Thursday, March 13, 2008
Dead People Rock: 1
Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee is most famous for his movie "The Crow", but there´s something most people don´t know:
Sources give conflicting accounts of the events leading up to Lee's death. The following is paraphrased from Wikipedia's page on Brandon Lee:
On March 31, 1993, the 52nd day of a 60-day shooting schedule for The Crow, the scene being filmed was the one in which Lee's character, Eric, walks into his apartment and finds his girlfriend being raped by thugs. The thugs shoot and kill both Eric and his girlfriend. The character played by Michael Massee fires a gun at Eric as he walks into his apartment with groceries.
Because they were running behind schedule, the second unit team made dummy cartridges out of real ones. A cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired from the pistol prior to the scene. This caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck.
The crew never noticed the malfunction. They reloaded the gun with blanks and gave the prop to Massee. When the actor fired the gun at Lee, the blank cartridge's explosion propelled the squib load out of the barrel and into Lee's abdomen. Lee fell. Although the bullet was traveling more slowly than one fired normally would be, the bullet's large size and the short firing distance made it powerful enough to fatally wound Lee.
The director shouted "Cut!"--but Lee did not respond. The cast and crew rushed to him and saw he was wounded. He was taken to the hospital where the doctors spent five hours trying to revive him. It was too late. He was pronounced dead at 1:03pm.
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