Rush Hour: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, music, movies, and more. We are your two Hong Kong trained stuntmen of stultifying trivia. I'm Alex Higel and I'm Jordan Run Talk. Are we trained an opera too? Yes, Comedia dell Arte and Peaking Opera Jordan. Today we are looking at one of the biggest movies by one of my personal heroes, The movie that broken already huge international star big in the US, added an entry into the canon of mismatched buddy cop comedies, and taught us all to love again. That's right, I'm talking about The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It's mum, you arch on too Much Information. The bit never dies joke is now and it's seventh Proud week. No, we're talking about nineteen ninety eight Rush Hour, which turns God it turns twenty five in September. Oh yeah, that one hits hard. Yeah. I mean you know, I make no bones about the fact that I think Jackie Chan should be up there with like Orson Wells or Beyonce in terms of all tourism, I don't think you can really combine. There's no there's no one like Jack. There's no there's no one like Jack full stop. I mean, you know, he's an Olympic level athlete, hilarious physical comedian, and a filmmate and an auteur, you know, and a singer and a singer, yes, singer, songwriter, clothing magnate, car collector, car collector. Yeah, I don't know. His career in the US is so fascinating to me even is not like a even outside of the like influence of Hong Kong action movies on Hollywood in the nineties, which we'll talk about, but it bums me out a little bit because he should have been like stallone or I mean when you see this stuff, because like by the time he came over here, he was forty one, you know, so he was kind of not past his prime. I mean, he's he's incredible in this movie and for like the other stuff that made a lot of money in the States, but like that's like Tom Brady like now exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, And like the stuff that he did in the eighties when you watch it, it's like you're like, why did I ever find Stallone or Van Dam or any of those guys impressive? They look like children. I mean, I get Van Dam is a beautiful man um and I get the like Arnold is just like a freak of nature, and Stallone has you know, his charms as well, but like every single one, they look like toddlers when you're looking at compared to the stuff that Jackie Chan is doing in the eighties, I mean not just the fighting, but like the stunt work and and and it's just it boggles my mind. And Jackie Chan didn't fail the US. The US failed Jackie I didn't. And I didn't see a lot of that stuff until it came over here, you know, because I think like Rumble and the Bronx was the first thing that I saw from him, and then I started just going back through whatever the video store had, but a lot of it wasn't available, So like I didn't see Armor of God, I didn't see Super Coop, which has like the crazy stunt where he firepole slides down a pole strung with light bulbs that explode on the way down. Just I didn't see that kind of stuff until like right really right before Rush Hour came out. And I don't think like Rush Hour was such a letdown to me, not because it's not a funny movie, and so much of it is the chemistry between them and the comedy. But I was just like he was jumping in between buildings on Rumble and the Bronx and crawling over live coals in Legend of Drunken Master, and then he gets over here and we'll talk about this later, but like American stunt guys are like, yeah, you can't do that here, dear, We'll lose what little bit of insurance we've been able to get on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know what do you Was this your first experience with him? Did you get any of this stuff in your corner of the world. I mean, my first experience with Jackie Chan was when my social studies teacher in middle school was clearly hungover and would come in and put on for reasons that I still don't understand, Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights. Yeah I know, I don't. I didn't even we didn't watch those of Friends Houses. I watched that in the classroom. Uh so, yeah, I have to say those movies was not the best first impression of Jackie Chan because at that time he was forty nine when that movie came. Christ Wow, I mean the stunts were fine. I just to me it was it was a comedy first experience, and I always liken him, at least at that time, to Jerry Lewis, who I just have never liked, especially as a kid. I mean, later on I kind of grew to appreciate Jerry Lewis as kind of a you know, comedic ballet dancer, much in the way that the French have grown to love. Just one of your many similarities with the French exactly, and you know, it's similar to how I feel about Jackie Chant. I eventually learned about his background in the Hong Kong cinema as sort of a guy who came out as the heir apparent really to Bruce Lee, a friend of the pod Bruce Lee, following his death in nineteen seventy three, and then of course I learned about the fact that he was, as you said, like the very definition of all around entertainer, from body work to singing to acting to basically mastering every single technical aspect of filmmaking, catering. Yes, yeah, I mean I'm gonna ask you more about that later. Yeah, And that's when it kind of gradually dawned on me that this man is an entertainment god. I mean, he deserves. If he hasn't won the Presidential Medal of Freedom yet he had gotten like a Kennedy Center honor or something like that, he damn well should. I can't pretend to be a martial arts fan, but it's still thrilling to watch any master at work at their chosen craft. So it's always fun to watch clips of his and movies of his. For me, Yeah, it's it really is wild. I mean it's like, um, it's like if Michael Jordan were Buster Keaton. That's an incredible and that's just the level of physicality and that you're working with. I mean, and and he's the other thing that I love about him too, is that he clearly has such a sense of reverence for that tradition. Like he talks about seeing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies and being like, oh, that's what I want to do. I love people who have developed such a specific vision for what they want to accomplish. You know, and I mean, like we'll talk about you know, he does have that thing of like Raymond Chow and Golden Harvest. These guys were like, oh, we need a new Bruce Lee. You're it. And he was like, no, I want to make people laugh by nearly killing myself and and you know, and stuck with it and the like Brett Ratner said, by the time he was making Rush Hour, he's like, he's been making movies longer than I have been live, you know, And it's just he's such a They broke them old when they made him. Well from the struggles of making a movie in which it is the first time one of your leads is speaking English on camera and the other of your leads is Chris Tucker, to the movie's role in establishing one of the biggest pillars in online film criticism, to chance somewhat conflicted mindset about the franchise after the fact. Here is everything you didn't know about Rush Hour. A little about our man, Jackie. He was born in nineteen fifty four in British Hong Kong to parents who were political refugees from the Chinese Civil War. According to Jackie Lore, he spent twelve months in his mother's womb, leading her to nickname him Cannonball, which is an evocative nickname. But I don't totally understand he popped out and immediately was on fire. I mean, aren't there rumors about his parents, like his dad was like a national spy and his mom smuggled opium or something I'm not super super familiar with, Like I didn't want step in it talking about the history of Hong Kong and Chinese British occupation and stuff that I don't know too much about. But I think, well, because I know even less well. I mean, I you know, we talked a little about this a little bit with the Bruce Lee stuff. I mean, the movie industry is kind of always rife with corruption, and Hong Kong was a very interesting place in the middle of the century, and so I think any of these people who were in politics or entertainment or big enough figures in that city probably touched those worlds at one point. But what have you heard. I heard that his mom like smuggled opium before Jackie was born and had some kind of connection to the Chinese underworld. And this may be related to the connection with his mother, or it may be related to just as you said, being part of the film industry in Hong Kong. But I guess I've read that Jackie got mixed up with the Triad gang, who harassed him a bunch of times over the years, like we shoot at him, we got off a plane and stuff like that, and supposedly got so bad that he started carrying not only guns but grenades in case he had to challenge them to like a showdown, which is like you people, don't scare me. Yeah, exactly. I mean it's the first of many don't mess with Jackie Chance stories. Well can you do to me? I haven't done to myself. I mean, have you heard any of that? No, it's it's you know, a little bit of what I was reading about the background of Hong Kong cinema in the eighties is that like sort of the parallel threads other than like this crazy martial arts stunt stuff and sort of that kind of grew as an all shoot of the what we think of as like the grindhouse era, the historical like Wuja style epics that like the Wu Tang we're obsessed with, the other thing is like the John Wu Chao Yon fat like holding two guns and a toothpick in your mouth and sliding down a banister and shooting someone fifty times. And they which it was like a huge influence on you know, nineties Hollywood action movies, but like a lot of that came from was like if they were like mob movies. And so you know, once the Triad saw that they were famous in it, that the worlds did start to overlap kind of in the same way that like the Mafia did in Hollywood, you know, in the music industry and so um. And you know, Hong Kong is not America, Like it's why, which I mean, you are going to bump into people who are involved in that world just by virtue of it being you know, not not even the size of California, is it. We should fact check that. Yeah. And then his dad I heard that, like his spot is alleged spy activities were so intense that he changed his name to protect his family. And then Jackie didn't find out about this until the nineties, at which point Jackie changed his Chinese name to reflect what it would have been had his dad not been forced to change it. Yeah, it's it's odd. His dad emigrated to Australia in in nineteen sixty to work for the another consulate to work for as a cook again. But then they sent Jackie back to Hong Kong to board and study at a peaking opera school. And peaking opera school is insane, I mean a joke. Yeah. Did he have some kind of a strange relationship with his family as a result of being like sent away to boarding school as a kid? I mean maybe it's something that peaking opera stuff is borderline abusive. Yeah, yea, so maybe he didn't take too kindly to that. His son is also kind of a up from what I've heard. From what I've seen anyway, he's like arrested for drugs and stuff and Jackie Son, is he in the industry at all? Or I don't think so. I think he's just kind of a n'er do well idiot. I mean, this is the sort of the sad part about Jackie, at least from like a Western perspective, is that he's moved closer to the Communist Party as he's like gotten richer and become more of a part of like the Chinese establishment. You know, I'm not not getting two two into has he or he's talked about one to like become a member of the communist political Well again, has he or has he been forced to say that after all? Yeah, I mean that's an interesting question. I know that. Like Jengi Ye, the actress who's in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers were her big like you know, Hollywood breaks, she has talked about being like essentially sex trafficked through the movie Homelin Gustry too, like prominent communist politicians. It's really gross. It's really gross and really sad. Yeah, Jackie with Jackie with his son apparently has said he's gone out of his way to say that he's leaving none of his one hundred plus million dollars fortune to him because quote, if he is capable, he can make his own money, and if he's not, then he will just be wasting my money. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. J jc Chan served six months for dealing weed. Just hilarious. He attended William and Mary in Virginia for two semesters and left because all you can see in Virginia is sheep. Can you confirm that's not true? But maybe in what maybe in William and Mary, I don't know. Now it looks like he tried to uh, it looks like he tried to um make it in the movie industry. But yeah, he's ooh. In twenty fourteen, a Chinese paper ranked jc Chan is one of China's top waste rol novou reiche. That's rough. Oh my god. Oh well, anyway to little Jackie Chan, Yeah, being sent away from his parents to attend this entertainment boot camp known as the Peaking Opera School. Tell him, Yeah, Peaking Opera is um. I mean, it's got a little bit of Comedia delocte in it. There's like stock rolls that people learned. There's there's like the strong man role in the clown role. But it really is a very um, uniquely Chinese form of art in that and it's very everyone in it is a singer and acrobatist and acrobat and trained in martial arts, and it's very comedic and very stylized. But um, the training is really really rigorous. I mean teachers would pick kids at like the age of three to apprentice and then you train for like seven or ten years, for like twelve hours a day in a boarding school environment, and they would you know, beat on them with canes and stuff, and it was really really crazy and um, so you get a little bit of martial arts, and you get a little bit of acrobatics, and but you also get like a lot of the really like a lot of his really stylized mugging, Like the faces he makes and stuff come from come from that tradition. It's kind of like it's basically like if if like a vaudeville actor. Uh and singer. Um was also like a boxer. I was taught by Joe Jackson and Mary Boardy and Mike Hyson's trainer. Um. Yeah, so it's like it's there's there's a lot of that and um what else was I gonna say about it? Uh? Yeah, oh yeah. He was there for ten years and then but he also did I mean, he did a lot of training in other styles of martial arts once he graduated there. Chinese myich arts is interesting because there's there's like like some of the stuff that he does is pretty straight kung fu, and then some of it is like woo shoo, and it is really kind of a big, big blend of of everything. I Mean, probably one of the most famous ones is a legend of drunken Master, which is like everyone knows like drunken kung fu is like a style of kung fu. And but he's you know, he was trained in a lot of other stuff, and you can see it in a lot of his different fight scenes. He there's a scene in probably one of my favorite fight scenes of his and wheels on Meals, Meals on wheels, Meals on wheels where where he fights an actual kickboxer named Benny the Jet who reportedly did not like him and did not pull his punches. And those men they're actually beating the crap out of each other. It's wild. I think he accidently hit Jackie at one point, and then Jackie hit him back on purpose. Yeah, if I recall, Oh, I mean, one of my favorite things about Jackie is that, for all of his physical gifts, he supposedly hates violence in real life and claims to have only been in one fight and that was because his friends dragged him into it. Do we think that's true or do we think that's just part of his you know, to protect his image one of those great stories. Maybe I don't think he's like Bruce Lee, who was just like I will fight God. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, like yeah, because Jackie's an entertainer, you know, he wants people happy. I mean even in Rush Hour, he doesn't kill anyone. There's twelve people who die in Rush Hour. Two are killed by the leads, but both of those two are killed by Chris Tucker. Apparently fans don't really realize that he's not quick to fight, not like Bruce Lee, because one of them came up to him while filming Rush Hour two in two thousand and one, and Sucker punched him in the stomach, making that Jackie would block it, which you remember, he serves is how Houdini died. Yeah, yeah, very much. So, oh that's horrible. Much like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chance started acting as a child. I think his first roles were when he was like six or eight or something like that. And you know, you can see him in Fisto Fury and Enter the Dragon as he kind of and he started his day rate when he was a stuntman was something like eighty cents a day, something impittling forgetting the crap kicked out of him. But he tells this story over and over again on being on and Enter the Dragon and getting beat up by Bruce Lee and playing up that he was injured more so Bruce Lee would come over and comfort him. Oh that's right. I remember when we did our Enter the Dragon episode. Yeah, I remember talking about that. Yeah, I mean. Jackie later said that the most painful injury he ever received, of many, as we'll get into, was when Bruce accidentally whacked him in the face with nunchucks while filming Enter the Track. And thankfully this had not damaged their relationship, because Jackie tells us I love that this is one of my favorite stories in the history of this series. Jackie tells the story of walking to a bowling alley one day when he passed Bruce Lee on the street and Bruce was like, oh hey, Jackie, what were you doing? Where you going? I'm off to the bowling alley? Oh can I come to? So Bruce Lee invites himself along on Jackie Chan's like bowling date and um. Jackie said he spent the whole game trying to keep autograph seekers away from Bruce and then about two weeks later, ten days later, Bruce died mysteriously of Sarah brol diema, just thirty two years old. Yeah, and we mentioned, you know, kind of at the top of the episode that there was just a vacuum in the wake of Bruce's death. And actually at the Alamo Drafthouse here in San Francisco, they have a bunch of posters from around the time, because you know, Bruce was a Bay Area dude, and so there's there's all these posters from the from the era where they were just trying to push anyone who looked like him and who they could spell his name, similar to there's Bruce Ellie, Bruce l I, Bruce e Lee, Like it's just it was so egregious. And Jackie was one of those guys. But you know, based on his love of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and he's peaking opera training he was he was like, I'm gonna do my own thing, and you know, by nineteen seventy nine he had been in a few movies. The first one that he writes and directs and stars in is nineteen seventy nine's The Fearless Hyena. Don't forget the porn that he was in nineteen seventy five's All in the Family, which is the name for a porn I could possibly think of. I think that's a tag on porn hub. Oh, I saw that joke from Noll. He was naked in this movie, but he didn't actually have sex with anybody. And Jackie later set of his porn career. I had to do anything I could to make a living. But I don't think it's a big deal. Even Marlo brand Marlow Brandon. That's what Archie Bunker calls Marlon Brando in an episode of All in the Family. So you know what, I'm leaving that flub in because that fits. He's Archie Bunker's in my head. Even Marlon Brando used to be exposed in his movies. The porn world at that time was more conservative than the current films. That's an interesting quote. He made an aborted attempt to cross over to Hollywood around this time. He's in a Cannonball run, which is funny giving given his nickname, But then he focuses on Hong Kong in the eighties and by eighty five he has established his own stunt team. UH. Sort of a trinity around him at this time is Samo Hung and a guy named U n Biao, and Samo is amazing. He's He's known for being a thick king who can still do, like backflips and stuff. They were buddy at the Peaking Opera School and the Jackie Chance stunt team is formed in eighty five on I think Armor of God. I might be wrong about that. And uh, what is his name in Armor of God? It's something ridiculous. It's like an explicit Indiana Jones thing. I think it's his Nate's character's name as Asia Hawk or something like that. Oh my god. But yeah, the stuntman, the stuntman thing is like his his his boys. Yeah. I love the TCB crew. This is Memphis Mafia. Yeah, of Jackie Chan's career. I love that. What I think I read that they go by the name sing Car Pond. Do you know what that means? It doesn't I think it doesn't really translate. No, it needs something like the tight like gang of boys, the TCB mafia, Chan's family group. Oh okay, I mean yeah, the boys that scay exactly. Yeah, and they've worked with him. I read at least on upwards of twenty eight films, probably more. At this point, it was eighty three and it was Project A, which is amazing. Yeah, and it was great because it meant that they got insurance and better pay, which is adorable. Well, whenever that couldn't get insurance, which was often, Jackie would pay out of his own pocket. And why weren't they uninsurable? Well, let's do it. Let's do a quick rundown of his injuries, shall we please? For Jackie Chan, doing his own stunts was very important to him, not just because of his worship of Bruce Lee, but he also, as you said, admired early Silent film era comedies like The General by Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton was his big hero, which is really interesting to me. Again, as you said, it goes back to his Peeking Opera training of wanting to be this all around entertainer. But in the act of performing his own stunts, he has broken his nose you say, four times, his ankle once, most of the fingers in his hand, both cheekbones, and his skull and this was his worst injury. It was during the filming of nineteen eighty six is Armor of God. When he's performing what he has called a quote simple stunt where he swung from a tree and unfortunately fell and hit his head on a rock, which necessitated a metal plate being put into his head and as a result, of this, he has a quarter sized indentation in the skull which he will sometimes invite people to stick their fingers into, I know, and hilariously. His stunt team more recently is used less for action stuff and more for boring stuff like where the characters just supposed to like drive or walk around because it just gives Jackie a chance to actually take a break on the set and rest. Yeah, and you know, a big famous thing for him is he puts the bloopers over the end credits of all. The thing that I've taken away from that is it is so easy to injure yourself doing regular stuff, like the ones that look the most painful, the one where he like, there's like a kick that's been like mistimed slightly and he gets like cotton mccornia and just collapses and it's like, man, how did you? And then like this stuff where he's like crawling across live coal and all this stuff. He's like, yeah, well I got that, but then I fell and now I have a quarter sized hole in my head. His hearing has been affected, you know. The craziest one is actually on Rumble and the Bronx, where he broke his ankle, and they still had a bunch of filming to do, so they just put a sock over his cast and painted it to look like a shoe and his jeans so that he could keep doing the stunts. The cast isn't the problem, the fact that the cast is there while he's hiding a shattered a broken ankle. Yes, yeah, I mean the famous thing is is, uh, there's I forget which blooper real it's in, but there's somewhere he's like being carted away on a stretcher and he just gives a big thumbs up and says Jackie always Okay, I don't think you are, dude, but God love you. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. So one of the three lines on his film is his sort of fanatical dedication to every aspect of it. There's this persistent rumor that one of his films has the world record for takes mandated for a single scene, which is twenty nine hundred for a scene in The Dragon Lord nineteen eighty, which is I think I've heard two different things about this that's online. One is it's a scene where it's like a human pyramid thing where a bunch of guys are like clambering over each other, And the other one is that it's a scene where these men are playing this ancient Chinese game that's basically like hacky sack and volleyball, where they're just like kicking a shuttlecock thing around with their feet and trying to make it's it's really crazy. Twenty nine hundred was not like consecutive. The idea is that this is the aggregate number of takes they needed to cut to get footage to cut everything together. It was confirmed by Raymond Chow I think in his biography that he spent forty days filming that scene, which in Hong Kong cinema terms is a decade because they made movies in a day. And Jackie also holds the Guinness World Record for most job titles on a single movie from Actually, one of his last straight out action movies is called Chinese Zodiac in twenty twelve, in which he stars, directs, is the gaffer and coordinated the catering. Why okay like to make the finished product on the screen look the way it does in your head? I understand that why catering wheel he has a oh oh, I'm sorry. He also did props. Okay, that makes sense that you want everything on the screen to look a certain way. Fine, why cater why the off stage? Well, he has a chain of restaurants, so probably just to get paid over and over again. I don't know how much of it is, like, how much of the stuff at this point is like state funded. So maybe he's just trying to squeeze a couple extra squeeze a couple of extra pennies out of him. But yes, he is also a singer. Part of his peaking opportunity included vocal training. He started recording and releasing records in the nineteen eighties. Has put out twenty albums with vocals in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Taiwanese and English. He often sings the theme songs of his films, which play over the end of credits and the shots of him. Yeah. The song Story of a Hero, which is the theme song to Police Story, was actually selected by the Hong Kong Police as a part of their recruitment campaign in nineteen ninety four. I'm just hearing it. I'm just hearing it. A story of a girl. There's a story of a cop fracture to skull and made the whole world smile. And he was the voice of Shang in Mulan in China. I love that, wasn't Donnie Osman the voice the American version. He also has a line of clothing, movie theaters, as we mentioned, restaurants, Jim, and a racing team. He formed a racing team. He's a UNICEF Goodwill ambassador, and he ran a segue dealership for a while. God love him anyway. What I like to think of is his Imperial Run in Hong Kong includes the Project a Police Story and Armor of God. It's like probably the three highest hits per screen time. You know, as we'll talk about, there's there's some of his movies that don't he doesn't He has vocally been like I don't understand what's funny too Americans, and like what plays in China doesn't always play in America and vice versa. So there are some of his movies that you can just YouTube all the stuff from because it's a lot of like mugging and jokes that don't necessarily translate. But Project a Police Story, Arm of God are really just like some of the craziest action stuff that's ever been committed. And as I as I chatted you before this Michee Yo, who just won for everything everywhere, all at once. And I found out that Jackie cham was actually offered the lead in that film No Way, and he turned it down, and so they they offered it to her and retooled it to be around her. But she and Jackie go way back. She is in Police Story three doing some of the craziest shiit I've ever seen in my life. She jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train and also in that movie, the rolls off the motorcycle as the train moves, motorcycle falls off the top of the train car and and she I mean, you know, I think American audience's first exposure to her was in Crouching Tiger, where she's amazing, but like again, she was you know, they were they these people were decades into their career when they came over here. Chowie unfad included from that film. And but yeah, she's in Police Story three. Shelso does this whole thing where she's dangling off the side of a van and doing like all of these crazy backward leg bends to pull her legs out of traffic and stuff. She actually broke her back on it, or almost broke her back making a movie and had to back away from doing a lot of that crazy stunt stuff. What else? What else? Oh ninety ninety four is another great one legend of drunken Master, which is probably, pound for pound, my favorite. It's got great fight scenes, the stunts are insane. That's the one he crawls over live coals. I have a question for you. You mentioned drunken kung foo being like a subgenre. Is that blended with comedy in the teaching of it? Like what is like? How did that subgenre? I believe that is under sort of Shallon kung fu, like the Shallon monk tradition, because it's often grouped under the animal styles like monkey kung foo and eagle and leopard and snake. And there's a divide between northern kung foo in Southern kung fu and north if I believe this is like reaching back to like fourteen year old nerd me, I think Southern is a little bit more pragmatic and a little bit more like I will punch you and kick you until you leave me alone, and Northern is a little bit more flowery and demonstrative. So a lot of what we see in um cinema is pulled from Northern because it's a little bit more it's cooler looking, and that's where some a lot of like the animal stuff comes from him. But actually, if you play tech in, the character of Lee is a combat is it. There's there's two characters in tech In that are Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. The Bruce Lee guy is named Law, which is funny, and all of his costumes are Bruce Lee costumes. And the guy's name is Lee is Jackie Chan, And so he does all the like drunken boxing and animal style kung fu that you can see jack and he wears like his costumes are also references to stuff that Jackie is worn. But yeah, that's and and Drunken Master is absurd because he at the end fight scene, you know, he he gets drunk to power up in the fight scenes. There's this amazing scene where his step mom is tossing him bottles of alcohol that he's chugging in the middle of a fight, and because the other guys don't want him to power up, they keep trying to drag the grab the alcohol away from him, and it's these amazing like Charlie Chaplin esque bits where these bottles are flipping around in the scene and he has to catch it and pull the cork out and chug it, and then he gets punched and falls down and then he powers up, which is a horrible message. But by the end of the film, in the end scene, he's getting beat up and so he drinks industrial gasoline to defeat the final villain. And the end of this movie has a has a coda in the original version where his character has been stricken blind from drinking this gasoline and it's this it's played for laughs, and it was cut from the American version because they were just like, no, Jackie, this is just you can't. They can't do this. So it's just one of these things that like doesn't again, doesn't translate well, but it's it's really it's really wild. That movie is one of my favorites of all time. And so by nineteen ninety is a really interesting time in the relationship between Hong Kong and Hollywood. You know, Bruce Lee was one of the really only the success people who successfully crossed over, and he died pretty immediately after it happened. So throughout the eighties, as I mentioned, you have the John Wu stuff that's like cops and robbers stuff, and that's basically the stuff that you would see chaw Yon fat. That's where he got one of his big stars in. Anytime you see someone in a Hollywood movie holding two guns, the dual wheeled as they call it in video game terminology, that's from John Wu. The other thing that they take from it is um a term that they call shoot to riddle, which is like you see the bad guys will have like seven squibs on their body that all go off like It's not like in West Westerns where they someone shoots the one clutches their stomach and rolls over. In like Hong Kong action like Hard Boiled and the killer people get shot up and so in like stuff like Die Hard where people are really getting like riddled with bullets. Like a lot of that comes from the Hong Kong action stuff in the eighties. The killer is a big one. Ringo Lamb is another is the probably like the bead tier list. If John Wu is the most famous one. Ringo Lamb It made a movie called City on Fire in eighty seven, which Quentin Tarantino has openly been like, I stole so much of Reservoir Dogs from City on Fire, And it's really kind of a ground swell because you see all of these guys Akira, which is probably the single biggest crossover anime with the exception of stuff like Dragon Ball Z or Naruto into the mid nineties or like the Studio Ghibli stuff, Akira is really one of the ones that kind of breaks them mold, and that came out in eighty nine in the States, and then you get the Wu Tang clan come out and something like Enter the thirty six Chambers, which is just saturated with the kind of grindhouse era Kung Fu movies that they were obsessed with. What all this kind of just stal translates to is that like it becomes really cool and like alternative, sort of hipster American culture to be hip to like all this era of Hong Kong action stuff. I mean, in True Romance, you know, the central relationship in that is Christian Slater going to see Sunny Chiba a Sunny Chiba Marathon and that's when he meets from Zann Arquette's character, And so there was this sort of filtering up of oh, these guys are doing really crazy stuff, and it becomes very sneakily influential. And John wu actually crosses over to Hollywood with Hard Target in nineteen ninety three starring John Claude van Dam and then he just Broken Arrow in ninety six with Travolta and then Face Off in ninety seven, which is his the Big the Big One, and he didn't really ever get to those heights again, but he's one of the biggest figures of that time. And Jackie Chan had been he as we mentioned, he tried to break into Hollywood and then went back to Hong Kong, and he was leary about being cast as a villain and being sort of type cast as like the martial arts guy who comes in and gets beat up by the hero, and so he actually turned down the opportunity to play the villain in Demolition Man, which is a hilarious Sylvester Stalone movie that comes out in ninety three, and that role went to Wesley Snipes. But he was a huge star everywhere else. That's the crazy thing is that like it took us so long to catch up to him. I mean, he some of the figures that I found with. By nineteen ninety five he'd made like seventy million in Hong Kong, four hundred and fifteen million in Japan. Wow sold thirty three million tickets across France, Germany, Italy and Spain. But over here he was so kind of a cult hit person. And ninety five Rumble and the Bronx comes out. It is not shot in the Bronxes, shot in Vancouver, very hilariously, and that became his biggest hit up until that point. He sent records in Hong Kong and it became the most profitable film of nineteen ninety six. It made six times its budget back because they made these movies for super cheap, so rush Howart comes from a script by a guy named Ross Lamana. He worked on Universal Soldier in ninety two starring Dolph Lundron and JCVD, directed by Roland Emerick. He worked on Cliffhanger ninety three starring Sylvester Salone, directed by Renny Harland, and Most Germaine to You Yes. Ross Lamana also wrote two episodes of a Titanic TV mini series that came out in nineteen ninety six, crucially a year before the James Cameron movie and the cast in this made for TV Titanic Movies Conna Nuts is, George C. Scott as the captain of the ship, Edward James Smith, Kathline, Zaida Jones, Peter Gallagher, Mary Lou Hanner, and Tim Curry. So this is Leonardo dic as Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm sure I forget. I'm sure he was like a cabin steward or something, or some like some flunky, some high society flunkey. So yeah, this is the part of the episode where our ven diagram overlasts. So Rosalaman had told screenwriters Utopia dot Com, I wanted to do a kidnapping story, but it was like, what the hell do I do to make it fresh? Which he did not. Then it came to me, what if the victim was from a foreign country? That's unfriendly toss. That'll add some jeopardy, And what if the people investigating are also foreign to each other? Wouldn't that sort of up the ante on the buddy comedy genre. In Lethal Weapon, it's fun and a good thing, but all they really Danny Glover and Mel Gibson's characters don't have in common is that one guy is a nut and the other guy's grounded. They really didn't make anything out of the racial differences, So I thought about everything that would be different between two guys working on the same case from different countries. They wouldn't even speak the same language. It's funny to me that he says all this because it's the exact plot of a movie called Red Heat, in which Arnold Schwartzenegger plays a Soviet detective who is investigating a murder with Jim Blush. When did that come out? Eighty seven? I think it's one of the least rememberable Arnold films eighty eight, So he was wrong that plot was not original. But Rush Hour is interesting in that it hinges on the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China in July of ninety seven, which ended one hundred and fifty six years of British rule and ended Hong Kong as a former colony. That is a really pivotal time obviously in Hong Kong history, specifically to our purposes. It was a huge threat to the action industry that I just ranted about because basically, under the one country, two systems, financial infrastructure of Hong Kong. At the time, they were essentially allowed to take foreign investment to make these movies, and so once they came under the rule of China again, a lot of those foreign investors, specifically Taiwanese investors, pulled all their money out, and that, combined with sort of the brain drain of a bunch of actors crossing over to Hollywood, would have caused a fallow period in Hong Kong action cinema kind of killed the glory days of it. Anyway. Rush Hour is also the brainchild of a producer named Arthur Sarkissian who had finished While You Were Sleeping the Yeah, and he claims that he knew Lamana and they took a meeting and Sarkissian was like, one of my favorite movies is The French Connection, which fair and he's like, he told Lamana he was like, do this, and in a couple of months he brought him back a script called rush Hour that was originally much darker. They said it was originally supposed to be more of an action thriller than a comedy, grittier kind of forty eight hours sort of thing, but they got Disney involved and Disney started backing off on the tone of it, and which makes sense, Yeah, exactly. And then Ross Lamana said, once Jackie came on board, it became a different movie. The part was much smaller in my original drafts. The Chris Tucker part was more Wesley Snipes of Bruce Willis. It was a little edgier. I kept reading that Chris Farley was supposed to start in this movie, which I wasn't able to verify from any like original source. But it's something that keeps coming up. Now, you may be saying yourself, but Alex I thought Rush Hour was produced by New Line Cinemas, and you're right it was. And what happened was Sarkissin had just done while you were sleeping at Disney, so he brought it to them, and they brought on a writer named Jim Kouf to do a new draft. And it gets a little more comedic, and everyone, everyone involved in this film starts saying forty eight hours, which is an obvious influence on it. The Nick Nolt Eddie Murphy movie deeply groundbreaking film as far as the mismatch guys come together to solve a crime. One of them's wise cracking one of them's tough and anyway, so everyone's saying, we wanted to do forty eight hours. But there's a bunch of La Times articles about this movie, which is funny because after it became a huge hit, they started going around to the studio heads who passed on it. So they brought it to Disney. Disney bought the script and it went into development with a guy's name Roger Byrnebaum and Joe Roth. And Joe Roth, who was the guy at Disney, told the La Times, I had seven good reasons for not wanting to make this movie, including among them, he didn't like the script, he didn't have any faith in Jackie Chan's ability to be a lead star. He was busy in other things. Uh. Sarkissian at this point had Brett Ratner on board as director because Brett Ratner had just done money talks for New Line starring Chris Tucker, and he said, so I added up all seven and came up with the wrong answer. This movie was a huge hit, as we will as we will discuss. So eventually what happens is that Disney bulks at the budget and so they decided against greenlighting it. It goes into turnaround, which is the term when other studios can start bidding on stuff Fox Past, Universal Past, because they just wouldn't meet the producers. And funnily enough, before they landed on Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence was considered for this, Dave Chappelle was considered this, and Eddie Murphy turned this down to do what Jordan holy Man. He chose poorly, and yeah, Eddie Murphy predictively later deeply regretted the decision. He's quoted as saying, it's funny when I think of it now. It was like, you can go jump all over California with Jackie chan or go to Miami and wear a robe for three months. And I went to Miami and you see the results. And so they went to Newline, and it's it's funny because Newline. Actually they should have got a New Line first man, because New Line basically was a sort of a they had an existing relationship with the world of Hong Kong cinema. One of their first big hits that wasn't because you know, a New Line is called the House that Freddie built? Did you do? Do you know about New Line Cinema? It's super fascinating not much, though I know a little bit just through you about Freddy Krueger. Yeah, Ninja Turtles, nightmaron Elm Street series, Oh yeah, and Ninja Turtles. So New Line started as this guy, the head of it, whose name I just watched a bunch of stuff about Nightmare in Elm Street. I already forgot this guy's name. Robert Shay is the guy who founded it. He literally drove reels of Reefer Madness and John Waters stuff around to theaters out of the trunk of his car. And so one of their big successes, their first huge success was the first Nightmare in Elm Street And in order to become a legitimate studio, they had to keep cranking these out. But like they became sort of a breeding ground, not just Wes Craven, but Rennie Harlan, who did you know, has become a big name action director and did all this stuff. Did a Nightmare in Elm Street sequel that was one of his first movies. So they're known as the house that Freddie built because that that was how And you know, obviously they went on to do frigging Lord of the Rings and make more money than God, but they also did Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles, which was co production with Golden Harvest, which is one of the big Hong Kong action martial arts companies, and they also were the US distributor for First Strike and Mister Nice Guy, which are two other Jackie Chan movies, so they had an existing relationship there and Newline told the producers that they green light this film, but it has to star Chris Tucker because Chris Tucker had just done money talks with Brett Ratner. And the other reason was that they were like, we have Martin Lawrence on here, but Martin Lawrence costs seven million and Chris Tucker is getting two million. Because all Chris Tucker had really done at this point, he was a def jam comedy guy. He had done money talks and he kind of steals a lot of scenes in The Fifth Element and Friday, but he wasn't as big of a star, and so they were like, we go with the cheaper guy, who we already know has a relationship with Brett Ratner and Burnbaum, the producer said he had been checkmated and had to go hat in hand to Martin Lawrence's agent and tell him the Martin's out Chris Tucker's in which he described the Late Times is one of the worst conversations with anyone I've ever had to have in this business. Sound very traumatic for him. Now, I want to look up who Martin Lawrence as manager was. So Beerbaum and Brett Ratner flew to South Africa, where Jackie Chan was filming a movie called Who Am I? And he wanted to meet Jackie Chan. Brett Ratner was a huge fan of his, and all three went out to a long dinner to talk about this new project that was going to be Rush Hour, and Brett Ratner sent Jackie Chan a copy of Money Talks just to kind of give him an idea of what he could do. And so the wheels of the film were already in motion. Brett Rattner told GQ in twenty seventeen, I got on a plane and I flew twenty two hours to have lunch with Jackie. We get to the restaurant, It's a Chinese restaurant in South Africa, so weird, and he feeds me abalone. It was like a piece of rubber and I'm chewing it and spinning into my napkin. Then he gives me a glass of wine. Bret Rattner doesn't drink or smoke, and I have to pretend like I'm drinking it. And then Jackie's like, let's smoke a cigar, and I'm like, is this guy testing me? What the hell? These are all the things that I don't do. Yeah, a Ratner, it must be said, has a number of sexual assault allegation against him that came out in twenty seventeen. He also is famously the guy who used a homophobic slur talking about rehearsing for the Oscars segment that he was producing. So he sucks and I hate him and most of his movies, but his love for Jackie is very evident. There's a Charlie Rose interview where he is waxing about Jackie to the degree that I go to wax about Jackie. He says, Jackie has a mastery of over seemingly every aspect of filmmaking. He says he knows where his light is. If I tell him what lens I'm using, he knows where it's focus is. He knows where to stand. He's been making movies longer that I've been alive. There's no actor in the world that could do what he does act, martial arts, stunts, direct edit. He was on the set before I was on the set, and his call time is two hours after mine. And Radner again like to his begrudging credit, litters Rush Hour with a bunch of specific gags from Chan's earlier films, like that's how much of a fanboy he was. And he said that after when Chan came back to him and Sarkissian and said I'll do the film, he said it was because Rattner didn't bs him in his pitch. You know, he said, I did the movie because every producer in Hollywood, every big director in Hollywood I meet, says Jackie, the script is brilliant. You're gonna be a huge star. It's gonna be incredible, it's gonna be great. And I said, Jackie, this script is horrible, but I know what to do with it. And I was honest, which kudos. I just love how everyone in this movie, like the Sarkissian is also like, yeah, the script is awful, Jackie. And Jackie still hates the movie. But what you know, as we will find out now, I don't know how much of the script actually made it into the movie. Because Chris Tucker improvised, like ninety percent of it. A big thing about their their relationship is the first time they met, which is hilarious. They've talked about it in multiple interviews. Their dynamic in the film was not far off of reality. Tucker told The New York Post in two thousand and one. I knew who Jackie was. I've always been a big fan. So I was telling him what we could do to make the movie good and stuff, and he was looking at me, like, who is this black man talking to me? I thought he didn't know English because he didn't say one word. I said, this man's not talking, how are we going to do this movie? And in that same interview, Jackie Chan says my English is not that good, but he speaks very terrible English too, And people transliterate Jackie's bits directly, his quotes directly, so it sounds like I'm doing a racist imitation. But this is just what he says. He says he talked to me, and I say to my manager, what happened is my English getting worse? But my manager said he don't understand him either. And Tucker elaborated this in twenty eighteen to East Coast Radio. He said I was kind of scared because Jackie didn't say anything in the first meeting where we met each other. We were in a meeting talking about the movie. Jackie didn't say anything the whole time. He was just nodding his head. Brett Ratner aside. After the meeting, I was like, does he speak English? There's no way we can do this movie if he doesn't speak English. I gotta have him communicating with me and Brett. And Ratner says, oh, he's just checking you out. He's Chinese. That's what they do. Well, I need him to say something. So that was the whole thing when I came up with the line do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? The first time I met him, but I was like, does he understand English? I just took that and that was in the movie. And Ratner said he knew that was the moment that the movie would works. This is a quote where he's talking to GQ. He's like, they had a conversation for thirty minutes. I love you, Jackie, You're the man, and Jackie was all, thank you, thank you, thank you again. Halfway through, Chris says, Brett, can we talk outside for a minute, and I go yeah, and we go outside and Chris says, Brett Jackie chan don't speak English. How are we going to do a movie when he doesn't speak English? I said, Oh, it'll be fine. Anyway, we go back in Chris leaves. I said, Jackie, how do you like Chris? And Jackie says, I like Chris, but I don't understand how he talks. I said to myself, this is going to be genius. And uh, this is one of my favorite interviews of all time. I want to get you reacting. Okay, this is him talking to the Academy. You. I mean, you've worked with so many interesting people through the years, so many great co stars, both the comedic stuff and and the serious stuff. Who are some of the actors that you've worked with that it became a friendship that means a lot to you. Or maybe it's a connection that you have with him that professionally you like. I think Chris Tucker he just beats from ear to ear, even even though I don't like him. The beginning tell us about that part. First time I met him in William Morris office, and he just keep talking. A Look at that guy, Why why he's talking and you know, and he's so fast. You know, mostly people like Brett Ratna, like like my manager Jackie the movie It's really good for you, I understand No, and Chris talk, Oh I just I just huh ha. Then then after he left, Yeah, after left, then asked my men, what the hell are you talking about? I don't I don't even one world No come in come from his mouth. And later on he used in the movie I love that so much. Um And Yeah, the language barrier was the biggest issue on the set. I mean they so Rumbo and the Bronx was shot in Canada and it was dubbed in English, but everyone spoke their own languages on the set. Jackie is speaking Cantonese and the other actors, the Canadian actors, are speaking English. Um. And so this was his first movie that he was gonna speak English in, and it was that was gonna be enough of a hilltal climb. But then is the fact that Chris Tucker just vises constantly, And Ratner told the La Times Jackie has a hard enough time with his own dialogue. The way he remembers dialogue is by remembering the last word of Chris's sentence. Nine percent of the time that word never comes. That was very hard for Jackie. It freaked him out. Yeah, that's a very sad quote from Jackie where he said, if I turned the page of a script and I saw another dialogue scene the whole night, I wouldn't be able to sleep. I not only have to remember my lines, I have to remember Chris Tucker's lines. But every time it's always different dialogue with him. He's always making things up. It's so sad he made he made Jackie sad. Tucker told the La Times he didn't even notice that Jackie was distressed by this until Ratner told him. There's a making of documentary of this on YouTube, and it's really funny because it's just the two of them sitting in a car and Chris Tucker is just non It's it's not particularly funny, but that's what happens when you improvise. You just do bits and see what sticks. And he's just going on and on about this girl that he can he's dating, who's she's really ugly but she can cook, and she lives in Crenshaw. And there's a long bit and he just looks at him at the end, because you really like to talk. Huh um, yeah there and as as he mentions in the clip, they are now friends. The second Rush Hour takes place in Hong Kong and they went to a karaoke bar and Jackie said that Chris Tucker was singing and dancing Michael Jackson for four hours non stop, and so that's why he does don't stop if you get enough. In the second movie, UM, I found this really interesting interview with the woman who was hired to become his dialogue coach, Diana Wang. She's from San Francisco, and it's funny because when she did the interview for this movie and she went on to work with him for twenty years. Um so they hit it off, but it was touching go at first. When she spoke Cantonese to him, he said, where'd you learn how to speak? Did you you have a weird acts? Him is in Malaysia and she said, no, I learned how to speak Canton. He's in San Francisco, in Chinatown and he says, it's sounds like you're in pain. But she was doing this oral history for Rice University and she says she'd said Jackie is not a very patient man. When it comes to dialogue, so it was just crazy. I would write down his lines in English, and I would break it down into syllables, and sometimes I would write like another English word that was similar to that word, or I would find a Chinese character that sounded like that word. And sometimes I would put little happy faces or sad faces to remind him where he needed to be emotionally. And you can see her in the bloopers. There's parts where he has like the poor guy is really struggling, and she just like runs over and says something in his ear and then runs back, and she said, the dialogue is the last thing on his mind. So often it was me running after him with his lines, screaming them out so that he could try to remember because he walks fast. So I'm carrying my backpack, I'm carrying his lines. I'm screaming his lines as we run to set. Sometimes I would get into his trailer and there'll be ten people in his trailer, and he'll tell me to sit down and wait, and he'll do meetings with each person, and I would be the last person and he talks to But by the time it was my turn to talk to him, they wanted us on the set. He didn't have a chance to look at his dialogue. So making Rush Hour was really scary because I thought I would be fired every week. I was expecting someone to fire me because I didn't feel like we were doing a very good job. We were struggling constantly in every scene, and you can tell in the outtakes, but the entire film was like that. Every single day, every single scene, every single sentence was a struggle. Sometimes we did a line twenty times, thirty times, whatever it took to get it right. And of course it was hard on his ego, and often when he looked at me, I could see hatred. He didn't seem to enjoy this process at all. So I didn't know whether I would be fired by him or fired by production because I didn't feel like we were doing a very good job. But she did. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Another stumbling block in the production was the fact that Jackie Cham was used to working in Hong Kong or other foreign locations with his own stunt team who had been together since like eighty three, eighty five and Rattner had to convince new Line to let them bring the entire stunt team over to work on the movie, alongside an American stunt coordinator named Terry Leonard, who had done like Raiders, the Lost Arc and a lot of stuff. He's a big name, And in that making of Leonard very dryly notes they take liberties with Jackie on some of those films in Hong Kong and throughout other parts of the world that we're not allowed to take here insurance why it is the most flat way of saying that, And he talks about it going on, coming on to set and Jackie looking up at all of the scaffolding that they had set up to help him do a stunt and going, ah, you Americans so safe. I love this anecdote so much because in every retelling of it that I've seen, Jackie was apparently very displeased by all these safety precautions, and this scene in particular with the scaffolding, It's worth noting it required him to climb thirty feet up the side of a building, the building that was supposed to be the Chinese consulate, and Jackie latter explained his annoyance. He said, there are so many safety and insurance rules to follow. I know that they want to make sure I'm safe and I do my stunts, but sometimes they insist I use protective gear for even simple things, and that's frustrating. It takes so much time. And also, speaking of the Chinese Consulate, the exterior of the Chinese Consulate and Rush Hour is the exterior of the Wayne Manner from the sixties Batman TV shows. You know that, I don't think I do. You're a big fan of both. I'm surprised, I am. Yeah. Yeah, Chris Stucker said he also did his own stunts on the film. I told Conan O'Brien on the first movie, I got in shape because I heard Jackie does his own stunts, so I said, let me get in shape, and I started doing it everything. Because if you don't come out there, Jackie will tease you. Chris Ducker, you're scared. Come, We'll do your stunts. Stop acting like a punk, I would cry. Yeah. Any Alex supporting acts as he killed by doing that, that's also true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, his post Rush Hour career is really I was just I'm on his Wikipedia page as we speak. I have no idea he was in Silver Linings playbook. I forgot about that. He's done. Okay, he's done ninety eight Rush Hour two thousand and one Rush Hour two, so that's the seven Rush Hour three, twenty and twelve Silver Linings playbook. That is all he did from nineteen ninety eight to twenty twelve, twenty sixteen, Billy Lynn's long Halftime Walk, which I've never heard of. And then he's going to be in the upcoming movie Air with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon about the founder of Nike. He's not done a lot of movies. No, And I mean it's like I said, it's kind of sad. I mean, Brett. In that GQ interview, Brett Ratner says he says people have mistreated him in Hollywood, which I don't think is necessarily true. But Chris Tucker, No, Jackie, but oh you were talking about Chris Tucker. I was talking about Chris Tucker. Yeah, I don't care about Chris Tucker. Oh this isn't the Chris Tucker episode. I'm sorry. I do care about Chris Tucker. He's great in this movie. He's hilarious. And Fifth Element. We watched Fifth Element recently and actually Brett Ratner knew him because I didn't know this about Brett Ratner, but he got his start through Deaf Jam essentially connection I think yes it was Ratner. While he was at NYU had been the manager and executive producer for a group of white boy rappers called BMOC for Big Man on Campus, which is a terrible sentence, and it only gets worse because he is named along with fellow sexual predator, alleged sexual predator Russell Simmons, who he calls his mentor because Russell gave him a screening for Ratner's film Whatever Happened to Mason Reese about the Child Star, and that essentially led him to getting a bunch of music video directing gigs with guys like Public Enemy, jay Z, Mariah Carey, md ON and then he made Money Talks, and Chris Jam was a Chris Jam, Chris Tucker was a def Jam comic. And so the soundtrack for Rush Hour, which it would not surprise you to know it was made in very close association with def Jam. I think their name is actually on the release, uh, And it features Drew Hill's biggest hit, how Deep Is Your Love, which is not a BG's cover jezs Can I Get Up? Which is what I remember, Like the first time I heard jay Z was on this. The soundtrack was a hit. It hit five on the Billboard Top two hundred, went platinum in three months. We were just talking about this in some episode like late nineties are Golden Angels soundtrack, I'm Ageddon soundtrack. I had the Godzilla soundtrack. Yeah, that'd be a fun show man, just talking about movie soundtracks, just the bad stuff that like, I mean Kiss from a Rose Space Jam. Um, it's not a bad idea, you know, they just all have so many It's when you look at the numbers behind them and the acts that people brought together in corraled and there's so little about it, you know, Like I tried to look this up, like because all these songs came out on other people's records then, but it's just so the synergy between like Deaf Jam and this major movie. When we were talking about that during the way back for the Lady Marmalade Episode two, Lady Marmalade, where were we going Brett Rattner, Yeah, I mean when I was at MIYU, the faculty loved Brett Rattener, presumably because he was a big donor, and they would always kind of shove him down our throats for different kind of like special guests events, right, and the student bodies would have instinctively knew that he was not somebody that we wanted to emulate. And we were proven right. Um, yeah, Yeah, there's a story from the set of Rush Hour that I Win sat in the aftermath of his sexual assault allegations. Now, Elizabeth Pinya, who played Detective Tanya Thompson, she only was so bored after being kept waiting in her trailer for five hours before shooting a scene that she eventually came on the set wearing the bomb proof vest that her character is supposed to wear and nothing else and cheery calls Brett Ratner quote turning ketchup red, shrinking about four inches and saying paying up man, don't do that. It makes me nervous. I fear what sort of things he said and did when the crew wasn't around. Yeah, moving on. It may surprise you to know that all three Rush Hour films were scored by Lalo Schiffrin, the architection I Guess the Mission Impossible, the architect of the seventies cop Funk martial arts sound and he did bullet all the dirty hairy movies Enter the Dragon, and he said that I didn't know. He said that that's why, basically why Brett Ratner tapped him. He said, Brett is a big fan of mine, and Entered the Dragon has been one of his favorite movies of all time. To an interview with ain't it cool news name I've not heard in a long time. Yeah, And then Schiffrin says, in his residence, which is funny, but he's from Rgancina, so I'll allow it. He has an answering machine that when he's not there, plays the music of Enter the Dragon, which Schiffrin composed. So that's very funny to me. And when he said he was approached for Rush Hour, he was like, I want you to do Enter the Dragon for the nineties. I don't know. I can't remember anything about the score of this movie, but it's just funny to me that they got Lalo Schiffrin. And now we're on a part of the show that you've titled Reception Hour. We never read your headings enough on this show. Whenever you in your outline, they're always so good. I feel bad Rush Hour made its budget back on its opening weekend and went on to gross two hundred and forty four million dollars worldwide. And you've described it as sort of a pleasant middlebrow hit with critics, though a lot of people who knew Jackie chance on calling work, including yourself, were very let down that it watered down his sensibilities somewhat. But obviously it's spawned the whole franchise, with Chris Tucker getting a bump up to twenty million dollars for Rush Hour too. Hell yeah, and a Jackie Chan of course, went on the Star in Shanghai Noon, which basically replicated the Rush Hour formula, with Owen Wilson playing the Chris Tucker role set in the wild West, and a string of other pretty disappointing No, I haven't really seen other than other than Rush Hour and the Shanghai franchise. I don't think I've ever seen a Jackie Chan movie start to finish. Are there any post Rush Hour that I'm missing? Nope? Okay, Jackie Chan Adventures the animated series. Did you ever watch that? No? I didn't, because again, like when this came out, I was like I was like, yeah, that's this is all fine, but I'm gonna go watch the really badge stuff about this, like yes, Disney version. I mean. One of the reasons for this sort of disappointing string of movies for Jackie Chan after the success of Rush Hour was his age. He was forty one years old when he made Rumble in the Bronx, which was before Rush Hour, and so, as you very eloquently put it, Jackie was nearing the upper limit of his ability to destroy his body in the name of arts, which is a beautiful way to put that. And he was also pretty open about being disappointed with Hollywood, and he basically admitted to doing American movies just a fund better projects than China. And of Rush Hour, Jackie Chan wrote on his website in twenty fifteen, when we finished filming, I felt very disappointed because it was a movie I didn't appreciate and I did not like the action scenes involved. I felt the style of action was too Americanized, and I didn't understand the American sense of humor. And he also said that he made the sequel to Rush Hour because he was offered quote an irresistible amount of money to do it. And then he said of the third Rush Hour film. Nothing particularly stood out that made this movie special for me. Yeah, he's very blunt about it. There's an interview with the magazine called Crosswalk from two thousand to where he talks about just being puzzled by the why this movie did well. Said, something I don't like is successful like rush Hour. I make the movie and I tell my manager, see, I should never make this kind of movie. Then I go to Asia to make an Asian film and they call me and say, Jackie, rush Hour is a big hit. It's a success. I say what. Then I make rush Hour two and I hate it worse than rush Hour one, and they call me and say it's a success. Then I slowly realize, Okay, I still have Chinese mind, I have hometown mind. I don't get American culture, American dialogue. So now, from that time on, I really listened to whatever Owen Wilson tells me to say, whatever Chris Tucker tells me to say. I realize, Okay, anything I think not funny means it's funny, and it's telling. Because also in that interview, he says that Rush Hour films didn't do well in Hong Kong, Like, yeah, he accidental spied tuxedo like they didn't do well in Hong Kong. So I don't, you know, I'm not super well versed in what the cultural distinctions or differences are there there are. Um, I mean, Jackie Chan's like Elvis in Hong Kong, you know, like like Bred Ratner talks about, like Chris Tucker. They when they went to do Rush Hour two there, they were like, we couldn't walk down the street with him. It was like, you know, he was insane. But yeah, I don't I don't understand what the what kind of the cultural hang ups there would be. I really only have to reason that they are just not as interested in seeing one of their own stars be put into a milieu that is not explicitly catered to him as much. But what do I know? Yeah, Jackie was even more blunt. In another interview. He said that he remembers telling his manager after Rush Hour is released, that's a terrible movie. They don't allow me to do my own style of action. My English isn't good Chris Tucker's English. I don't understand. Terrible movie. But hey, yeah, supposedly they're in talks for Rush Hour four. Oh god, that's the coded to this whole thing. Is he like pushing seventy Yeah, I don't. I don't know, man. I mean he's talked about like I can't do these stunts anymore, blah blah blah. But I there's something he just all the world's a stage. He just loves entertaining the people. I'm saying a lot of overlap between him, not in terms of discipline and skill, but in terms of that same Tom Cruise something that's no. I was gonna say, the Jackass guys Johnny Knoxville, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I there's a movie that he may call The Foreigner with Pierce Brasen and that I think tried to put him in the sort of wisened, dignified like elder statesman and gravitoss role that I don't I haven't seen it. I'm not sure how well it did. But you know, we'll always have We'll always have Rumble in the Bronx. No. I you know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but this movie is really fascinating as a specific cultural artifact in time. You look at the top ten grossing films of ninety eight, Titanic Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan. There's something about Mary Waterboy, Deep Impact, Godzilla, and Goodwill Hunting, And of those films plus the next two, only Doctor Doolittle and Rush Hour had minority leads. So that is a very groundbreaking thing in terms of and in terms of bringing these international stars over. It was also kind of a big trend because one of the probably the guy who I would say is in number two to Jackie, coming from Hong Kong martial arts films into Hollywood as jet Lee. Jetle had his big Hollywood moment right around this time with Lethal Weapon four, where he basically just comes in and does a bunch of really cool martial arts stuff. And then they started importing some of his films, like Black Mask came out, which was a Hong Kong production that like the Rizza rescored and they redubbed and put it out in theaters. And then he was in Romeo Must Die, which is pretty explicitly also an attempt to be like black people like kung fu movies. Let's make a movie with a big kung fu star and a bunch of hip hop people, so that's Wheromeo Must Die. Then he was in the one with starring Jason Statham and then he got into the Expendables franchise. So you know, not that you can chalk all that up to Jackie and Rush Hour, but there's a convincing through line there. And then the other thing too is the Matrix comes out, and the Matrix not only takes the John wu stuff, the gun ballet and the gun choreography, but it takes the wire work, and it takes the Yen Wooping is a choreographer, and it takes all this stuff that the Shaw brothers and all these guys have been doing and synthesizes it into American sci fi and action conventions, and it is obviously a huge hit. Blade comes out from New Line Cinema, which is again kind of a synthesis of black hip hop culture and black culture, and Wesley Snipes is a huge, huge star of the era and big martial arts guy. And then you know, we get Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in, and that's an interesting case study too because that is less genre blending. That is explicitly a Woujah film, which is this you know, historical it's it's like a historical epic action film. But that you know, was huge Oscar Oscar Bait and that I don't know that it launched or solidified Chao Yun Fat and Michelle Yo and even Angle, but Angle did get Incredible Hulk a few years after that, which that movie is not good. But you know, those movies all broke through kind of around the same time, and even those Woujah things had their brief period of vogue right after Crouching Tiger, House of Flying Daggers with Jenggee who is in that movie came out, and then Gentley did Fearless and Hero Hero is a beautiful movie, and so yeah, I I there was this really brief moment in time when all of this stuff kind of came in on the back off on Jackie's broken back. So I don't know, I think it's a really even as much as I say it's kind of a letdown to me as a hardcore fan of his, and it's it's a silly film and he doesn't like it, it's very important and it's a really fascinating period of time. And then we even got you know, I won't necessarily make this claim, but Andy Lao, Andrew Loo and Andy Lao, who are not with the same person or related apparently made Infernal Affairs, which became The Departed four years later. And around this time we also got a brief spate of martial arts comedies. You remember Shalton Soccer, You remember Kung Fu Hustle. Those wouldn't exist without Jackie. Steve Odenkirk doing Kung Pal which is a ridiculous film, but that wouldn't exist without Jackie, you know. So you can pin a good five or six years of Hollywood, mainstream Hollywood movies on his little broken body. So there's that, And perhaps the biggest shadow that the film casts is that we have Rush Hour and Jackie Chan to thank for. Rotten Tomatoes? Did you know this? That's my Jay Leno voice. Do you hear about this? Do you guys hear about this? Rotten Tomatos? Rot Toys was launched in August of nineteen ninety eight by a developer named Sendong who was a fan of Jackie and wanted to create a website that would aggregate reviews of Jackie Chan movies and Hong Kong movies as they were imported into the States. He wanted to launch it with the timing of Rush Hour, so it came out a month before because Rush Hour's release date was pushed and now we have rotten Tomatoes, which is arguably not great. I mean, you know, there's all a lot of controversy about the way that like fanboy communities weaponize it against movies they don't like and won't get into that, but you can thank rush Hour for it. So there's that. Let's got that going for it, which is nice. Well that was sprawling. Good luck editing that, um and uh, you know, thanks for listening. I you know, I feel kind of a batter should maybe we should have gone deeper on Chris Tucker, but I just I wanted to backdoor this in as my love of Jackie Chan and I hope everybody can get on board with that and recognize him and you know, fed him appropriately. Folks, Thank you for listening. It's been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtok. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.