WHAT WENT WRONG - Big Trouble In Little China

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Starring Clint Eastwood, directed by Walter Hill and set in 1880s San Francisco? This week, Chris & Lizzie dive into one of John Carpenter’s most subversive films - learn how Kurt Russell did everything in his power to avoid having to fight, Dennis Dun and John Carpenter made Wang Chi the real hero, and how Eddie Murphy stomped on all of it.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to the coziest of the pods. That's right. What went wrong? Your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is a miracle that any of them exists at all, let alone the good ones. As always, I'm here with my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how you doing tonight? I'm doing great, Chris. I'm excited to talk about this absolutely bonkers movie.

It is bonkers. But, you know, before we get into that, we do have a little announcement for all of you, our dear listeners, which is that we are going to take a little hiatus and we will be back with more information in the new year. Listen, sometimes work piles up to the point where you just, like, need to close your eyes and just not do anything for a little while. And that's kind of what's happening. Chris has a lot of exciting stuff. He's got some projects happening, some scripts rolling around. And I am just rolling on the floor. Just rolling around. And, you know, I do have a day job that I also love.

And we're going to take a little break. And we really appreciate you all, hopefully not raging at us. But if you, yeah, you're probably going to rage a little bit. And I get it. We get it. We get it. I'm not going to read those messages. And Chris, what are we doing with the Patreon?

Yeah. So, first of all, if you're going, you're a full stop supporter. Thanks again. You should have gotten a message from us. We are getting the hoodies ready to send out, which have our new logo. You're the only ones that have seen it. By the way, if you haven't seen that message and you are a full stop supporter, send us a message and we will get you that shipped out. If you're interested in a hoodie or any other merch, we are also in the midst of building our website and we are going to be getting merch up on that website in the new year. So don't worry, that's coming. For the Patreon, we are going to pause the

Patreon for a moment while we take this hiatus. Keep an eye on it. There will be a few things dropping on the Patreon over the next few weeks, but you won't be paying while we're on this hiatus. That's what we've got on the Patreon side. And if you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to reach out via Instagram or email. Emails probably best. Instagram is harder to keep up with to be candid. And that's what went wrong pod at gmail.com. Indeed.

Thank you, Chris. And speaking of our full stop supporters, you are crazy and we got more of you, which is amazing. And so we're going to shout all of the new ones out. So stick around to the end of this episode because we are honored and very grateful. And now, without further ado, Chris, let's go get ourselves into a little bit of big trouble in Little China. Yeah, you know, as I always like to say, did the check clear? It's just the weirdest dialogue.

I love it. Of course, guys, yeah, we are here to discuss the 1986 action, comedy, fantasy, kung fu film, Big Trouble in Little China, directed by John Carpenter, written by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, adapted by W.D. Richter, more on that strange credit later, starring Kurt Russell, Dennis Dunn, Kim Cottrell, Victor Wong, and James Hong. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox, and of course here is the IMDB log line for the film. A rough and tumble trucker and his sidekick face off with an 80s. ancient sorcerer in a supernatural battle beneath Chinatown. I don't necessarily agree that he's a sidekick.

I think Jack Burton is kind of the sidekick of this movie, which I like. And I think John Carpenter would agree with you wholeheartedly. Yeah, I have a hot take on this, which is that I actually think it's very progressive. I think it is a hyper progressive, transgressive film for the time. Well, you know, Chris, as Jack Burton always says, who? Me. Who? Who? Me? Yeah. God. The Pork Chop Express. Okay. Lizzie, first things first. Had you seen

Big Trouble in Little China before? Oh, yes. I had a very good friend in college who was absolutely obsessed with John Carpenter and particularly Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York. So yes, I have seen it. But not for many years. Yeah, this was a favorite of mine when I was young, very little. I watched it with my dad, probably when I was eight or nine, and it scared me and I loved it. And then I watched it a lot throughout middle school and high school, and I hadn't seen it in about 10 years. So it was very fun to go back and rewatch it. We'll get more into the things that I in particular like about the movie and why I think it works and holds up.

But, guys, this is not the first John Carpenter film that we've covered. We obviously covered The Thing. And if you'd like to learn more about John Carpenter, his upbringing, how he got into the industry, his early filmography, please check out our episode on The Thing. I am not going to go back into that here because there's a lot of other fun stuff that happens in this movie. That is totally separate from that.

So, before we begin, my primary sources for this week's episode include Entertainment Weekly's Big Trouble in Little China oral history, written by Clark Collis, published in 2016, Uproxes, It's All in the Reflexes, the story of Big Trouble in Little China's contentious screenplay by Ashley Burns

and Chloe Schildhouse, the audio commentary to the film provided by Kurt Rutgers, Russell and John Carpenter, which is available both on the Blu-ray and DVD. You can also find it online on YouTube for free. Martial Arts, Cinema, and Hong Kong Modernity by Manfung Yip. Great book. Highly recommend it. The Films of John Carpenter by John Kenneth Mear, contemporaneous coverage of the film from Starlog,

Sinophantastique, and The New York Times, and, of course, various other criticisms and retrospectives on the film. Big trouble in Little China, Lizzie. This movie's journey to the screen begins with. the growing international popularity of a very specific type of film in the 1960s and 70s, and that is, of course, Hong Kong action cinema, specifically martial arts films and Kung Fu films. And I think this movie is a great opportunity to do a little background on the incredible

impact these films had and continue to have on American cinema and international cinema, some of which I was aware of, much of which I was not. So a brief primer, if I may. China went through an incredible amount of upheaval in the first half of the 20th century, the Chinese Civil War, the second Sino-Japanese War that was part of World War II. All of this resulted in two filmmaking traditions, kind of taking power. You had prestige Chinese cinema, that's Mandarin language cinema, and then Cantonese B-movies and serials.

And these B-movies spawned two action sub-genres. Wusia spelled W-U-U-X-I-A, which featured mysticism, characters with supernatural abilities. Think of this film. Right. And had stylized visuals that included special effects drawn directly onto the film by hand. And then as a response to this, Kung Fu movies, which were much more realistic, quote-unquote,

depictions of unarmed hand-to-hand. combat. So the first Kung Fu movie was The Adventures of Fong Sayyuk, a two-part movie from 1938 and 1939, about a folk hero, Fong Sayyuk. However, Wusia dominated Chinese cinema until the 1970s, and then it was usurped thanks to one performer. Any guess, Lizzie, as to who popularized Kung Fu? I hope I'm not wrong, Jet Li. Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee. Fuck, let me take it again. That's who I meant. God damn it. Take it again.

And maybe we'll let you put it in. No, damn. Let me fix it. Let me fix it. That's what I meant. All right, guys. She meant Bruce Lee. Sure.

So that's like, Bruce Lee. Go back and let me fix it. So the San Francisco born, Hong Kong raised, University of Washington attendee. Shout out University of Washington. David Bowman. Our producer went there. He was a child actor turned.

hybrid martial artist, actor, and stunt performer, and he exploded onto the scene in 1971 with Low Ways, The Big Boss. This was his first lead role. The film was released under the title Fists of Fury in the United States. And it was about a Chinese expatriate living in Thailand, Bruce Lee, who goes up against a drug smuggling ring and its titular Big Boss. It became an international sensation. So the movie was budgeted at $100,000, which was a very standard budget for Kung Fu films made in China at the time.

So very modest budgets for these films. And it made, guess how much it made worldwide, Lizzie, on $100,000 budget? $50 million. $50 million. You nailed it. Wow. $50 million worldwide. Yeah, so it made 500 times its production budget, which is crazy.

It became the highest grossing Hong Kong film of all time. That was until the next year with Bruce Lee's second film called, this one was called Fist of Fury in China, and then it was released in America under the title the Chinese Connection because they'd already used Fist of Fury for the first one. It was pretty funny. It dealt with some more serious issues of Japanese imperialism. It was technically a period piece set in early 20th century China.

Again, $100,000 budget. How much do you think this one made worldwide? $75 million. $100 million. Whoa. So this one did a thousand times it's a production budget. It was, again, the highest grossing film

out of Hong Kong until Bruce Lee's third film, Way of the Dragon grossed $130 million against a budget of $130,000. So again, a thousand times its budget. Why can they... They could give them more money at this point. Well, they do with Enter the Dragon. So Bruce Lee's fourth film, Enter the Dragon,

was a Hong Kong Warner Brothers co-production. It was his first American co-production. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest martial arts films of all time. I am sure we will cover it at some point on this podcast. It was his most expensive film. It came in at a price tag of $850,000. So eight and a half times what the previous ones had cost. It grossed $400 million worldwide.

This was in 1973. Inflation adjusted. That is $2.7 billion in today's dollars. So Bruce Lee's fourth movie was Avatar, effectively. That's insane. Now, obviously, tragically, Bruce Lee died in 1973 after suffering an allergic reaction to a painkiller he had taken to relieve headaches.

He'd suffered a cerebral edema that's brain swelling, and he was 32 years old when he passed away. Oh, my God. Yeah. I didn't know he's that. young. A career cut tragically short. Again, we will cover Mr. Lee's life in depth and with the respect it deserves in a future episode on one of his films. Suffice as to say, though, in the brief period during which he was an international superstar, he changed the film world. So Hong Kong

Action Cinema was on the international stage and Jackie Chan quickly picked up the mantle that Bruce Lee had left behind, in particular 1978's Drunken Macon. I should also mention Samo Hung was another contemporary of his. He's like a stockier performer from that time that I'm sure you'd recognize, and Yun Bao also. So Hong Kong cinema had found an audience eager for representation, and that is marginalized groups around the world, not just Asian groups around the world, related deeply to Bruce Lee's outsider characters and the literal strength that he held in just his hands.

So there's a great book I pulled for. from called Marshall Arts, Cinema, and Hong Kong Modernity by Manfung Yip. And as he said, quote, the Kung Fu film had emerged as a global trend and a market force to reckon with. In addition to its popularity among African American and Hispanic urban viewers, along with white working class audiences in the United States, the genre also had many subcultural fans in Europe, not to mention a massive following among the marginalized indition franchise groups

in many third world countries. For example, reports, had it that the big boss, Bruce Lee's first kung fu film, was shown in packed theaters in Beirut for six weeks before its run had to be cut short due to the release of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Even so, the film was able to attract more viewers in its second run than the godfather did in its first run in Lebanon. Wow. So it just goes to show how popular these movies were, again, across racial divides with people, white, black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern who appreciated the outsider stories that they were trying to tell. Now, Lizzie, as you know,

if there's money to be made, Hollywood will figure out a way to take part. Yeah. For better or worse. So obviously, entered the Dragon, an American co-production. And then you had the likes of John Claude Van Dam, Stephen Seagall, and Chuck Norris, their careers were all launched, again, for better or worse, by these films. It also inspired two not yet credited screenwriters, Gary Goldman, and David Z. Weinstein to take a crack at a Hong Kong action-slash-mysticism-inspired Western action film. Now, Gary Goldman was in the industry at the time. He was actually a documentary filmmaker, and he'd worked for producer Larry Gordon for a while. So Goldman and Weinstein were actually less inspired, it seems like, by Kung Fu films

and more by Wusia films, the more traditional, yeah, mystical films at the time. They thought American audiences, if they could use basically American visual effects to pull off what they were doing in China in terms of storytelling, they had a hit on their hands. Specifically, they wanted this to be the next Star Wars in their minds. So what did they do?

An attempt, I know, Lizzie's face, I feel the same way. I'm a little surprised. Well, that took a sharp left as Star Wars, but, you know. Well, it's about to take an even sharper one here, because in attempting to write a Woosia film for Western audiences, they decided to literally make a Western film. So the first draft of Big Trouble in Little China was set in the 1880s in San Francisco. go. Jack Burton was a cowboy named Wiley Prescott, who rode into town only to find big trouble. So the story, Lizzie's face is... Well, I just have some questions. Like, was it...

Please. First of all, not necessarily a bad idea. Was it... No. Was it like a gold rush thing? Was it all white people? Was it like taking the idea of this and no. Okay. Well, no, no. Actually, it's decently historically accurate in the sense that there was an enormous Chinese population living in the western United States at the end of the 19th century.

If you were to go, if you want like a contemporary example, look at something like Deadwood, which is more historically accurate, or a non-historically accurate example would be like Shanghai Noon, which started Jackie Chan, obviously. There was a great deal of interaction between Americans, white Americans, and Chinese immigrants in San Francisco starting back in the 19th century. Right. But so this pitch did still keep that. It wasn't just entirely whitewashing something.

It was still, no, it was Chinatown. Okay. It was Wiley Prescott gets sucked into the world. The overall arc of the story is very similar. Okay. Not going to lie. I don't hate it. No.

It's not that it was a bad idea. The problem was that the sun had long set on the Western film in the United States. Right. They were having a hard time making any money. The Western was technically a dead genre. and I mean that literally. I did not know this. The Western accounted for 50% of the major Hollywood films released between 1950 and

1958. In fact, it's estimated that 40% of films made in the United States before 1960 were westerns. 40%. That is insane. So the genre had suffered a steady two-decade decline from the late 1950s. It was somewhat stymied by the success of Sergio Leone and Italy's spaghetti westerns, which poured out of Italy, obviously, but it had basically disappeared entirely as a genre by the early to mid-1980s.

I did a little research on the rise and fall of different genres within the Hollywood system, and from what I've been able to piece together, war films, westerns, and musicals were the dominant genres up until the 60s and 70s, and then all of them, no more so than the Western, suffered steady declines, giving way to action, thriller, horror, and documentary as the kind of exploding genres. And then again, science fiction, crime, fantasy, and romance have actually all held very steady at a very small percentage of the output of Hollywood across its history. Yeah, that's interesting. And I feel like war films and musicals, both had a resurgence and Westerns are,

they're waiting for Kevin Costner to save him, and boy, is he going to do it. Yeah, there have been blips with Westerns. Of course. Yeah, exactly. But nothing like what it was. So, Tombstone. Despite, yeah, exactly, Tombstone, Unforgiven, etc.

Despite the fact that they were attempting to graft this burgeoning foreign genre onto a dead one, Goldsman and Weinstein were able to get the script to producers Paul Monash and Keith Barish, in the summer of 1982. And this was through Goldman's former boss, producer Larry Gordon, who had gotten them in contact with agents, who then got the script to these producers.

Monash and Beresh liked the script. They paid for a rewrite, which kept it in the same 19th century setting, and then they took it to 20th century Fox, where it ironically landed in the lap of new president of the studio, Larry Gordon. So again, 12 people in Hollywood. at this point in time. Now, there was a bit of tension

because I guess Larry Gordon had actually fired Goldman a few years prior, so they weren't on the best terms. However, Gordon liked the script, and he was even interested in making it as a Western, and he had a director in mind, and that was Walter Hill, who had directed 48 hours and the long riders,

and he'd done some other Western stuff. He passed on the project, and the studio was like, this is not going to work as, a Western. It's just not going to work as a, it's a dead genre, but also they had broken what's kind of considered a cardinal rule of storytelling, especially by studios, which is they were attempting to tell a story with two forms of mumbo-jumbo-jumbo. Right. It's like the first mumbo jumbo is, it's a period beast, 19th century,

San Francisco, the audience has to orient themselves to that. And then there's the mumbo jumbo of Chinese mysticism and action. Again, think of a movie like Cowboys and Aliens. didn't really work at the box office. I think audiences have a hard time first orienting themselves to a different world and then rules that are unexpected in that world. So the studio said to Goldsman and Weinstein, we want to set it in a contemporary time.

Apparently they offered the rewrite to Goldsman and Weinstein and Goldsman and Weinstein said, no, we think it's good as it is and we're not going to rewrite it. So they basically got kicked off the project at this point in time. Yeah. It was a bold move, is how I would describe it. Enter W.D. Richter. He was a longtime script doctor.

His best credit at this point, in my opinion, was his excellent adaptation of the novel The Body Snatchers for 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nice. Starring Donald Sutherland. If you haven't seen it, go see it. It's great. Directed by Philip Kaufman.

He actually also wrote and directed The Adventures of Buccaroo Bonsai, which I have never seen, but is a cult film and has a cult following. but it had tanked at the box office. So he was kind of back to writing, you know, paid jobs at this point. So they bring him in and they ask him to do a page one rewrite. And so he said to Sinap Fantastic Magazine at the time, I realized at the start that I would have to lay the script aside and begin from scratch.

Now, things became more uncomfortable when he got a phone call, personal phone call from Weinstein, one of the two original writers, basically saying that he was betraying the profession and screenwriters everywhere by accepting the job to rewrite their screenplay and telling him that he should turn it down out of solidarity. Guys. Hey. And so Richter said...

I get it, but no. Yeah. No. So Richter said, apparently, quote, I'm sorry the studio doesn't want to go forward with you guys, but my turning it down is not going to get you the job. They'll just hire someone else. Yeah.

And I like the idea of the movie, so it's a legitimate task for me to take on. To be clear to our audience, like, if you're a screenwriter in Hollywood, you will be rewritten. That is one of the rules. It just happens. I will be rewritten. I have rewritten someone else. It happens to everyone. Everyone gets rewritten.

Now, meanwhile, John Carpenter is still licking his wounds from the somewhat disastrous release of his first studio film, 1982's The Thing. Which is so good, but did not do super well. Tanked and was critically kind of torn apart upon its release. Again, not going to go into his biography here, listen to our episode on The Thing for a Breakdown. But quick recap, broke out with 1978's Halloween. He'd actually done a movie before that called Darkstar with Dan O'Bannon,

who had written the first draft of Alien. He worked his way into the studio system with some writing jobs, and then he had the modestly budgeted genre hits, The Fog, and Escape from New York. Obviously, Escape from New York with Kurt Russell. And then after the thing flopped, he got yanked off of Universal's Firestarter adaptation. So in the mid-1980s, he was kind of looking for a hit at this point.

And he had two very similar directing opportunities. So on the one hand, he got sent Richter's rewritten Big Trouble in Little China. So now it's obviously set in Kemp. contemporary San Francisco Chinatown. It's Jack Burton, long-haul trucker. Carpenter had passed on the original version that was a Western, and then he liked Richter's pass. Yeah, it makes sense. Hollywood's 12 people, Lizzie. Richter and Carpenter were classmates at USC from 1968 to 1971. Oh, my God. And then on the other hand, was the Eddie Murphy movie The Golden Child. Have you ever seen this? No, but I feel like this has been recommended to us for this podcast. I see. I see.

think so. So the Golden Child is not very good. It was a dark fantasy kung fu action comedy, so not dissimilar from Big Trouble at a surface level. And it was set up at Paramount Pictures. And that movie follows Eddie Murphy's Chandler, Jarrell, a private detective slash social worker who specializes in finding missing children. And he learns that he's quote unquote the chosen one and is destined to save the golden child, a kidnapped Tibetan boy with mystical powers. That one sounds offensive. Yeah, and apparently it was, I haven't seen it since I was very young, so I don't know, but it got panned upon its release. Apparently, it was actually apparently originally written as a drama detective story as a star vehicle for Mel Gibson.

Go figure. Whoa. I know. So then when Eddie Murphy got attached, they decided to turn it into a comedy, and I just don't think it worked. I'm never watching it. Okay. Yeah. But here's the interesting thing.

Here was the dilemma that Carpenter. was facing. If he were to choose the Golden Child, which my understanding from everyone involved, the strips was not very good. But you have Eddie Murphy. But you have Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy. It's a huge star. He was the new Bruce Lee is the best way I can put it. He had his first three movies. Here they are. 48 hours with Nick Nolte, $80 million against the $12 million budget, trading places, $121 million against a $15 million budget. And then Beverly Hills cop, $316 million. against a $13 million budget. Shout out Beverly Hot Hills Cop 4, just trailer drop today.

It actually looks pretty good. So three films, over half a billion dollars at the box office. He was guaranteed box office goal. He's amazing. I mean, yeah, this is peak Eddie Murphy. As he told Rolling Stone in 1989, quote, my pictures make their money back. No matter how I feel, for instance, about the Golden Child, which was a piece of shit,

the movie made more than $100 million. He wasn't wrong. Okay. In the end, Carpenter goes for big trouble in Little China, with the pressure of knowing that he's going to be going up against Eddie Murphy in a similarly themed film. So Carpenter and the studio make two important decisions. The first one is that they need to get a big star to go opposite Eddie Murphy. And the second one is that we need to get into production as fast as possible so we can beat the Golden Child to theaters. Oh, boy. So the Golden Child was slated to release in December. December of 1986, and they're like, we got to come out summer of 1986. And right now, we are at the end of summer, 1985. So... Okay. A little tight. It's going to be on a very VFX stunt set design movie. This is never a good idea. It seems like any time this has happened, it is not worth beating the deadline that you think you are racing against. But maybe for us, it will be different.

Sure. So Carpenter would be given 10 weeks to prep with extensive sets, costumes, special, and creature effects, and then 15 weeks to shoot, and then only four months to edit, do the effects, and the music for the finished film. So it's a very tight turnaround. Also, for anybody who is not familiar, John Carpenter frequently does his own music. As he did in this one, including the final song that plays over the credits. That's John Carpenter singing. I'm not surprised.

Yeah. Mr. Carpenter needed his star. He needed a true American hero, somebody who could bring Jack Burton to life and go head to head with Eddie Murphy at the box office. His answer, or maybe the studio's answer, Clint Eastwood. Oh.

Yeah. Not as funny. Nope, not as funny. Mr. Eastwood, I can't tell if he was Carpenter's choice or just the studio's choice, but he was the top choice initially. However, he was too busy to take on the film. Ironically, he was fresh off of one of the 1980s only successful westerns,

pale writer, which he had directed and starred in, and he was heading off to shoot 1986's Heartbreak Ridge, a Korean War drama that he would star in and also direct. Now, this is not a knock against Mr. Eastwood, but at 55 years old, I think he was too old for the role of Jack Burton. Beyond that, the role required an actor willing to participate in a, send up of the White saved your character, I don't think Clint Eastwood's the man for that job. He's not the first one that comes to mind. That's all I'll say if I'm looking at a casting sheet.

Well, you know who also wouldn't be second on my list? Although I do think this would have worked better. Jack Nicholson. I mean, yeah, it's better. It's fun. It's still weird. It's weird. It's weird. But sure, Sure, sure. I mean, the problem with both of these guys is that I don't know that the ability to laugh at yourself is there in the way that it is with Kurt Russell just, it seems like he just doesn't care and it's just having the most fun of all time. And that's really exactly what you need in the middle of this movie. As you've pointed out, Lizzie, Mr. Nicholson is a strange choice, although his wattage as a star was high at the time. Sure. In the three-year span, starting in 1980, he'd starred or co-starred in The Shining.

Reds and Terms of Endearment. He was also a two-time Oscar winner by this point in his career. So, again, makes a lot of sense from a on-paper perspective. Sure. Fortunately, I believe, he was also too busy to take on the project. And with production fast approaching, the studio and Mr. Carpenter decided to go with a John Carpenter mainstay, and that is Mr. Kurt Russell. Thank God.

Jack Burton himself. He, just the way he is eating that sub sandwich. So funny. It is so funny. Or when they ask him if he's scared before he's going to go down the fire pole and he's like, no. And then he clearly is terrified. Like it's so good. There are so many moments in this that are just really incredible.

Just to call out one other one that was one of my favorites is when he just immediately, like, accidentally fires straight upwards and, like, shoots a bunch of. of rocks out and just knocks himself out immediately at the end of the big fight. You're going to love how that came to be when we get to it. All right. Kurt Russell, who I really think just no one could have done this job in quite the way that he did it. I love him so much. So he was a former child actor. He had gotten his start on a Western TV show of all things because everyone was in Westerns.

That was called The Travels of Jamie McFeeders. Sounds so made up. He had then gone to work for Disney. He was a brainy teenage heartthrob in a trilogy of films for them. He played Dexter Riley. Have you ever seen these movies? No. The computer wore tennis shoes was the first one.

I watched it when I was little. They're fun. Now you see him. Now you don't. The strongest man in the world. He's like a college student at a fictional college. It's kind of within the world of Flubber, technically. the absent-minded professor,

they were, you know, well-received. He was very cute. I mean, he's very handsome man, but he was like a very cute boyish, you know, kind of heartthrob character. And he had that, what's funny is in the movie when he goes into the brothel

and he's wearing the glasses and the tweet suit, like he kind of looks like his character from the Disney stuff. And that's actually the costume that he wore in Roberts and Meccas' used cars. They actually just recycled it for this movie. Anywho, he'd had

a really unusual career in the transition into adulthood up until this point. So he had done the 1979 made-for-TV Elvis with John Carpenter, which was kind of a prestige role. And he was nominated for an Emmy for his work in that movie. And then he'd also, I believe he won, I know he was at least nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in Silkwood. Yes. The Mike Nichols movie. He's great. Obviously, Maril Streep and Cher, we're both wonderful in it. That's right. She was robbed, just saying. She was. She's great. And then Moonstruck. Anywho, he had then hitched on to the John Carpenter bandwagon early in the 80s with Escape from New York, which Snake Pliskin was based on dirty Clint Eastwood.

Like, that's what he based the character on. And then obviously 1982's The Thing, which was a big flop. So, again, very interesting series of films, unusual, the way he's jump. around. Now, there's a lot riding on this role, as I've mentioned, not just going up against Eddie Murphy, but this movie has an almost entirely non-white cast. So aside from Jack Burton, you have Gracie Law, the lawyer and the Karen of the movie, played by Kim Cattrol, and Margot, I believe is her name, like a totally incidental. Played by Kate Burton, Richard Burton's daughter. Yep.

Which I only know because I was the only professional play I've ever been in was called The Corn is Green and it starred Kate Burton. No! That's amazing. So apparently she teaches acting at Yale and Brown, I want to say, and the movie she gets at, the role she gets asked about the most is this one. You know what? I seem to remember that. I almost think that that may have come up, but she was very nice. That's all I recall.

She's very funny in it, too. She's totally useless. Every white character in this movie is completely useless. Like, that's the big joke of the movie. It's like... Kim control is occasionally useful, but yes. That's fair. A little more useful than Jack Burton, who just walks, what's the plan?

Okay, we're going through here. You know, it's so funny. Okay, so since the story focuses so much on Asian and Asian American characters, and because Hollywood had done so little to promote any Asian American actors up until this point, they were like, wait, how are we going to get a box office draw? We've never featured movies with Asian American actors before. So they put all of the pressure on the lead white male role. This will come back to bite them in the marketing for this film.

And then the third issue is that the budget for the film had come in at upwards of $25 million, which would make it, according to Cinifantastic Magazine, the largest budgeted film under the 20th Century Fox banner since 1969's Hello Dolly. And how that movie was $29 million, I do not know. I do. The scale of Apollo Dolly is huge. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah.

21 million. 20 years earlier is what I was thinking. Yeah, that's true. Just feeding people to her. So a brief sidebar, though, guys. So both the Empire strikes back and Return of the Jedi were more expensive than big trouble. And obviously both were 20th Century Fox. I believe, though, that because those were co-productions with Lucasfilm, they're not

encountered when we say the most expensive. It makes sense because I'm sure that there's no financing there as well. Exactly. Don't come at us. We understand Star Wars was more. Okay. Now, why is this so expensive? Well, Hollywood had never made a film like this before. The special effects budget was at $2 million alone, a number that was considered far too low by both John Carpenter and Boss films. The effects studio tasked with the job. They had a whole bunch of practical effects, including building an animatronic floating guardian that had all those eyeballs that move in different directions. I love that thing.

Tons of makeup. Yeah, they had like very expensive wigs for a lot of the supporting characters. James Hong's makeup took eight hours to put on when he plays the older version of David Lopan, for example. It looks great. It looks great. It's an expensive movie.

And they built all of those sets. So basically nothing was shot on location with the exception of the opening of the film, which was shot in Chinatown in Los Angeles, not in San Francisco. Not only that, but no one had done an amazing, American big budget kung fu-movie movie before. Wusia movie before.

So they didn't know how to do stunt and fight choreography. So they flew people in from Kong, but they couldn't do it at the same speed that they were doing it in Hong Kong. So again, this price tag is because this is the first time that something like this is being done. So they're paying the cost of figuring out how to do all of these things as it's going along.

Initially, Kurt Russell actually wasn't interested in the role. As he told Starlog magazine at the time, quote, there were a number of ways to approach Jack, but I didn't know if there was a way that would be interesting enough for this movie. But what Richter had done in the rewrite was given Jack this unearned arrogance that became the foundation for the film's most subversive element. And as John Carpenter later told Entertainment Weekly, quote, Jack Burden is a guy who is a sidekick but doesn't know it. He's an idiot blowhard. He's an American fool in a world he doesn't understand, end quote.

100%. It's so funny. It's so smart. I did not pick up on that when I watched this when I was, you know, 18 or 19. But watching it again, like, comes through loud and clear. And the fact that this was made in the 80s is really impressive. He's a moron. He's a moron who knows literally nothing. He messes up everything. He goes backwards on the wheelchair. Yes. And he almost falls in the well. Everything he touches turns to shit. He's bad at literally everything. Everyone around him is hyper-skilled at everything that they're talking about. He's just a do-do. And it's so funny. When Victor Wong gives him the giant magnum, and he's like, you want this? It'll make you feel like dirty hairy. He's just making fun of him to his face. He also like, remember that he doesn't have to turn the safety off when he's firing the gun for the first time.

Or I think it's Eddie Lynn is like, what, you never plugged a guy before? And he's clearly so rattled from killing someone. And then he's like, course I have. Of course I have. Yeah. He's like a long-call tricker. So Kurt Russell loved this idea. Yeah, it's great.

He loved that he was going to obliterate the exact persona that he'd perfected in Escape from New York and The Thing. As he later said, quote, Jack isn't the hero. He falls on his ass as much as he comes through. This guy is a real blowhard. He's a lot of hot air, very self-assured, a screw-up. At heart, he thinks he's Indiana Jones,

but the circumstances are always too much for him. So very aware of the joke, which will become a problem, because how much the studio was aware of the joke is unclear. Okay. So Carpenter puts together his production team. A couple notes. That includes cinematographer Dean Cundee.

So they had worked together on Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and The Thing. Listen to our episode on The Thing. They had a falling out on The Thing. And he actually didn't shoot Starman for Carpenter, but then they came back together for this movie. He got production designer John L. Loyal. who killed it? Like the production design and the sets are amazing.

Janet Jackson actually used the Chinatown set for a couple of her music videos later. Apparently and it still exists today, I believe. He also had PD'd for John Carpenter on The Thing. They then brought in

martial arts, experts, and stunt coordinators, including Jim Lau, Kenny and Doso, and James Liu. And they were brought on to basically design and choreographed all of the fight scenes, including a 60-person back-alley fight scenes between the rival, Changsing, and Wing Kong Warrior Societies, that kind of ends the first act of the movie.

Boss films was going to do the effects. They had just done Back to the Future. And, of course, John Carpenter was going to do the music and the score. And again, a subversive element was that he did not want to do the Americanized, what he called Chapsui soundtrack that was like Orientalism, where he would pull. play, you know, instruments, quote, from the Far East that would make the movie sound like it was from the Far East. And instead he decided this should have a rock and roll soundtrack because these are rock and roll, you know, heroes ultimately. Right. Heavy synth. Yeah. Now, I would argue that

kind of the equally important casting decision that Carpenter needed to make to Jack Burton was Wang Chi, who obviously you think is the sidekick at the beginning of the movie, but it's actually the hero. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yes. So Burton would flail his way through the action. Wang needed to be competent both physically and intellectually. As Russell himself later told Entertainment Weekly, the real lead was Wang. So I read online, again, I wasn't 100% able to confirm this, but I saw it in enough sources that I do believe it's true, that Jackie Chan was initially the top choice for this role.

Yeah, that could totally make sense. Certainly makes sense. In the end, the role would go to an American actor. who had nearly given up on acting entirely, only to get an unexpected break in his early to mid-30s. And that's Dennis Dunn. So on August 16th, 1985, a Dino de Laurentis produced, MGM-distributed, I believe Oliver Stone written,

Michael Chimino directed movie called Year of the Dragon, which I've not seen, dropped like an anvil in theaters. So this is right when they're geared. up in pre-production on Big Trouble in Little China. The story followed Mickey Rourke as Stanley White, remember that name, New York's most decorated police captain and Vietnam vet, who focuses too much on his job and not enough on his wife. It's like so cliche,

who's put on assignment in Chinatown only to go head to head with Chinese organized crime. The over-serious story failed to resonate with audiences. It didn't recoup its $24 million budget at the box office, and it had three direct impacts on Big Trouble in Little China. One good, one bad, and one, a little bit of both. So the bad was that it was a warning to 20th Century Fox that the genre mashup that they were green lighting with John Carpenter was extremely risky.

Yeah. Exactly. So it put more pressure on the production. Now, secondly, and this is where it's a little murkier, it rightfully angered the Asian-American community in the United States who were upset with the portrayal of the Chinese in the movie as villainous stereotypes. Now, that led to increased scrutiny

on Big Trouble in Little China, but I think that actually had a lot of good impacts on the movie. And then most importantly, it led John Carpenter to Dennis Dunn. Dennis Dunn was 33, 33, 34 years old at the time. He'd been born in Stockton, California. He was the theater actor.

He'd gotten his start at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. And this was his first film role. Wow. Year of the Dragon. Yeah, he was working marketing at department stores up until this time. He's really good.

He's great. He was about ready to quit on acting, and then he gets this role in Chimino's Year of the Dragon as Herbert Kwong, a rookie Chinese-American cop, who goes undercover in the Chinese-American Underbelly of New York only to be quickly killed in order to serve as extra motivation for Mickey Rourke's character to do something about it. My God.

Okay, so what Big Trouble and Little China is making fun of, basically? Actually, exactly. So actually, the whole cast and crew, of Big Trumb and Little China, were very aware of the negative reaction to Year of the Dragon. Dunn, in particular, when he got the script, he was actually up for a role

in a made-for-TV movie called Blood Orchid, in which he'd play a lawyer. This was the first time he's, like, getting to choose between two projects. So here's what he had to say of the script. Quote, my wife read it and really didn't like it. There were some questions about the script,

and I saw a lot of possibilities. I was a W.D. Richter fan. I saw Buckaroo Bonsai, and I like the way he mixes all these genres and puts them together, kind of multicultural, futuristic. I saw the humor in big trouble. It felt like the right thing. It was a childhood fantasy come true.

You get to be a hero. You get to be funny and kind of goofy and silly, which I am in real life. It was just fun. So I think it was viewed as the riskier project because it definitely still engaged in stereotyping. But what he saw in it was like, oh, it's making fun of everyone in theory.

And I actually get to be the hero in this movie, which is absolutely true. And when he eventually joined the projects and he was nervous about it, Carpenter just told him, dude, just be yourself, be the hero. Like, everyone's going to love you. And of course, everyone did. Now, while he was considering the film, the plot details of the movie leaked.

So, according to Daniel Kwan, the film's marketing director, quote, groups like Chinese for Affirmative Action and Chinese Progressive Association were upset that San Francisco's Chinatown needed to be saved, by, quote, a macho, smart aleck white truck driver. These groups demanded to be shown the script for the film, presumably to give input. And of course, Kwan had to deny this request.

A studio's not going to give out a film that's in progress. In particular, one that was as contentious as big trouble in Little China. And I don't mean that for reasons of presumed racism. The script was contentious because simultaneous to this conflict was an internal fight for credit over the screenplay. So if you remember our original screenwriters, yeah, Goldman and Weinstein were deeply upset that the studio had stripped their story

of Wiley Prescott and his horse. And they did not like the fact that it was turning from a Star Wars Raiders of the Lost Dark franchise into a campier, winky subversion of the hero story. So they basically got a copy of the script, the rewritten script, and it seems like they were already convinced that Larry Gordon

was kind of out to get them. That's the head of 20th Century Fox, if you remember. And I guess the straw that broke the camel's back was that the script that they got their hands on simply said written by W.D. Richter. It didn't have their names on it at all. And that is not normal. So usually you have all of the other writers' names on it.

So that did feel like a retaliatory move from the studio. So they went to the WGA and they started an arbitration process where they were petitioning to be the sole credited screenwriters on the movie, which is creating a publicity headache. for the studio, and then at the same time, the script leaked independent of that to the Asian-American advocacy groups who were protesting the film. So they then got a copy of the script. They met with

Daniel Kwan to address concerns. However, according to Daniel Kwan, quote, they failed to present him with any specifics of what they wanted changed. Instead, focusing their complaints against the overall impression for the movie and how the white lead, Jack Burton, still comes off as the hero at the end. Kwan tried to assure them that. that Burton was only a hero by dumb luck, but they were unconvinced. Now, at the same time, Carpenter and the production teams were receiving letters from these advocacy groups. These groups actually even protested the actual set, and they called out the story from making Wang Jack Burton's Yes Man.

But if you've seen the actual finished film, he's clearly not Jack Burton's Yes, Man. So the question is what happened. And it seems like, from what I've been able to piece together, it's in time. possible that in the original script, it still leaned towards a more traditional white savior character. Sure, and they may have adjusted it. Well, they absolutely did, because what Carpenter and Russell had decided amongst themselves was that they were going to take the blowhard nature of Burton's character dial it up to 11 and set it on fire. For example, before the movie started, Kurt Russell started lifting weights and running two months ahead of production to beef up for the role.

But John Carpenter said, I'm not going to teach you how to do any martial arts. because we never want to allow the American Caucasian lead to know what he's doing. We want to make him look like an idiot. Again, Kurt Russell loved it. So while the whole rest of the class was doing martial arts training, Kurt Russell's just trying to get beefier and beefier. So he looks like a dumb beefcake in the movie. And then they decided to take it a step farther.

They started improvising ways in every single action scene to not include Jack Burton in the action scene. So even though in the script, it would be written that Jack Burton would do something heroic. For example, the final showdown at Lopan's wedding when he fires his machine gun in the air. It was Kurt Russell's idea, quote, how about if we come in here and I'm all excited

and hit the machine gun and rocks fall on my face and I'm out? Jack's out for the first two minutes of that 10-minute fight. And then he gets into the fray and sure enough, he stabs this big guy, but the big guy falls on him and then he can't move for the rest of the fight. And so they literally were just coming. up with ways to not include him when he can't get his knife out of his boot to join the fight, another one of those instances.

Like, they just tried to come up with every way to make him look like an absolute ass. And I love it. I love that Kurt Russell was on board for it. Oh, he was like the driving force. So apparently, this other instance, as I'm sure you'll remember, the lipstick on his face for that extended period of the film. All right. So, quote, one time Kim and I kissed. Then I noticed that the crew was smirking.

I had lipstick all over my face. I said, you know, I've always wondered about that. In kissing scenes, how come that big red lipstick is always magically not there when the guy pulls back? I looked at John and I started laughing. I said, let's leave the lipstick on at least a couple scenes. And he said, all right. I always admired John for that because the audience is going to go, what the fuck? I did.

I was like, is he bleeding? What's happening? And then I realized what it was. And it's great. It's great. So apparently it wasn't just Kurt Russell that John Carpenter was giving freedom to on set and in the development process. So Peter Kwong, he played Rain. That's one of the three, like, element fighters for Lopan.

He told Uprocks later, quote, I really appreciate John Carpenter's input in this, and that when we were doing this, the timing of it was right after the release of Year of the Dragon. Year of the Dragon was a movie about China Town street gangs in New York. It was protested heavily because it held the Chinese in such negative light, not like the Godfather because the Godfather was all about culture, family. It showed colors.

It showed dimension of human feelings. as opposed to the stereotypes that all Chinese are involved in gangs or being controlled by gangs. Again, we don't need stereotypes about negative evil Chinese people. It's already bad. Dennis Dunn expressed a similar sentiment

after filming the movie, he stated, quote, they were already writing letters to Carpenter with concerns about some things in the script before we even started. I knew how I had had a responsibility, being an Asian American actor. I talked with John Carpenter, and you could tell that he didn't want

a disparaging image of Asians. I've been on sets where you go there and you feel like you're a set, second-class citizen. But on that set, you felt like you were part of a team. So Carpenter, to his credit, he rounded out the main cast with legitimate Asian-American actors and martial arts performers. We'll get into that list in just a second. Really quickly, 20th Century Fox did not want Kim Cottrell for Gracie Law. Had they seen Manichin? I know. I don't think they saw the role as humorous because they were like, she's a comedy actress. She'd done like porkies and stuff. But Carpenter knew. He's like, she needs to be

funny. This needs to be a woman who will scat with her husband while he plays the upright base and take it seriously. Do-Dads and the what is her? If anybody hasn't seen this. Yeah, the he-dogs and the she-dogs. If you don't know what we're talking about, stop, pause the podcast, go to YouTube. Look up Kim Katrall, jazz husband. That's probably all you need to type in. And you will behold the most incredible like three minutes of your life. I'm not going to tell you anything else. That's all. It's great. It's something. All right. So moving on from Kim Kutraub, who's great in it. You had San Francisco native Victor Wong as Egg Shen. He had actually also been in Year of the Dragon. I think a lot of people know him, obviously from his later work,

including tremors. And then you have James Hong as David Lopan. I mean, he's probably one of the most prolific actors of all time from a statistical. He did basically 50 movies a year across a 60-year career. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. He's in literally everything. Yeah, he's most recently. You would have seen him in everything everywhere all at once. He's going to be in Kung Fu Panda 4 next year. A quick few notes.

So Victor Wong, I did not know this. He was a Berkeley grad, political science and journalism. He then studied theology at the University of Chicago. He then joined Second City, the improv group, then returned to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, and he studied under Mark Rothko. Wow. James Hong, who's actually two years younger than Victor Wong, which I didn't know,

is a Minnesota native who had split his childhood between Hong Kong and the United States. He studied civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, joined the Minnesota Army National Guard, was mobilized during the Korean War, finished his degree after the war at the University of Southern California. He then worked as a road engineer for L.A. County for five years, and he would act on weekends and evenings until he could support himself as a character actor. And obviously, by this point in his career, he was very established. He had recently been seen in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Chinatown.

Now, as I mentioned, perhaps as important as the leads, where the droves of actors and martial artists brought both over from Hong Kong and from up and down the West Coast to play the supporting roles in the film. They include but are not limited to. Carter Wong, he played Thunder. He had come up in Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema. Jeff Imata, he was a California-based martial artist. He would go on to be a stunt coordinator on hundreds of movies.

George Chung, Leah Chang, Gerald Okamura, Jocelyn Liu, Al Young, Eric Lee, and many, many more. I can't go through all of the names right now. But it's really a remarkable crew and cast that they put together for this movie. Carpenter also very smartly decided not to just broadly otherize the characters in the film. if actors had accents, they spoke with accents. If they didn't have accents, they didn't speak with accents. He did not put subtitles in the film when the characters are speaking in Chinese. They would switch between Mandarin and Cantonese according to what they were comfortable with.

And if Jack Burton needed to know something, they would have one of the characters translate for him and get kind of annoyed that they had to do it, which I thought was another really interesting choice. This was a time in film where like, it was very common to just be like, oh, a non-white actor, let's give them an accent, even if they don't have. one in this instance. So, for example, in terms of Carpenter taking ideas from everyone, stunt coordinator James Liu got bumped up to associate producer on the film to get more ownership, and he's the one who came up with the Changs salute that they do at the end of the film. If you've seen the movie, you know what we're talking about. Quote, I was trying to come up with something that was symbolized the respect and brotherhood of the Changsings, and what that part of the movie is all about. It actually came from one of my styles, white eyebrow, styles of fighting.

this is the real salute. So I took away the fist. So he just did the hand. There's like a fist in front of it. This became classic, like a legend in and of itself. And he said, up until this day, people salute him on the streets when they recognize him with this salute. He said, Big Trouble was a very special movie for me. It was my first shot at becoming a martial arts coordinator.

So the mysticism in the film was not only much more researched by W.D. Richter, but then Carpenter did a bunch of research on contemporary movies from Hong Kong cinema. he reworked it. The story of Lopan is actually a real Chinese myth. And then Jim Lau, who was an associate producer on the film, came forward and also helped him rework all of the mysticism in the movie. Further, the Chinese characters in the title card don't translate to Big Trouble in Little China.

So Daniel Kwan, the marketing director, his father actually came up with the Chinese version of the title that's portrayed at the beginning of the film, and it translates to, evil spirits make a big scene in little spiritual state, which I think is a really funny, like, great, double entendre title. Great. So a few notes on production, which was actually relatively smooth,

it began in October of 1985. It lasted 15 weeks. It was almost entirely shot on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, although, again, as we mentioned, Chinatown, and downtown down to LA did stand in for San Francisco's Chinatown at the beginning of the film. There were some shots of Victor Wong, I believe, in his tour bus, eggs tour bus as well that were shot in San Francisco, some exteriors.

Kurt Russell did really drive the big rig in the opening scenes of the movie. That was not a stunt driver. Carpenter was terrified that he was going to run someone over and really didn't trust him. Steve Johnson was brought on to do the creature effects, including the sewer monster and the guardian. That's the character made up entirely of eyes. He also did James Hong's makeup. And he also felt he was in love with James Hong,

and he thought James Hong was so funny that they kicked him off of set because the scene when James Hong just keeps turning around and saying, shut up, Jack Burton. And he just laughed so hard every time he delivered it that he would ruin the take.

So they're like, Steve, you got to get out of here? Please leave the set. So both of these creatures, I should say, and James Hong's age makeup are direct homages to Zhang Shi, and I apologize if I'm getting that pronunciation wrong, that is a genre of Hong Kong B-movie horror

that was experiencing a renaissance at the time, popularized by the martial artist Samo Hung, and I have watched one of these movies, encounters of the spooky kind and Mr. Vampire. And Mr. Vampire is wild. I highly recommend it. Okay. One accident, a squib,

that's an explosive device to simulate a gunshot or a bullet wound, did fire off early on the wall close to Kurt Russell's head. He was not injured, but John Carpenter was very upset. And apparently, Kim Katrall left the set every day at 430 because she was in a stage production of Chekhov's three sisters, which is the most Kim Katrall thing ever. It's great. So good. That's amazing. James Hong wore 12-inch lifts in his shoes to play. Right, because he's seven feet tall. Yeah, the younger low pan. Apparently, he was terrified when he was going down the escalator at the end

of the film, convinced he was going to tip over. They were running out of time, and they just made him do it himself, not a stunt double. And then apparently a number of cast members got six. from all of the waterwork when they're going through the sewers under Chinatown. Other than that, production went surprisingly smooth. It looks like it was probably pretty fun.

Carpenter leaned heavily on the expertise of his crew. Choreographer James Liu was responsible for all the fight scenes. They used every trick in the book from trampolines to wirework. And when John Carpenter didn't know what to do, he would just turn to his actors.

So James Hong said of the final showdown between Lopan and Egg Shen, quote, Carpenter did not really exactly know how we should portray the battle scene between Victor and I. But Victor and I had seen all these old Chinese films where the two opponents would fight each other with this hand magic where things would come out of their hands.

That's an old Chinese fable type of magic fighting. So Victor decided to throw balls of fire at me, and I invented that I would cross my little fingers and little rays would come out. And John said, great, and he put that in the film. So again, everyone's contributions are making it in. Of course, though, things have to come to a head, and that's during post-production.

The process was rush in order to make their July 1986 release date. Four months to edit, finish the film. Carpenter's, you know, playing the synth in the meantime. They take the movie to the execs at Fox, and they're like, wait, he's not the hero? Wait a minute. He's an idiot. What? They didn't appreciate what Carpenter, Russell, and Dennis Dunn had been going for.

And they felt they couldn't make Wang Chi the hero because they needed to put Kurt Russell on the poster. And then they worried that if they put Kurt Russell on the poster and the movie starts with him speaking like an idiot, eating a giant sub sandwich. As it should. As it should, that they were going to feel like they were bait and switched. So as John Carpenter told the New York Times in 1989,

quote, they didn't get it. Rambo 2 was out. That was the template for action movies. They were very patriotic. Kung Fu raised. eyebrows and escaped from New York. Mr. Russell played a mean machine. In big trouble, his character screws up a lot.

The perception was that he was an idiot. That's right. They wanted an action hero. So, guys, if you get a chance, it's on YouTube for free. Listen to the director's commentary on the film. It's Kurt Russell and John Carpenter watching it together, and it is so funny.

It is so, they're both just laughing their asses off the whole time. Apparently, the whole opening scene with Victor Wong and the lawyer is just the result of the studio interfering because they needed someone to explicitly say Jack Burton is a hero in the beginning of the movie. That's so weird because that, like,

I mean, it ends up kind of working because it feels like it's highlighting the joke in a certain way, but it's the only part where I was, I didn't remember that. And I was watching it and I was like, this is strange. Like, it's, I don't know. It potentially could have set it off in a bad direction, but...

Yeah, so that scene where Eggshan again says, you leave that man alone. Jack Burton is a hero. Yeah. That scene was basically written by 20th Century Fox CEO Barry Diller. You know what, Barry? It showed. So, according to Carpenter, again, in the audio commentary,

despite some studio interference, the film tested surprisingly well. and everyone was really optimistic about the prospects for the movie. As Kurt Russell later told Entertainment Weekly, quote, a lot of people on the junket said, how does it feel to be in a movie that you know is going to be a massive hit? And I would be falsely humble and say, well, hey, you never know. You've just got to see how it goes.

But inside, I was going, yeah, I'm so happy. And then it came out, end quote. Oh, no. At the time, 20th Century Fox had an internal rule not to spend more than $3 million marketing a movie despite the fact that it's not unusual to spend upward of half of a film's production budget and marketing costs. So $3 million would be roughly one-eighth of the $25 million production budget. Add in the negative press the film received off the release of Fear of the Dragon,

a confusing marketing campaign that struggled to convey the campy comedic tone of the movie. People thought it was Raiders of the Lost Dark. It's actually making fun of Raiders of the Lost Dark, if anything. Yeah, you're going to get the wrong people in there. And, of course, a release date that effectively pitted it. not directly, but a week or so later, against James Cameron's aliens, and it was kind of dead on arrival.

So Big Trouble in Little China opened in 1,000 theaters on July 4th, 1986. It grossed $2.7 million in its opening weekend. It ended its run at $11.1 million, well under its $25 million production budget. Reviews at the time were mixed to negative. Now, guys, we've gotten some comments before where, you know, you'll point out that on Rotten Tomatoes,

a movie that we said was panned upon its release actually is fresh or, you know, 50%. That's aggregated over time. Exactly. Rotten Tomatoes is not just giving you the contemporaneous reviews to the film's release. That is often cult films, which have been re-evaluated in subsequent years. The thing right now is like 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. If Rotten Tomatoes had existed in 1982, it would have been the inverse. So, again, Big Trouble in Little China, 70s.

I believe on Rotten Tomatoes right now. That was not the case at the time. Now, it wasn't all bad news. Goldman and Weinstein had won their WGA arbitration. So they were given the screenplay credit, and the WGA came up with the very unusual adapted by WD. Richter credit that you see at the beginning of the film, even though in reality, based on WGA rules, it really seems like it should have been written by W.D. Richter story by Goldman and Weinstein. After Big Trouble in Little China flopped. John Carpenter left the studio system to return to the independent world. He was pretty crestfallen. He would work again with Victor Wong in 1987's Prince of Darkness, which I think is an underrated film. And then, of course, he would team up with Kurt Russell in the 90s for Escape

from L.A., which is a very weird movie. It's a movie. When I was young, I saw this movie. There's a map of L.A., and it said, it says La Cagnada, but it looks like La Canada. And I thought it was implying that Canada had been invaded by Mexico, because I was dumb. Okay, so, James, James Hong and Victor Wong continued their prolific careers as character actors. After this, Kim Cattrol eventually found her way to television with sex in the city, although she did do bonfire of the vanities.

in a smaller role, listen to our episode. And of course, Kurt Russell continued to be a mainstay at the box office. Many of the films cast and crew actually went directly from Big Trouble in Little China to work on The Golden Child, ironically, including James Hong, Victor Wong, and Peter Kwong, along with a lot of the martial arts experts and stunt coordinators. Of course, that film made over $100 million at the box office. Eddie Murphy. Couldn't be beaten.

His movies make money. The person who lost the most in terms of opportunity with the release of the film was, of course, Dennis Dunn. Yeah. As he later told Entertainment Weekly, quote, I thought it was my big chance. I'm in this big, and maybe it'll take off. And my goals will keep expanding. And I'll keep getting more interesting roles that are beyond the stereotypes of Asians, but it didn't happen. end quote. Many in the Asian American community at the time were deeply upset by the film. Pat Lee, a member of the Asian Pacific American artist board, said the film had, quote,

every old Chinese stereotype you could dredge up. Hatchet men, Tong wars, prostitutes, madame, dragons, incense, hidden alleyways and dungeons. When I grew up, the white kids used to think of that of Chinatown. It's a figment of the white man's imagination, end quote. Robin Wu of the Chinese for affirmative action said, the movie uses comedy at the expense of the Chinese, called out the film for the lack of female representation, and said that it, quote, doesn't portray Asian women in a good light.

I would say... That's true, yeah. Yeah, that one lands more for me personally. Others, however, supported the film, if not for its content, for the fact that it was unusual and how many Asian actors and crew members it employed. Janet Mitsui, an administrator at East-West Players, said, I don't find the movie offensive.

It's not as technically well-made as Raiders or Star Wars. but you can't have everything. It's not the film we support. It's the Asian actors working. Big Trouble in Little China would, of course, have a second life on home video. In the years since, its bungled release, it has become a cult classic and a favorite of both fans of John Carpenter and the Kung Fu genre. James Hong later told Entertainment Weekly, quote, I've been to autograph conventions and this film, let's just say it this way. The production stills from this film have sold more than all the other ones combined, including Blade Runner, Seinfeld, Bals of Fury, all those other ones.

Wow. End quote. Many viewers do now see the film, as you mentioned, Lizzie, as extremely surprisingly progressive for its time in hindsight. I found a lot of great pieces addressing Big Trouble in Little China, and I really liked this one retrospective on the film written by... Joe Fu called Orientalism in Big Trouble in Little China. And I'd just like to read some quotes that I pulled from it that I think are illuminating.

Quote, although Jack Burton is the main character of Big Trouble in Little China, he's never on the inside, as it were, with regards to the Chinese culture. Instead, he relies on the cultural influence of the many Chinese people around him. These voices manifest in many Asian bodies, from the unspeaking prison hench women to the Magical Storm Brothers. Speakers switch between English, Cantonese, and Mandarin with ease, often leaving Jack out of the conversation entirely or rendering explanations to him via choppy translation. What John Carpenter does artfully is place Jack's character at the periphery of the San Francisco Chinatown subculture. See also his amazingly Chinesey tank top and letting him go only as deep

as his petulance will allow. Some might complain that the film's many goofy elements, which includes an eyeball flesh monster, a sewer dude with the worst rubber mask, skeletons pretty much everywhere, some kind of knife ceremony, and so much wire foo that Jack Burton at one point complained specifically about buddies flying around on wires. Yes. That these elements enhance the otherness of Chinatown. But I think the opposite. John Carpenter is doing an homage to Hong Kong be horror. And from what I remember, as a child consuming these movies, he does a great job making an American an entry into the genre. The genre is called Zhang Shi and relies on jumping ghosts and vampires and silliness. For a sublime example, you can see Sam O'Hung doing a rendition of the evil dead

before that film in encounters of the spooky kind. The movie treats its westerners with profound silliness as well. Gracie Law is constantly mentioning that she's a lawyer and merrily exposites, You know me, I stick my nose in everything, and she's serious. Even though the story is set in America. It's the white folks who are the outsiders. Big trouble in Little China shows a commitment to casting many and varied Chinese actors, decorating Chinese spaces,

and engaging in a mode of otherness that's in line with contemporary Chinese cinema. The Jack Burton character leaves Chinatown, and the only lasting effect is the oblique mentions of stormy weather in his CB send-off. John Carpenter's message for his audience is clear. White people can visit otherness,

but maybe they shouldn't. stay. End quote. It's a great article. You guys can look it up. Again, the title of this is Orientalism in Big Trouble in Little China. I thought it was a really insightful piece. Again, in the end, if you look at the film, Dennis Dunn gets the girl, his buddy Eddie's going to get the other girl, and Jack Burton doesn't even get a kiss, and he's probably going to get eaten by the sewer monster in the back of his truck. Hollywood, of course, continues to beg, borrow and steal from Chinese cinema. Look no further than John Wick, which is a effectively an Americanized version of Hong Kong's heroic bloodshed genre,

born by John Wu in his contemporaries in the late 1980s. Yeah, they even refer to it as gunfoo, so yes. Yep. In 2015, the Asian American Media Arts Organization, visual communications hosted a reunion screening of the film, Big Trouble in Little China, in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. In attendance were Gary Goldman and James Hong,

along with Al Young, Peter Kwong, Gerald Okamura, Jeff Imata, Leah Chang, those are all performers in the film. And they participated in a Q&A to discuss the enduring impact and legacy of the film, which I think is complex and difficult to talk about, but also worth talking about,

and this is certainly a movie worth watching. In my opinion, you can read their quotes online from this Q&A, but Hong gave a quote that I think is the one that we should end on. So he spoke positively about his experience working on the film,

but he also pointed out how the film did little to open doors for Asian American actors at the time. Quote, I must say, as Peter started off to say, it still didn't open the field wide enough for Asian Americans. In a way, after that movie, we still just took minor roles, not principal roles,

of people that are in the principal walk of life like doctors and scientists. We still existed as cliche Chinaman in the movies for a long time. Now it's starting to come up. I hope you people will write the studios and speak up and open the field for more Asian Americans.

I don't know how many more years I have left in this industry, end quote. And I'd like to end there for big trouble in Little China. That was great. Yeah, that was really interesting. And I'm glad that everyone had a good time on this. I was going to be really sad if you told me that they'd all said John Carpenter was a huge douchebag. No, everyone seemed to really like him pretty much universally. And the quotes, especially from this retrospective, again, not that the,

The movie solved, you know, issues of Asian American representation. But it seems like it holds a really special place in everyone's heart who worked on the movie. Because it seems like everybody got to collaborate creatively in a way that, you know, they didn't in other projects. Well, can I share my, can I kick off what went right? Please. I have to go with Dennis Dunn. I think he's pretty remarkable in this. He's so fun and funny.

and I feel like the, I feel like you, like he doesn't play it as a hero necessarily, but it comes through so clearly by the end that he really is. And he's just amazing. I really, really liked him. He's great. I think part of what works so well is that Kurt Russell so wants to be, like, he plays it so much that he wants to be the hero. And then Dennis Dunn so effortlessly does not care about being the hero.

that he is the hero. And it's such a great contrast between them. Yeah. It's really wonderful. The physical contrast between them also helps. Dennis Dunn's a very small man. Kurt Russell's huge. Kurt Russell is incompetent.

Dennis Dunn is competent. It's such a great study in contrast in this film. So I agree. I think he's amazing. I agree. I'm trying to think, you know, you pick Dennis Dunn, so I'll pick Kurt Russell. I just think the two of them.

And the fact that he, again, you have to have an ego to be an actor, you know what I mean, at this size especially, but the fact that he was so willing to just destroy that, I think is so fun. And it just makes for, like you said, a surprisingly subversive, surprisingly funny, again, in a lot of ways, surprisingly progressive film.

And I read a lot of great articles talking about how the film still does engage in a lot of tropes and stereotypes. You know, David Lopan is very much like a yellow pair Foumanchu reference. But I do think that, like, just think of the movie from a vibe. Like, I was saying to a buddy mine who's a Chinese American filmmaker, and he was speaking, like, really lovingly of big trouble in Little China. And he was like, Kurt Russell and John Carpenter passed the vibes test, is how he said it to me.

He was like, like, no matter what specific gripes I might have, the movie's vibes are right. Like, they're trying to do the right thing in subverting the genre. So, anywho, guys, that is our coverage. of big trouble in Little China. Of course, this was voted on by you. We will have more votes in the future. Thank you again to everybody that participated in the poll for this film.

It was a lot of fun to research. It was a lot of fun to go back and rewatch. Yes. As always, we have to do a shout out for our full stop supporters on Patreon. Heck, yes, we got a lot of them now. So let's just go. We're going to go reverse order this time.

Do it. Michael McGrath. Whoa. So and Chinani. Pia b'i-b-b-b-b-h. Hannah Tripp. I should have committed to sounds. Keep going.

No. Yep. Tom Kristen. Yeah. Matthew Pelton. Boom, boom. Bo-p-p-p-Bu-B-B-B-Saddy. Oh, I like that. Good for you, Sadie. One name.

Oh, yeah. Scott Gervyn. That was a new one. Got something special in there. And this one goes out to Nick Sue and Shell from Lachlan Morrow. A little gifted shoutout.

That does it for this week's episode. As we mentioned, check back in in the new year. We'll have more updates on our hiatus, future episodes, etc. Send us, you know what? You can send us your recommendation, guys. We will say the list is very long.

Yeah, you've done a lot of our homework for us. You've done a lot of great work. Yeah. We know we can keep this podcast going literally until we die. Yeah. We have so many now. Every time we think, like, are there that many disasters? And then you guys go, you got to hear about this one.

Yeah. So we really appreciate that. Thanks again for listening. As always, if you enjoy this podcast, feel free to leave us a rating and review. Yes, please. You don't enjoy this podcast. Just move on. Like, you know, if you don't like the way one of us laughs, for example, you don't need to give us a one-star review about it.

Just keep on. Keep on walking. We wish you well. Anything else, Lizzie? No. Thank you all for everything. and we'll be back. Thanks, guys.

What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing in music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Uos.