Halloween III is interesting. This…isn’t. It’s a thrown together pile of Google scraps with nothing new to say.
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