DISGRACELAND - Brandon Lee: Hungry Ghosts, Cursed Movies, and a Goth Masterpiece

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Haunted by the legacy of his superstar father and by an old family curse, Brandon Lee tried to outrun the past. But the past came after him all the same. It was said that his father, Bruce Lee, was taken by that family curse at just 32 years old, and that it then followed Brandon to the set of The Crow, a cross between a superhero blockbuster and a brooding art film that was all goth. The shoot was plagued by injury, electrocution, storms, fires, and car crashes – and culminated in tragedy when a prop gun fired a real bullet. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com. This episode was originally published on October 7, 2024. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. Visit www.disgracelandpod.com/merch to see the latest Disgraceland merch! Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter)  Facebook Fan Group To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is.

Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been hotter in a door-were? way, then Elizabeth Taylor. That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network. Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on,

from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history.

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of a curse.

of a haunted legacy, of a massive movie set destroying storm, a car crash, and one too many eerie coincidences leading up to the strange accidental death of one of Hollywood's brightest young stars at the time, Brandon Lee. But it's also the story of a goth masterpiece, the movie The Crow, a film with a soundtrack filled with great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called

As the Crow Dies, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to informer by snow. And why would I play you that specific slice of Northern co-exposure cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on March 31st, 1993. And that was the day Brandon Lee's life was tragically cut short by a fatal mistake. On this episode, a curse, a goth masterpiece, an accidental death, and the crow's Brandon Lee. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgrace Land. The five-year-old sat in the wings as his father demonstrated martial arts moves on stage. The Hong Kong television audience went wild.

Here, Bruce Lee was a massive star, unlike in America. In America, Bruce was just the sidekick. He was the other guy on the Green Hornet, a mid-60s attempt to cash in on Batman's success. But here in Hong Kong, the Green Hornet was known as the Cato Show, named so after Bruce's character. Didn't matter if it was a supporting character. Bruce Lee was the star. After the applause died down, Bruce looked off to the edge of the stage.

He made eye contact with his five-year-old son, and then he beckoned for him to come out of the dark shadows. And Brandon Lee stepped into the spotlight to thunderous applause. His father held out aboard and said, Just like I showed you. Bruce had been training his son in martial arts since practically before the kid could walk. Brandon braced.

He blocked out the eyes looking at him from the crowd. He took his stance. He clenched the fingers on one hand, tight, cocked his arm back straight, and put his fist through the board. The audience loved it. Brandon stood there and basked in their adoration. And looking back on this moment later in life, you'd think, maybe they were really clapping for his father. That he was just an extension of Bruce Lee's stardom, the way a nunchuck can extend the fighter's reach. But in this moment, Brandon Lee felt like a star.

His father knew all too well about being a star. You got all the attention, positive and negative, but none of the power. Bruce took hold of little Brandon and looked him in the eye. Never become an actor. Be a producer instead. That's how you hold the real power. This Hong Kong trip was full of conflicting emotions for Bruce Lee. The Green Hornet had been canceled after only one season.

He'd failed to land any major American film roles. Here in Hong Kong, studios were ready to go to war over the actor, but back in his adopted home in America, things seemed cursed. And maybe that was why Bruce Lee decided to tell his son about an older curse, one that had haunted the family since before Bruce was born. Bruce's older brother died at just three months old. Some superstitious members of the family believed this meant that the next male child in the family would be marked for dead.

death. Bruce's mother took this to heart, and when she became pregnant with another child, she adopted a daughter in an attempt to break the streak, to distract any hungry ghosts that might try to claim another baby boy from the family. In case that wasn't enough, when she did give birth to another boy, Peter, they gave him a girl's nickname, and they dressed him in girls' clothes, and they pierced his ear to trick the ghosts. But there were no superstitious rituals when Bruce was born. Because Bruce wasn't born in China. He was born in San Francisco while his father was touring the U.S. as a stage performer. He was given an American name, a boy's name, and no one had thought to pierce his ear or address him as a girl. It may be being born in America meant the hungry

ghosts would never find him. Or maybe it would just take more time. July 20th, 1973. The phone rang in Bruce Lee's Hong Kong home. Brandon, now eight, answered. It was unusual for the house to be this quiet. Bruce had converted part of it into a martial arts school. Men and women were often found training in the backyard, swinging weapons and shouting as they threw themselves at each other.

All that action kept Brandon's friends away. The same violence they paid to see at the movies was a little too scary up close in real life. The man on the line was calling from Los Angeles. The assistant director of the film that would be Bruce's major breakthrough in the West. They were currently in post-production, but the assistant director had heard a rumor.

That Bruce Lee had died in a fight in Hong Kong, beaten to death by 20 guys. The truth, though, was much stranger, but the outcome was the same. Bruce Lee had been found dead in a Hong Kong apartment at the age of 32. Somehow, though, news had made it all the way around the world before it made it to Bruce's own home.

The assistant director on the phone didn't say any of this to Brandon. He just asked the boy if his father was there. In Cantonese, Brandon replied his father wasn't home. And the director asked where Bruce was. Brandon hadn't given it much thought. His father was away most of the time. Movie, he said in Cantonese, movie. Enter the Dragon premiered one month after Bruce Lee's death

and became a massive box office hit. U.S. studios followed it up by re-releasing his Hong Kong. film Way of the Dragon. Then there was the question of the film Bruce had been directing and starring it at the time he died, Game of Death, a Hong Kong film he'd put on pause to make enter the dragon in the United States. And the footage Bruce shot before his death was repurposed with an entirely different plot. In the version that was released five years later in 1978, Bruce plays an international martial arts star who gets shot during filming by a stuntman turned assassin. Pieces of a bullet lodged themselves in the act.

and he uses the opportunity to fake his own death and adopt a series of disguises to take revenge. This meant that the studio could slap false beards and dark glasses on a Korean actor who looked nothing like Bruce Lee and complete the film using only 11 minutes of the original footage. Game of Death came out when Brandon Lee was 13 years old. By that point, his mother had moved the family back to the United States, and every time he started at a new school, there were always a couple of kids and wanted to kick the shit out of Bruce Lee's kid. But when Brandon Lee got into a scrap, other people got hurt. He'd been trained in martial arts since he was a baby,

and after his father's death, he continued studying with one of his father's students. But every dojo and studio he trained in had his father's pictures on the walls, as if Bruce Lee were some kind of saint. Brandon's feelings about his father were complicated, and they were still raw. Even before his death, Bruce was away more often than he was home. When he did show up, he never knew what you were going to get. Either he was happy about a big deal going through when he came bearing expensive gifts, or he was sullen over how poorly things were going.

Brandon was kicked out of high school four months before graduation, after being elected senior class president and using his office to incite a rebellion. And despite his father's warning, never to become an actor, he began studying at the famed Lee Strasbourg Institute in New York. He wanted to be like his father, but not that much like his father. Casting directors can do him with kung fu roles, clearly itching to Billum as the son of the greatest martial artist ever captured on film. Instead, Brandon looked for parts that would allow him to step out of his father's shadow and into the light.

He was still pushing against being cast in his father's image, but with his leading role in the action movie Rapid Fire, Hollywood immediately identified him as part of a new generation of action stars, and as the son of one of the best to ever do it. All the attention got him interviews, but all the interviews wanted to talk about was his dead father. In 1991, Brandon Lee was approached with a bizarre offer. Universal, the studio, optioned a memoir written by Brandon's mother.

The studio was going all in, they were buying up the life rights to the Bruce Lee story, and they wanted Brandon to play his dad. Maybe he was uncomfortable playing the romantic lead opposite an actress playing his own mom, or maybe the whole idea of playing his father felt haunted. Either way, Brandon passed. And the part went to Jason Scott Lee, no relation. Brandon went out of his way to make sure that Jason knew he had the family's blessing.

They ate dinner at Mr. Chow, the Beverly Hills restaurant that was a hotspot for celebrity sightings. On his way to being a big star, Brandon made a grand entrance. He pulled Jason aside and told the younger star not to try to be like Bruce Lee. Just be himself. Dragon, the Bruce Lee story, includes a dream sequence in which an actual demon, a manifestation of the curse Bruce Lee's family believed haunted them, smashes Bruce Lee's face into his tombstone, and then turns to go after a little Brandon. But Brandon Lee never saw that scene or that movie.

By the time the movie was filming, Brandon Lee had landed his dream role, a part that combined his physicality with his charisma as an actor. Brandon Lee was going to become a ghost. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

We always say that trust your girl, I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters.

He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation.

New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place, and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien.

And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes.

Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was.

Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air. So much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves.

My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door, and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him.

Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, and my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head. with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like, making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going,

and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, or religion, or sex, or addiction, or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban.

Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver. And more.

Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1980, the Marine put his tumbler of whiskey down on a discarded newspaper. His ghosts were after him again. Sometimes the whiskey chased them away. Sometimes it magnified them. Like tonight, when he looked through the bottom of his glass and saw an article about a couple murdered in Detroit, mugged for the girl's engagement ring.

The killer shot them both. The Marine stared at the article. He read it again. It wasn't his story, but it was familiar. But when he was 18, his fiancé had been killed by a drunk driver. His whole life was in front of him, and now he'd wound up here, drinking in a military bar, and not giving a shit whether he lived or died, wishing he could get revenge on the man that killed the woman he loved,

wishing he could get revenge on the whole world. Broken snippets of poetry floated through his drunken mind. He picked up a pencil. The ghost of all his pain, all his anger whispered in his ear as he thought about that couple in Detroit, thought about his fiancé. He sketched a face, a clownish death mask in black. He thought,

what if he could get that revenge? What if the worst thing imaginable happened? But then, you came back. Over the next several years, James O'Barr worked on the character whenever he could. His protagonist, Eric Draven, was a rock star who was murdered along with his fiancé. A year after his murder, however,

Eric Draven is resurrected to seek revenge. O'Barr based the character visually on the face of Peter Murphy from the band Bauhaus, combined with the wiry muscular body of Iggy Pop. But the character's psyche, his drive for revenge, was O'Barr wrestling with his own ghosts. The resulting black-and-white comic book was seeped in the aesthetics of goth subculture and music. Everyone in it was based on someone O'Barr knew. And the users and low-lis he'd surrounded himself within his broken life. If they weren't real, they came out of the work.

parts of himself. He was just happy to get all that out of him. He didn't even care if it got published. But in 1988, the back cover of an underground comic book featured a man dressed in all black with black and white makeup holding a shotgun and a samurai sword and proclaimed in its tagline. For some things, there is no forgiveness. The first issue of The Crow came out in early 1989 and it was a massive underground hit. It got picked up by Paramount for for film development, and O'Barr was heavily consulted in casting. The movie aimed to outdo the expressionist sensibilities of that year's Batman, portraying a totally self-contained, hyper-reel world of dark shadows and constant rain.

But the production seemed cursed from the start. O'Barr nearly walked away from the whole thing when the initial script bore no resemblance to his comic. A carpenter was electrocuted when live power lines hit the crane he was working on, leaving him hospitalized for two years. On the same day, one of the film's equipment trucks mysteriously burst into flames, and the film's publicist was in a car accident in the city near where they were shooting. Another construction worker slipped and put a screwdriver through his hand. A sculptor who'd been working on sets for several days lost his shit and drove his car

through the studio's plaster shop. Another car crashed into one of the set's barriers after the driver and passengers had been involved in a drive-by shooting. The same publicist who'd been in the show, the car crash joked that the movie was already contributing to the cause of justice by stopping the shooters. And on March 13th, three weeks before filming was finished, a massive storm destroyed several of the film's sets. As the sets were rebuilt and shooting slogged along, prop masters were getting ready for what came next. There was a particular gun that was key to the plot,

one that would show up in two different scenes. First in close-up, and then in action, and then in action, in a scene that showed the murder of the main character and his fiance. That scene would be one of the last to be shot. For the gun's first appearance, they'd need a revolver that could be shot in close-up. And there are two basic things you need from a prop gun. One is the flash and the bang. And for that, prop masters used blanks, a bullet cartridge that has primer and gunpowder, but no slug.

There's an explosion, but there's nothing to fire. You get the bang and the muzzle flash, but there's no risk to it. it. But with a revolver, if you're shooting close up, you want it to look like there are bullets in the gun. Blanks don't look like bullets, since the projectile, the part you actually see is the part that has been removed. For a big budget production, the answer was to have two guns, one with blanks and another with dummy rounds, but by this point, the crow was struggling to come in under budget. As an unidentified member of the crew said afterward, they wanted to make a $30 million movie, only wanted to spend 12.

So the prop masters decided to improvise. They made their own dummy cartridges for the close-up out of live rounds. They took up the gunpowder but left the primer in the cartridge. This is different than what allegedly happened more recently on the set of the film Rust when Alec Baldwin fired a gun that killed the cinematographer and wounded the director. That was apparently a live gun firing off a live round. a loaded gun that should never have been on set in the first place. That film had a licensed armorer on set,

a requirement that the Motion Picture Association put in place after the filming of this movie that we're talking about, The Crow. But the armorer on Alec Baldwin's movie had only worked on one other film, where she'd received complaints for firing off a weapon without warning. And the assistant director had been fired from another movie when a firearm went off and injured a crew member. None of those safety precautions were in place on the set of the crow.

The prop gun got used in one scene earlier during shooting when it was fired, and the primer sparked. It wasn't enough to fire the dummy bullet, but it was enough to push the bullet out of the cartridge, lodging it into the barrel of the gun. The rest of the dummy bullets were removed. Nobody noticed they were one short. The prop gun was set aside, and a hungry ghost was waiting for the last day of shooting. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all. dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck.

I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network.

Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form.

I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of The Wicked Words Podcasts. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened.

His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is.

Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring the 14th season of family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. my daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything

and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of showed me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashians family over there, Everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been asleepwalking. David O'Yellowo.

I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things.

Tana Monsu. Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The shoot was almost over. Brandon Lee was coming back to life.

The production of The Crow had been grueling. A lot of that had been due to Brandon's own decisions. He'd fallen in love with the story. script in the comic book that it was based on. And when the character's creator, James O'Barr, threatened to walk out over changes to the story, it was Brandon who got the changes next. He took Chris Robinson of the Southern rock band, The Black Crows, as his visual inspiration for the character he was playing. Robinson was skinnier, lankier than Brandon. So Brandon put himself on a strict diet and workout regimen before production even started. For the first scene,

they shot, though. When Eric Draven claws out of his own grave, Brandon had bags of ice brought to the set. He plunged himself into a tub of ice naked to get himself mentally prepared. He was playing a corpse, and corpses were cold. The character's iconic makeup looked simple, but it had to be in exactly the right place to avoid continuity errors in shooting. At the beginning of each day, which usually meant in the middle of the night, makeup artists laid a death mask over Brandon's face with slits cut out

where the long streaks of black were filled in. And almost all the shooting was at night in freezing winter temperatures. Brandon was often shirtless and barefoot. The script called for almost constant rain and the weather mostly complied. When it didn't, the crew fired up rainmakers and flung freezing water at the actors. Brandon would wake up at 4 in the afternoon to go into makeup, shoot all night, and collapse into bed at 9 in the morning. He got one day off a week, which ideally he spent with his fiancé. Brandon Lee and Eliza Hutton met when she was working as an assistant to director, Reni Harlan.

Brandon flirted with her during the meeting, and soon the two were a regular item when Eliza accompanying Brandon on the worldwide press tour for rapid fire. They moved in together, adopted a cat they named Cato, a nod to Brandon's father, and they were engaged to be married after the crow was finished shooting. Eliza flew to North Carolina whenever she could to be around Brandon on set. He even got the producers to hire her as an assistant. And by the end of March, as shooting moved into its final phase, she was in California planning for the wedding. The Crow was almost finished filming. But one of the best things for Brandon was that he no longer had to sit for makeup every day.

The final set of scenes were flashbacks, happier scenes of Eric Draven and his doomed fiancé, all shot in rich color to contrast the rest of the film's stark grays and reds. They'd also finished most of the stunt work, which was a relief for Brandon who was physically exhausted for weeks spent throwing himself off buildings in the rain. One particularly grueling shot involved Brandon's indestructible character being shot over 50 times with semi-automatic weapons. And for each bullet that supposedly hit him, a squib fired off, a tiny explosive device that made it look like he'd actually been hit. Most of the shooting scenes were done now, and the film's weapons expert had already left the set,

moving on to another project. In fact, there was only one more scene of violence to shoot, the murder of Eric Draven and his fiancé, and after that it was just more scenes of the couple's happy days together, and it would make a great segue from Brandon out of the dark work of the crow and into the preparations for his real-life wedding. He also hoped it would be the last time to be involved, in violence on screen for a while.

Brandon had embraced the label of Action Star while doing the press junket for Rapid Fire, but even then, he thought of himself as a different kind of action star. Not another Jean-Claude Van Dam or Dolph Lundgren, more like Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, a guy who could do shoot him up action on film and then turn around and play an actual honest-to-god Hamlin.

The Crow was going to put him on the map as a serious actor, not just Bruce Lee's heir. For his next film, he wanted to leave the punching aside. On the evening of March 30, 1991, the set was ready to shoot the murder scene. The scene called for Brandon to enter his apartment, carrying a bag of groceries, only to be shot by a thug played by Michael Massey. Brandon was supposed to slump forward so that he could be dragged into the apartment by Massey and the other thugs.

Michael Massey was handed the prop gun. The revolver had been loaded with dummy bullets for a close-up shot earlier in filming. one of which was still lodged in the barrel, and the revolver was now loaded with blanks, cartridges with gunpowder, and primer, so that when Massey fired the gun, there'd be muzzle flash and an appropriate bang. Then Brandon would trigger a squib in the grocery bag, a small explosive to make it look like he'd been shot. But no one knew that all the necessary pieces of a live bullet

were actually still lodged in the gun, all lined up separated by just a hair's breath, the bullet in the barrel and the blank in the chamber. The director called Action. The thugs in the apartment were tossing the fiancé around the room. Brandon made his entrance. Massey turned on him from a few feet away, leveled the prop gun at his chest, and fired. The hammer of the gun struck the primer igniting the gunpowder in the blank,

and the explosive force of the gunpowder dislodged the dummy slug from the barrel of the gun and fired the actual bullet into Brandon Lee's stomach where it lodged against his spine. The squib and the grocery bag went off, and Brandon fell backward out of the camera's frame. The director called. He assumed Brandon was just trying something new. Brandon regularly improvised action scenes, experimenting with falls and punch combinations. Not everything worked, but when it did work, it was brilliant. Everyone reset to do the shot again.

That's when they noticed that Brandon Lee was still lying on the ground. That's when they also noticed he was bleeding. Brandon Lee was rushed to the hospital. The doctors worked on her for hours, pumping him with over 60 pints of blood as he hemorrhaged from his shredded intestines. In the California home Brandon shared with his fiancé, the phone rang. Not unlike the phone that had rung in the Lee family home in Hong Kong back when Brandon was he. Eliza Hutton got on the first plane to North Carolina. She arrived the next morning.

Brandon had been moved out of surgery and into an intensive care unit. The doctors had done all they could, but he'd lost a staggering amount of blood, and the dummy bullet had ripped up his guts. Brandon Lee never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead the next afternoon. He was two months past his 28th birthday, three weeks short of his wedding. Brandon Lee wasn't a ghost anymore. Brandon Lee was gone.

In February 1993, while the crow was still shooting, producers worked to put together the soundtrack. They needed bands that matched the dark, gothic tone of the movie. The Cure, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, the Jesus and Mary chain. But there was one band whose involvement to the filmmakers was the most crucial to the movie. They wanted to get new order. New Order was formed by members of Joy Division in the wake of singer Ian Curtis's suicide. Joy Division was a huge influence on James O'Barr when he wrote his original comic. He even dedicated the book to Ian Curtis.

Chapter titles in the book like Atmosphere and Autrocity Exhibition were direct lifts from Joy Division songs. The cop character in the book and in the movie was named after one of the band members. So the producers reached out to the Manchester band, and they provided a list of the other bands that had signed on. They sent the film's entire script. They sent a copy of the comic book. And they asked New Order if they would cover a Joy Division song, Love Will Tear Us Apart, or Dead Souls.

The members of New Order read the story of a dead guitarist who comes back to life. It wasn't the story of their own band. Not exactly, but something about it felt too close. New Order had played their first show only months after Ian Curtis's death, adopting a new band name because as Joy Division, they swore even before Curtis's death that if any member of the band ever left, they'd stop using the name. It took them years to find their own sound and years to no longer be haunted by the ghost of their dead-mead singer, but not long enough to forget about it all.

New Order passed. Nine-inch Nails provided the bit of Joy Division the movie needed with a cover of Dead Souls. The Crow soundtrack album was released along with the movie. More than a year after Brandon Lee's death, it went to the top of the charts. The movie, however, nearly didn't get finished. James O'Barr couldn't bring himself to come back to the set. He blamed himself for Brandon's death. It was like losing his fiancé all over again.

He wished he'd never written that stupid comic book to begin with. Brandon's fiancée and his mother sued the filmmakers for negligence and eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In addition to the settlement, it became a requirement that all film productions have a licensed armorer on set at all times. There were strict protocols created for the handling of firearms to prevent another tragedy like Brandons. Paramount got nervous and dropped the movie. With the extremely violent nature of the film, there was no way they could bring it to market. It would be like some gruesome joke, a movie about a corpse, played by a dead man.

But then, Miramac swooped in. Miramax was an independent distributor that specialized in art house and foreign films, but with The Crow, they saw a chance to walk the line between superhero blockbuster and dark, brooding art film. The studio pumped millions more into the film's budget, most of which went to CGI efforts to fill in missing pieces of Brandon Lee's performance. A fleet of writers reconfigured the script without James Obar's help, arranging the pieces that had already been shot into a coherent story.

No footage of Brandon Lee's death was used in the film. The scene in question was rewritten, with Brandon's character being stabbed and thrown out a window rather than shot. But rumors would continue that there were versions of the movie where you could see the real-life shooting. When The Crow was finally released, hordes of teenage fans lined up dressed in black, decked out, and makeup to see it. It became a slow-burn hit,

a defining artifact of the 90s goth culture. all driven by ghosts, by James O'Barr's dead fiancé, by the murdered couple in Detroit, by Bruce Lee's dead brother, by Brandon Lee's dead father, and by the tragic death of Brandon Lee. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is The Graceland. All right, guys, hope you dug this episode. Obviously, Brandon Lee left us too soon. So this week's question of the week is, it's kind of like that old Billy Joel lyric, Only the Good die young, which young artists, they could be actors, it can be athletes, it could be musicians, left us too soon and left a giant hole in your heart. Let us know, 617-906-66-6638, send me a voicemail, leave me a text. Hit me up and you might hear your own voice or your own text on the next

after-party episode. You can also hit me at Disgraceland Pod on Instagram, X, and Facebook. Leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts for Spotify, win some free merch. All right here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad-free.

Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Unscripted Bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelandPod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Disgracelandpod. Rockerola. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target.

He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello-O. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tana Mangeou, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more.

Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iron. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.

And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets. starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robeye, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club from Hello Sunshine and IHeart

podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and a page. off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TVR pile. Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Cotton, the fabric of our lives. Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been

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