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I think the one film that really hit me hard that came out of those formative

years of me being a cinephile was The Crow.

I was in high school.

I was a big fan of the James O 'Barr comic book.

I remember traveling to New York to meet the man and have my graphic novel

signed.

I first came across the comic The Crow when it was a very small

printing of its first

and immediately was engrossed in the story of this first issue.

Its plot is about a guy who is killed too soon, and he comes back, and he

vengeance.

It's just about a guy who is in love with a woman, and she gets killed, and

come back from the dead, and you avenge her death. And as a high schooler, it

was just angsty enough to connect with me.

Crow is kind of the hand of God.

that allows that person who's been taken to heaven to return to put something

horrible right.

Within that lies a beautiful underlying story of love and the

conviction that if a loved one is harmed, there is an opportunity to

justice for those who have lost people dear to them through tragic

circumstances.

So that began my odyssey to option material, develop it and turn it into a

feature film.

We started filming on February 1st, 1993 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Everyone was invested a thousand percent in trying to make, you know, a film

that would stand shoulder to shoulder with any studio release on a fraction of

the budget.

I think there's plenty.

of material if you want to find a curse in the making of the movie The Crow.

When they set up pre -production offices, they had a voicemail message

said, don't make this movie, bad things will happen.

On the very first day, principal photography, two of our electricians had

terrible accident.

Everything's ready to go. Remember, they only shot at night, so night had

fallen. They were driving there.

pickup truck with a cherry picker. He backed his cherry picker up into a live

wire. He caught on fire.

It ended up hitting the high tension wire, high electric wire that

would carry the voltage to run all the lights and the back lot set.

He was rushed to the hospital. He had second and third degree burns all over

body. He didn't die.

He lost his ears.

But it was a terrible tragedy.

And then they had to start shooting.

We went through the storm of the century.

The hurricane is now at its peak with winds reaching speeds of more than 115

miles an hour.

That was a terrible hurricane that destroyed our back lot set

where it had gotten back to people in Hollywood. And

there was an article from Entertainment Weekly that called what was going on in

our location the Curse of the Crow.

One of the staff in the production office decided to make an ill -timed

that things have happened, but she said, it's not like anyone has died.

When I had learned that they were making a crow, I followed that like crazy. You

know, I read Fangoria, I read Entertainment Weekly, I was following

that was going on with Brandon Lee.

What we needed for the role was someone who was a true athlete and

a great actor.

We'd gotten an opportunity to see Rapid Fire.

We were absolutely sold. The only person we made an offer to was Brandon Lee.

Brandon Lee was trying to make a name for himself, was trying to kind of come

out from the shadow of his father and was making films which, in the realm of

action films, weren't so bad. Rapid Fire, Showdown in Little Tokyo.

He, like his father, had so much potential.

You're seeing his star rise, and then he got robbed, just

like his father did.

I'm Lance Anderson, and I worked on The Crow as a special makeup effects artist.

My job was to take care of Brandon, to do all of his makeup throughout the

This is the original script that I kept.

It has a lot of my original continuity shots.

This is establishing makeup.

As it progresses, the makeup starts to get more worn.

This is when he falls out the window.

Kind of strange looking at those photos.

Yeah.

We hired the immensely talented actor Michael Berryman to play the role of the

Skull Cowboy, which was a character that appears intermittently in James O

'Barr's comic, The Crow.

Well, I got a call from my agent and went to a meeting.

And the next thing I knew, I was flying to North Carolina, to Wilmington.

I spent hours and hours and hours getting a full body cast and head cast.

We made this suit for Michael Berryman, and it had a complete bodysuit sculpture

for the whole ribs and the whole thing. He basically wore a giant suit and

articulated fingers.

Very difficult to wear.

And then on my head, I had a mandible jaw that was acrylic, and it

was bolted front to back with a top piece that had...

these little servo transmitters, and these little paddles would move the

underneath the latex. It was pretty extensive makeup.

I've been asked, where did the Skull Cowboy originate from?

And it obviously came out of the creativity of James O 'Barr.

James wrote because it was part of his therapy.

His fiancée was killed by a drunk driver.

And in order to remain here on this earth, in this physical plane, he had to

come to grips with it.

And so he wrote.

Sometimes in life, you can take from what you have experienced and bring

a piece of that into the character that you're developing, and it can help you

heal.

It can help you have a cathartic experience.

And it enhances the performance.

There had been lots of press material touching on the curse nature of the

That perhaps it was a continuation of the curse of Bruce Lee, who died under

mysterious circumstances while shooting a film.

Pretty much everyone discovered Bruce Lee after he passed away.

Then you start doing research on who he was.

And then as you look into how he passed away, that's when the theories start.

There's theories that there was a hit on him from the Chinese mafia for

betraying martial arts secrets.

One of the interesting fantasy theories is that Bruce Lee was struck by a death

blow. And a death blow is a specific type of strike.

Which its impact doesn't take effect until days, weeks, months, years later.

There's one theory that Bruce Lee's passing was part of the Lee family

Bruce Lee's parents...

lost their first male son.

This was attributed to a belief that there was a curse or a demon after the

males in the Lee family.

You had an older brother, you see.

He died in childbirth.

The demon took him away from us.

A firstborn man child is very valuable.

He was sometimes dressed in girls' clothing, sometimes referred to by a

name, again, in order to deflect and break the curse on the males of the

We dress human dresses so the demon wouldn't know I had another son.

Now he knows.

And he's coming for you. In Dragon, the Bruce Lee story, Bruce Lee is portrayed

as being haunted by a demon, this kind of dark figure in kind of samurai armor.

And there's a scene where he's trying to protect his son in these kind of

dreamlike pursuits.

The actual circumstances around

Bruce Lee's death are much more banal.

Yes, he was found dead at.

the apartment of a young starlet who he may or may not have been having an

affair with.

While at this apartment, he took a painkiller.

He went for a nap and didn't wake up.

They attributed his death to having a hypersensitivity to this particular

painkiller.

Recently, there's been a biography published, Bruce Lee, A Life by Matthew

Pauly, and he puts this theory forward that it was a heat stroke which killed

Bruce Lee.

leading up to the last year of his death, he had his sweat glands removed

because he wanted to look good on screen.

A month or so before the day that he passed away, he actually had a seizure

a stroke.

And so this potentially could just be the reverberations of the previous

misdiagnosed heat stroke.

Game of Death is Bruce Lee's final film. He doesn't live to finish it.

And that's already a weird parallel with what happens to Brandon Lee and the

Crow.

It gets even weirder when you consider that Bruce Lee's character is shot on

set of a film in Game of Death, which is exactly how his son dies in 1993.

Gentlemen, these are blanks.

Only aim upward.

There's a wad of paper that comes out and can injure someone.

Roll sound.

Action.

It

was

the night of March 30th, 1993.

We were a day.

47 out of what then grown to 52 days and nearing the end of production.

In the scene, Eric Draven has just returned and the villains are already in

the home and have been treating Sophia Sheenis' character, Shelley, very

violently.

I was down in the trailer getting a rig that I had rigged for Brandon to wear.

where a knife is thrown at him when he comes through the door.

And I built a harness.

They would throw the knife and then the knife would be embedded in his chest.

So I was down there getting that ready and they told me they need me on set.

And the director said, we're changing that scene. He's going to come through

door and he's going to get shot.

Eric puts himself between these villains.

and Shelly and Michael Massey as Funboy takes a gun and fires

at the character of Eric Draven. The camera was in the wrong position when he

came through the door, and it didn't look like he was aiming the gun at

So they either moved the actor or they moved the camera or something to get a

better angle so it looked more realistic that he's being shot.

When he came through the door with the grocery bag, they do the shot, and then

he drops down, and everybody waits for him to get up.

And he didn't get up.

He just stayed there.

He just didn't move.

And somebody says, I think he's really hurt.

And call a medic.

Call a medic.

The medic came.

And he's been shot.

And I just, I felt all the blood rush out of my body.

And I just dropped down. And everybody was around me was doing the same thing.

They were just shocked.

Did you go to the hospital?

Yes.

I... I don't

want to talk about going to the hospital. Can we... We went

to the hospital.

And we waited around for hours.

And then they came out and told us that he'd passed on.

It was one of the most horrible things in my life to see that happen and be

there.

Michael Massey was, I mean, to put it mildly beside himself, he was broken by

the experience of...

having pulled the trigger, I don't think he could have taken on any greater

responsibility on his own shoulders, although it was not by any means his

Plain and simple, and it wasn't his job to be responsible for that particular

weapon.

Chinese mafia executed Bruce Lee and then his son.

I mean, that's where things were going, you know, with the tabloids.

Blood on the set.

What really happened?

How could a bullet end up in a gun?

Well, it wasn't a bullet.

It was a dummy head.

The dummy head was still in the chamber.

And it blew it out.

What occurred was that there was a dummy bullet loaded two weeks before

that had lodged a real bullet in the barrel of the gun.

These are different caliber dummy rounds that we have, and the whole goal to

making dummy rounds is to make an imitation round that would lead the

believe that it is a live round.

So this is the dummy round, and this is the live round.

Even though this is a dummy round and it's had the gunpowder removed, the

hasn't been removed or struck. When we do a dummy round, it's always important

to remove the primer cap from the center.

What happened on the Crow was when they put the dummy round in, they forgot to

remove the primer.

And what happens is, again, that primer has enough force to dislodge the lead

round and actually push it into the barrel.

We're actually going to pull the trigger.

and it'll have just enough force to lodge the round in there.

So you can see in there our dummy round.

We'll index it.

Three, two, one.

So just with that simple action, that little snap, the cap's gone off, no

gunpowder, but what we'll be able to prove is the hung round inside the

Inside that barrel, we have the obstruction.

But if you look down the barrel, you'll notice that there's no light coming

through. So that would tell me that there's an obstruction.

In this case, a lead round, a hollow point.

That's the one thing they didn't do. They didn't check the barrel for an

obstruction. The problem with that is when you put a blank in there, then

whatever's in there, be it rock, dirt, or a hung round, that round comes out

flying at 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 psi.

So when we're ready, I'll put a round in here. It's going to be a blank, a half

-load blank.

This is it. There's no lead projectile. It's just crimped at the end, but it's

got powder.

The crimp's hot, but this produces enough powder to push this lead round

that board through two inches of plywood.

So when we're ready, three, two, one.

The round's gone off.

I can go check downrange.

We can actually see the round.

Got punctured through it.

Right here.

That's your round.

That was the hung round that got pushed into the barrel with just the primer

cap. And what you can see is, I don't know if you can see the striation, but

actually fired the round. So this would definitely be a lethal round.

This would be something you don't get up from.

After this tremendous tragedy unfolded, We, as filmmakers,

our initial response was that we couldn't film any further

without Brandon, even though we were at the end of our schedule.

And it was because we just couldn't even fathom

moving forward at that time.

We heard from Brandon's fiance, Eliza Hutton, who's to be married to a

short time after we completed photography, and his mother, Linda Lee,

Brandon was incredibly proud of the work that he had performed.

And they said, you know, if you are up to it, we want you all to

finish this.

I didn't want to come back, but I kept thinking about...

This is Brandon's film. This is a film that he wanted to be a launching pad for

him.

And if I didn't go back and do what I could do to make sure this film gets

whatever I can do, I'll do it.

Because if this film wasn't seen, wasn't finished, it'd be a shame.

But they called me up and they said, I want to use a double.

Stunt double looked a lot like him, and they wanted me to make a mask

on the stunt double of Brandon's face so they could use it in the film.

That was really tough.

That was really tough.

To be honest, when the stunt double wore that thing, it freaked everybody out.

I mean, it literally freaked them out.

When the feeling that you get when you're finishing a film with an actor

passed on, it's not a good feeling.

It's a very morbid feeling.

And it's something you deal with personally.

You know, you don't feel good about it, but it just needed to be done.

That's all. It just needed to be done.

There were changes that they had to make.

Instead of doing a lot of one -on -one dialogue scenes between Eric Draven, for

example, and his girlfriend, they had to do a lot in montage.

A lot was done in shadow.

They had to take out one character, the Skull Cowboy.

They had shot just one set -up shot of him with Brandon Lee, and that was in

beginning of production. They were going to fly him back at the end.

They never ended up doing that. They had to write around the convention of that

character.

When I got the word of what had happened, I had so many mixed emotions.

The number one sense of loss was being cheated because Brandon was engaged,

number one, for him and Eliza. Number two, this wonderful young man that I'd

been introduced to just snatched away like that.

And then people are going, the curse of the crow, you know, Carloco Studios,

there was an electrician, somebody got electrocuted. This happened, that

happened, this happened, that happened. Don't you think? Is it possible?

Is it?

Really?

Really?

No.

The crow was not cursed.

The crow was created out of love and loss.

In my opinion, Brandon died because a studio cut corners.

They sent home the weapons expert that we had. It's a right -to -work state in

union -busting environment.

And after so many weeks, it is my understanding that contractually they

hire a local person to do all of the armaments and weapons.

That is my personal opinion.

Someone was overworked and you miss one little oops and something happens.

Makes you appreciate every day and then you should appreciate

every hour and pretty soon every moment.

I'm at most calm when I can appreciate each breath and especially

appreciative when I hear that beautiful note of a heartbeat.

Life is very precious.

It's hard with The Crow to separate fiction and reality.

I think that people will continue to find curses with The Crow. They're going

continue to find some new element to relate back to something that maybe

happened to Bruce Lee or some of the other actors on the film, like if

tragic happens to one of them.

And I think people want to cling to those sort of curse legends.

They want to have a story that kind of justifies something so tragic.

From that is born just a fascination with trying to look at this through the

lens of possible conspiracy that could have netted this tremendous loss and

horrible accident.

Truly, I sympathize.

But the sideshow of looking for conspiracies within that loss, I think,

away from what he did.

I do believe that there's a great film there, and it stands on its own merits.

And I'm proud of the film.

One can look to a number of films that followed in its wake in terms of look

feel and design.

It really did launch a different approach to futuristic films and comic

adaptations because it really is a very unique piece of art and filmmaking with

a central performance by Brandon Lee that is really, truly incredible.

It was bittersweet for me, personally.

The vengeful spirit of Eric Draven, the vengeful spirit of the Skull Cowboy.

My dear friend Brandon, you can't be prepared

for these moments, but you can carry on in honor of

those that have left us.