Big Trouble in Little China: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two truck drivers of Triviare I should have written more of these. I'm just so excited to get into it. I'm Alex Heigel.

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Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan run Tug and I'm so happy and how excited you are right now? This is truly adorable.

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Speaker 2: That is because we are talking about maybe my favorite film of all time. If I'm being truly honest with myself, like I can front and talk about, you know, Goodfellas or Paris, Texas or any of my real high falutin things that I dip my toe into. But if I'm really honest, this is my favorite movie ever made from one of my if not from probably my favorite director. A heady mix of creature costumes, ancient Chinese mysticism and kung fu films, and dumb red meat Americana from the eighties. That's right, we're talking about John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. It is a movie that I saw when I was eight or nine years old and have been aggressively fixated on ever since.

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Speaker 3: It's a comfort watch for me.

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Speaker 2: It's a movie I love introducing people to because, like I would, I will put this movie on and then just watch the person watching because it's just like that. You get so much out of it. It's funny on the surface, but then it just gets more and more bizarre, and like by the time there's a giant shrimp bug coming out of the sewer to just randomly kill one of the heroes, and then that's never addressed again.

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Speaker 1: You'll notice that I texted you a lot in the beginning and then I stopped for me.

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Speaker 2: I was just like, yeah, it's oh man, And you know, I really researching this and realizing that the sort of stew that went into it, it really just confirms my opinion that it is like I mean, i'd call it like grade A carpenter, And I know you like the thing a little bit better and it certainly doesn't have the like critical bona fides of something like Halloween. But holy there's this movie so much fun and I love it. What did you think of it?

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Speaker 3: No pressure, I.

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Speaker 1: Mean, I just out of the gate. I find it fitting that on the heels of Peewee's Big Adventure was just the tale of a man child who wants his bike back. We're delving into the tail of a manchild who wants his truck back. So I really appreciated that, right. Yeah, you know, I considered playing a game where I wanted to see how far I could bluff it through this episode before admitting to you that I didn't watch it, but I knew that I couldn't do that to you. Yeah, I know that would have just been this meant so much to you. Yeah, especially after all the double episodes you've done for my triple episodes for my beloved large Boat. I couldn't do that to you. Yeah. My main takeaway was really, I feel like I know you a lot better having watched this.

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Speaker 2: It's all there, man, rubber suits, kung fu quipping, false gbado.

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Speaker 1: I watched a handful of things for you over the course of this series, A racer Head, thing, freaks and geeks, and Big Trouble in Little China, and I would say that I definitely liked Big Trouble more than a racer Head, slightly less than the thing. It's possibly because I'm not really all that into fantasy stuff or like kung fu fight movies. Really that's not really my area. And also I just I found it, and I'm sure it's as intentionally so kind of disorienting on first watch. I just finished watching it intentionally, I wanted to get you my freshest test possible, so I just like the credits rolled for me like maybe twenty five minutes ago. So this is very, very fresh. But I think it's supposed to be this or anything, because your point of reference is the Kurt Russell character, and you're finding out what all these characters are, what all these supernatural things are as he is. So I almost feel like I need to watch it again just to have some symbols of what occurred.

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Speaker 3: It is amazing.

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Speaker 2: I mean, I don't really think I would be hard pressed to think of another film that throws all this stuff. Yes, certainly of the time. Yeah maybe since, But the only comparison that has is The Golden Child, which we'll get into laryer. But yeah, like, what do you you if you were pitching and make an elevator pitch? I mean you rattled off. You have a pretty stellar comparison here that I want to. I'm wanna hear you read out loud.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I loved how truly singular and weird this movie was. I have never a Golden Child aside, heard of another movie like it. I don't think it's it really, it's a stew as you said, but it's definitely not derivative. No. I mean my elevator pitch was that it's like Enter the Dragon meets Labyrinth meets Escape from New York meets John Wayne.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's good.

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Speaker 1: Did I miss anything?

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Speaker 4: Well?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the conventional wisdom is that kur Russell's doing Clint Eastwood in Escape from New York as just like the ultimate badass, and then in this movie he's doing John Wayne as a nincompoop.

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Speaker 3: Which, Yeah, one of the things that I.

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Speaker 2: Love most about this movie is how it really commits to keeping you in just as much of the dark as the main character. Yeah, Like there's the there's those little glimpses of exposition, like when you see Eggshan and Wang Cheese Dad talking about like they're doing like Chinese fortune telling. They're like when the goat butts against the mountains, his horns become entangled in the roots, He's like, what in God's name is happening? But they don't, Like a movie today would probably pause and explain that to you. Yeah, And I think this is best illustrated by the aforementioned part in the Sewer where the monster comes out and just completely hauls off and murders one of the protagonists and the eggshn throws like a magic grenade at it and goes, you will come out no more, and car Russell just goes, what what will come out no more?

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Speaker 3: And the movie just keeps moving and never addresses it again.

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Speaker 2: And in like a Marvel movie or something today, they'd have a whole thing or like God forbid, like a Tolkien thing, they'd be like, well that was actually Shuschwalfe of All the Destroyer, who was like web and go to this very pedantic thing. But Big Trouble is just like, Nope, Nope, you don't need no keep going. There's a guy's gonna explode in a minute.

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Speaker 1: We got we got more fights to see.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, another guy, there's gonna a guy is gonna self inflate to death.

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Speaker 1: Was like some woo Lee Wonka like villainous and.

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Speaker 2: Oh man, well from the somewhat controversial genesis as a turn of the century Western that the film had, to the backlash from Asian American advocacy groups in the entertainment industry that it faced upon its release, to that curious coincidence of a movie starring an infinitely more bankable star at the time based in the same premise happening to come out at more or less the exact same time. Here's everything you didn't know about Big Trouble in Little China.

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Speaker 1: Wow.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 3: I didn't know this as much when I.

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Speaker 2: Was a fan, but I really started getting into this because I love screenplay and like script doctoring stuff. It's so nerdy to me and so interesting. But like so many of the films that we've already covered here, Big Trouble Little China came together because of Hong Kong, specifically because of the amazing wave of action movies coming out of Hong Kong in the nineteen seventies, and specifically a sort of mystical teen film called The Butterfly Murders by a guy named Sui Hark, who's a name in Hong Kong. And there was a screenwriter named David z Weinstein who was looking for a film to collaborate with his buddy Gary Goldman on and he remembered thinking, if you took this film The Butterfly Murders and bring it to an American audience, give it a Hollywood style plot structure, but also keep it Chinese, it could really blow people's minds. And that was the genesis of the idea. There's a whole interesting lineage of historical Chinese Hong Kong action martial arts that is like based in myths and legends. I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation, but it's wuja is like the historical epic thing, like you're crouching tiger stuff and then all the Golden Harvest and Hong Kong stuff that was coming out that the Wu Tang later became obsessed with and put in all of their songs is also kind of belongs to that branching sub genre. And the reason that Weinstein put it in San Francisco was because he was in interested in a period in San Francisco's Chinatown that's called the Tong Wars, and Tong is a word in Chinese that basically just translates to hall or gathering place, and essentially they were early on. They were just support systems for the waves of Chinese immigrants that were landing in the US at the time period, and they were in a bunch of different cities. But as most things do, they became corrupted and it were involved in all kinds of nasty stuff, like literal human trafficking. Like a lot of what they were doing was bringing women in because there were infinitely more Chinese men in the country at the time than women. So one of the things that these tongs were doing were trafficking women in to be wives.

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Speaker 3: And sex workers and such. But they were also involved in.

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Speaker 2: Drugs and gambling, and the gang warfare between these organizations got so bad. A gang warfare between these different tongs would have open battles in the streets by thugs that they'd all hired, and oftentimes they were brawling with melee weapons like hatchets, and that's something that you actually see in a lot of Chinese cinema. There's a Jackie Chan movie called The Second Legend of Drunken Master, which is one of the best martial arts films of all time, by the way, go watch that if you have any interest in it, where there's the he and his buddy take on like a whole gang of guys just armed with hatchets, and that's like sort of a villainous stereotype. It's like you're, you know, in like in American action movies where you have like the bad bikers like that are just interchangeable enemies that get killed. That's like how hatchet men functioned in a lot of Hong Kong cinema. Anyway, the nineteen oh six earthquake in San Francisco and the fire that really did more damage than the earthquake itself sort of wiped this era out because most of the brothels and opium dens and gambling houses that were these criminal enterprises territory were just kind of wiped out. And as the city reconstructed itself, naturally they put an end to the dens of in nickquity. So fascinated by that backdrop and the air during the gold Rush, when San Francisco was a wash In Cowboys, Goldman and Weinstein penned a screenplay called Lotus about a cowboy named Wylie Prescott who friends a railroad worker named Sun who needs to meet his incoming fiance at San Francisco's Docs and an evil sorcerer named low Pan intercedes and crucially takes Prescott's horse and high jinks En Sue oh Man, we didn't.

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Speaker 3: Talk about Low Pan.

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Speaker 2: I can't wait to talk about Low Pan with you, Goldman said. We felt like we were writing a brilliant movie that would be the next Raiders of the Lost Arc. It was a very unusual project and still is. There's never been anything like it, so trying to do something unusual was a little bit of a risk, but we had great confidence that we could pull it off. Goldin and Weinstein's agent did request a new title, and Weinstein told Tara Bennett and Paul Terry for their making of The Big Trouble Little China Coffee table book that is out of print and copies of it are going for.

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Speaker 3: Like two hundred and fifty dollars online and I cannot justify the expense. But it's a huge, beautiful book and I'm I'm obsessed with it.

00:12:12
Speaker 1: If anybody has has a copy that they are in the part where Tigel's birthday is coming up in less than a month, it is I always have to shout out Uprocks.

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Speaker 2: Somebody at up Rocks, like went ham On Big Trouble Little China oral histories. There are like four separate two thousand word features on the making of Big Trouble in Little China. So I didn't like an idiot, I scam past the bylines, but shouts to them anyway. For the making of book, Weinstein says, we spent a half a day brainstorming titles and then Gary said how about Chinatown Gun, which thank god they didn't go with that, because the next suggestion was Big Trouble in Little China. So then they sold the script to a producer named Paul Manag, a real estate developer turned producer, because Hollywood is paid to play. If you have money from real estate, you can start making movies. Those two had made Sophie's friggin choice, so, uh, what.

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Speaker 3: Do I know?

00:13:13
Speaker 2: They clearly knew something. And then so the script was optioned into a movie at twenty Century Fox under Goldman's former boss, a guy named Larry Gordon, which was a bit awkward since Gordon had at one point fired Goldman. So, if you're keeping track, these two wrote a script. It was optioned by the studio under a guy who had just fired one of them.

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Speaker 1: And this is perhaps the reason why the script went to a writer named W. D. Richter, who just directed the Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension.

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Speaker 3: You ever seen that one?

00:13:48
Speaker 5: Not?

00:13:48
Speaker 1: Nope, And I mean the title speaks volumes. But tell me more about this.

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Speaker 2: I mean it is I believe it is a no It was based on a novel apparently, but it is just a bizarre film.

00:14:04
Speaker 1: I gathered that by the Adventures of bucker Ubon.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: Doctor bucker UBONSI is a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and a rock star. And he's played by Peter.

00:14:14
Speaker 1: Does he have a podcast?

00:14:16
Speaker 2: Well, he's played by Peter Weller, which is hilarious because to most people, Peter Weller is known as the sort of exoskeletal, quasi lifelike star of RoboCop. So you just get that like severe teutonic, like carved in stone Peter Weller presence in this deeply bizarre pulp film. But I don't think Richter was a director either. I think he was primarily a screenwriter.

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Speaker 1: What an insane cast? John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Goldbloom, veteran character actor Dan Hidea, Yes, Vincent Chavelli Oh my god. Okay, bookmarking this anyway, back to Big Trouble, back to back to another Clancy Brown boy, Clancy Brown, the greatest pipes in the business.

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Speaker 3: What a voice on that man?

00:15:06
Speaker 2: Jonathan Banks friggin Mike from Breaking Bad is in this movie.

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Speaker 3: Holyh what?

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Speaker 1: Okay? Yeah, we will be watching this imminently and possibly doing an episode on it, but for now, back to Big Trouble. So this is the guy, the director of this insane movie is the guy who got put on the Big Trouble in Little China script, completely elbowing out the original two writers, Goldman and Weinstein, and this guy W. D. Richter. He's the one who moved the time period of the movie up to modern day from the late eighteen nineties, which is a change that the original writers still disagree with.

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Speaker 2: I want to see what you think of because you're a screenwriter first, and I want to see what you think about his because I think his assessment here is quite shrewd.

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Speaker 1: Actually, yes, the guy who was later brought on the co writer W. D. Richter. He felt that it was a mistake for the audience to have the quote double remove first of a historical setting and then a fantastical adventure. It's basically you just suspending your disbelief too much. He said, you're asking audience to go to a period Western, get used to all these little eccentric realities, and then you go one step further into a yet more exotic world. I don't think so, and I think he's right. I think that's about as somebody who just watched it for the first time, knowing next to nothing about it other than it was your favorite film. Uh it was. It wasn't It was tough to follow. It was just like, what is that was the prevailing feeling was what is happening at all moments in the best way, in the way that you feel when you're on a thrill ride or something. But yeah, no, I think it would have been a little tougher. Yeah, in a funny way. The dialogue and Kurt Russell's just the bad John Wayne impression. In my mind, it almost felt like a Western anyway. Sure like to make it explicit, would it probably just muddied the waters? I mean obviously, yeah, I mean he had a truck, obviously, but still the pork Chop Express, dude, the CB radio stuff is so good.

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Speaker 2: It's you just tell him that when knocks the back of your favorite head up against the wall, that's such a great line. Yeah, man, his dialogue in This is gold. When I saw John Carpenter play play a bunch of his film scores live, the Pork Chop Express song, like the not the Big Trouble Little China theme, which we'll talk about, but the Pork Chop Express song killed live like he does these little intros for each song, and so everyone knows what's coming. But still when the guitars do the hit that wearn air nail, it's just like the roof just done it, Donna done it.

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Speaker 3: It's just so great.

00:17:42
Speaker 1: While yeah, let's tell my ex wife, I'd never drive faster than I can see. I mean, that's great, that's great. I've seen this movie once and I remembered that.

00:17:52
Speaker 4: Yes.

00:18:20
Speaker 1: But another reason for moving the time period from the eighteen nineties to present day or then present day was a much more practical concern, he said, it's a much more complicated thing to have to make. You have to create eighteen nineties San Francisco. And I just finished Bukaroo, the aforementioned Bukaro Banzai across the Eighth Dimension and I knew how hard it was to create a whole world and make it up out of thin air, And geez, wouldn't it be great to be able to point the camera at something that existed at a real location and worry about the content of the script and performances rather than do we have the right building behind us? Do we have the money to make it look like the eighteen nineties?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's funny that John Carpenter and W. D. Richter knew each other from film school. They both went to U Film School, and Carpenter would say Rick and I went through all three production classes together. We each had our own crews, so we never actually collaborated on a film. Carpenter also did script doctor worked on a screenplay that Richter had called The Ninja, which was a big I didn't know anything about this movie, probably because it never got made, but it was this big historical epic that was in development hell from twentieth Century Fox in the eighties. That was at one point people they were gonna have star Richard gear.

00:19:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, is that rumor about him and the Gerbil reel?

00:19:37
Speaker 3: You know, I don't know man.

00:19:38
Speaker 2: In all my time in the gossip trenches, I don't think of all the quote unku allegedly closeted male celebs. I just don't think people it's like that mad Men thing. I don't think people think about Richard Gear anymore, not since Runaway Bride at least.

00:19:54
Speaker 1: Doctor T and the Women.

00:19:55
Speaker 3: Was he in Runaway Bride? Am I making that up?

00:19:58
Speaker 1: I think he was?

00:19:59
Speaker 3: He was? Yeah, so nineteen ninety nine, like come on.

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Speaker 1: But original writer Gary Goldman argued against this change in one of the many pieces on uprocks dot com. Once you make the story contemporary, that changes a lot. Our idea was that because it was set in the past, it was much more like Raiders of the Lost Arc, where the hero wasn't as ridiculous because he didn't need to be. Jack Burton is a truck driver who encounters Chinese magic, and by making a contemporary you had to turn it into really a full on comedy. He also added to Entertainment Weekly, the idea that we would be rewritten was not so unthinkable, although in this case the idea that you would have something so original and not speak to the original writers about it did strike us as being bizarre and unfair.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I do feel.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: Bad for them, and like anyone, when there's something gets taken and butchered.

00:20:47
Speaker 3: But this is the business we've chosen.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: The two eventually had to go to the WGA for arbitration for credit, but Goldman snuck in a particularly rightly bit of vengeance.

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Speaker 3: I love this.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: He was brought on to rewrite the Total Recall the Arnold Schwarzenegger film a few years later, and he made one particular change. Michael Ironside's villain in that film is named Richter, and you better believe that guy dies horribly just a little petty. It might not even be true, Like I mean, it's true, obviously, that's the name of the character. I don't know if if that was why he did it, but if he did writer's revenge.

00:21:27
Speaker 1: Yes, Speaking as a screenwriting major, I can say that they are a petty, petty group of people, and I one hundred percent believe that that's the case. So wait, I have a question for you. Yeah, as evidenced by your incredibly thorough history of Kung fu films from the beginning of this episode and also the episode we did a long time ago on Fista Fury to the draft Fista Fury. Yeah, was this the movie Big Trouble, Little China that got you in the Kung Fu films.

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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I didn't even mention how I got this.

00:21:56
Speaker 4: No.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: So I started doing taekwondo when I was five or six because Power Rangers came on and my parents wanted me to make do a sport and I was like, I want to do that. So I don't even know how they. Oh I do know through a friend who was also doing taekwondo at this studio.

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Speaker 3: We landed there and that was like my thing. When I was a kid. I didn't do any other sports. I just did taekwondo.

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Speaker 2: And they, you know, you have these things called promotions where you have to go in and you basically do all your little kicks and your stuff in front of a panel of judges and you get a new belt. And the place where I was doing all this at for a while had movie nights after their promotions, and you know, in the ultimate hands off era of the early nineties, they were just like, yeah, we'll show you, you know, Enter the Dragon, which has nudity and gratuitous violence, or they'll be like we'll show you Big Trouble, Little China. And he had dude was like as baffled.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: And enthralled as you were.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: As you were imagine being a nine year old kid hopped up on cherry Pepsi and Twizzlers and watching this movie at like gymnasium, lock in style where you're like, I'm unsupervised. So really that's how I got into it, and that's why it's you know, that that thing that you lock onto as a kid as being the coolest thing ever stays there.

00:23:20
Speaker 1: I had that same experience, but with Apollo thirteen and not at taekwondo, and then I went to space and then you went to space. Me of it, and then I went sent home early because I was crying too much.

00:23:33
Speaker 2: I mean, if anything cured me of being fascinated in space, it was watching the movie Alien at like six.

00:23:42
Speaker 1: You've spoken at length about how much that movie upset you.

00:23:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: Probably.

00:23:47
Speaker 2: The other reason I loved John Carpenter is because there was a kid who grew up down the street from me who, for whatever reason, was obsessed with the Halloween franchise. And if I told this story on this podcast.

00:23:58
Speaker 1: Before I remember, tell me again, yeah, I might have been just to me. It might have been our in our session.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: So you know, in one of our sessions, you know, so how like like little idiot boys play like Ninja's or G I Joe or whatever.

00:24:11
Speaker 3: We'll go on.

00:24:12
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, like you know, with like some of my other friends at that age, we would play like G I. Joe where we would like run around with like because America is a hellscape, we would run around with fake guns and pretending.

00:24:21
Speaker 1: We're crop in the fifties.

00:24:23
Speaker 2: Yeah kind of, or like coming from me, or like Ninja's where we would just like run around and like play fight with swords and stuff because like big yards and like that kind of sh.

00:24:33
Speaker 3: So this kid down the street from me, his idea of a fun time was to play Halloween, where he would dress up in a boiler suit and a Mike Myers mask and stalk me through the friscillating dusk light of our neighborhood with a plastic butcher knife.

00:24:48
Speaker 1: Was this run by you beforehand or did he just start doing it? Well, I just pitched it together. Oh he pitched it. Okay, we at least he pitched it.

00:24:56
Speaker 2: I mean I was I was like okay, but I was like scared of that. Like I remember his one party he must have turned ten right before Halloween. H two O came out or like around that eras ninety seven, and so for his birthday party, we had a sleepover where they just watched all of them and I was so scared by one and two that I tapped out for four, five, and six, and just like was in the other room, like sleeping, trying to sleep with my head under my pills, just hearing screams through the wall. And people wonder why I'm so fixated on horror as a genre.

00:25:36
Speaker 3: Just a few.

00:25:36
Speaker 2: Formative, few formative memories that really drive that into your psyche.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: I ever tell you my time machine story from my little bastard next door neighbor.

00:25:46
Speaker 2: No, but does doesn't have to do with your fixation on trying to travel back in time to the fifties?

00:25:51
Speaker 1: Maybe kind of. So, yeah, we had these older boys who lived next door. They were like twelve when I was like six, and they used to they used to like to kind of one of them in particular, used to like to torment me. We lived in a lake, and he used to take dead fish on rakes and like fling them at me. So that wasn't nice. And I saw back to the Future, and I loved it. It could that that's my favorite movie, even more so than Large Boat. And I had a plastic big wheel tricycle, and I had a little area in the backyard that I transformed into my laboratory, and I taped a bunch of bits of paper and my cardboard, toilet paper tubes and stuff onto my tricycle to make it into a time machine. That was. I made a little flux capacitor out of construction paper and a little like keypad that type in the date. And they spent a couple afternoons outfitting my big wheel, and then I started pedaling it as fast as I could in circles around the little back walk. And eventually this one of the kids next door came over and asked me what I was doing, and I explained that I was trying to pedal through time. I did my very own time machine. And he said, oh no, no, you're doing it all wrong. You know in the movie they got to go up to eighty eight miles an hour. Oh god, that's you know, you're not going anywhere near fast enough. And so, oh man, what am I going to do? And he said, why don't you go to the top of the driveway and now my driveway at the house, the house we still have, actually was four hundred feet long and it sloped down at a forty five degree angle that ended in a twelve foot sheer cliff into a lake. And so I hauled the thing up there, and I remember getting to the top and he came with me, and again he was like twelve and I was like five or six. And I'm up there straddling the bike about ready for blastof and I turned him and I remember saying, well, wait a minute, what about the lake, Like I want to go back to nineteen fifty five, like like Martin McFly did, what about the lake? The lake will be there, Oh no, won't now back in the fifties, now lake, they like, won't be there. No, And so I shove off And my only real snapshot memory of the whole experience was that there were sparks flying out the back wheel of the bike. It was going so fast, and which I thought boded very well.

00:28:04
Speaker 3: I thought, I'm like, yeah, it's happening, it's happening.

00:28:07
Speaker 1: No, it's happening. But yeah, no, I the bike flipped. I went into a hedge and the bike went over the edge of the little mini cliff into the lake. And I've been trying to get back to the nineteen fifty five ever since.

00:28:23
Speaker 2: Kinder Trauma formative influences.

00:28:28
Speaker 1: John Carpenter, Yeah, same way I did. I did that on purpose. I put it right there for a reason.

00:28:33
Speaker 2: So John Carpenter one on one is that he loves westerns, and specifically he loves Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo. He said something to the effect of every film that I make is a remake of Rio Bravo. And you know that the Western framing is especially obvious in his obsession with panavision, shooting in panavision scope and the beautiful, big wide American landscape style images that you like so much of his and my Dean Cundy.

00:29:02
Speaker 3: I loved in Cundy.

00:29:04
Speaker 2: I found out that he and Carpenter actually like had a falling out over the thing, apparently because they were I don't know if it was just that much of a nightmare to shoot out in the wilderness like that, but yeah, they didn't work together on Starman, which was Starman actually starring Jeff Bridges, for which he was nominated for an Oscar was what basically got Carpenter the clout, I think to get big budget money to make this movie. Anyway, So they didn't work together on Starman, but he came back for Big Trouble. So anyway, Carpenter loves westerns, right, but despite this movie starting as a western, he was not the studio's first choice to make the movie. That would have been Walter Hill, the eighties action icon who directed The Warriors and who Larry Gordon, the executive, had worked with on Forty eight Hours. It's funny because Goldman and Weinstein wanted Clint East to direct and star in their original idea for Big Trouble, but Hill passed and the film came across John Carpenter's desk. And this is where the Big Trouble Golden Child thing has such a legend about it because Carpenter was asked to do the Golden Child, he turned down because he thought Big Trouble was more interesting, which it is. Yeah, I mean for anybody who's not familiar, because this movie seemingly doesn't exist. It's been like completely memory hold. There's a ton of people who have just no idea about it. It does not have the cult following, but Golden Child is basically, Eddie Murphy is an LA social worker and he has to go and rescue a child, the titular Golden Child, to save the world. And it has a ton of trappings that are very similar to Big Trouble, which we'll get into later anyway. Carpenter told Entertainment Weekly though, that he saw his first kung fu film in nineteen seventy three, The Five Fingers of Death, and he name dropped Masters of the Flying Guillotine and Zoo the Warriors of Mystic Mountain as some of his other favorites. And those are funny because those have all been name dropped by either the Wu Tang Clan or Quentin Tarantino at various points.

00:31:13
Speaker 3: I believe there is.

00:31:14
Speaker 2: A line in Wu Tang Clan Ain't nothing with when he says uh and the survey says, Bam, you're dead. Fatal flying guillotine chops off your head. And he told up Rocks John Carpenter did. They really are a unique kind of cinematic form. They're extremely innocent but incredibly violent. It's hard to describe them. They're really strange and have all these odd ball things that happen in them.

00:31:41
Speaker 3: They're delightful.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: He took no issue with the setting change to making the film in the modern day, but the change that he made to Richter script mostly involved renamings. He said, Rick had included some names of real triads, real Chinese triads. We had to change them because we're going to get sued. We had to make up a lot kill yeah or murdered. Triads are real. They are real gangsters. There's nothing you can do about it. You don't want to fool around with them. My wife was like, she was like, how many John Carpenter are smoking cigarettes? Impressions are you going to do in this one like you did in the Thing? And sure enough, I was watching an interview with him from around the making of and he just lights up in the middle of the interview. This is in nineteen eighty six when you could do that sort of thing on TV in a studio. But Carpenter quickly pulled in other members because okay, so the thing about The Golden Child is that they that Fox knew that Paramount had this movie in production, and so they basically either I think Carpenter probably agreed to it, but they gave him a very short production time because they wanted to get this movie out to beat Golden Child, because they were operating under the correct assumption that opening anything against Eddie Murphy at this point in the eighties was commercial suicide, and it in fact was. So Carpenter wanted to bring back people he'd worked with. That includes Tommy Lee Wallace for Second Unit. They go way back to usc and Halloween, and Dean Cundy's cinematographer and the guy who was production designer on the Thing, guy named John J. Lloyd, who is this legendary production designer and just the most taciturn like not fun guy to watch interviews of. There's an AFI interview with him that I watch where they just are like feeding him the names of his movies and he's like, yeah, that was a good one, just like completely over there by the time they got to him to interview. Weirdly enough, in the DVD commentary track, Kurt Russell and John Carpenter claimed that one of the sets for the film, I assume the street set was used for a Janet Jackson music video, and I, because I'm a nerd, I went and tried to find which one it would have been, the only video that matches the timeline for it is her first music video for dream Street. But I watched that music video a lot and I couldn't pin point exactly how the set figured in. But that's something that you now know, so go nuts with that information.

00:34:09
Speaker 1: I am. At this very moment, I was gonna say, are you trying to pinpoint this set? One of the sets that's supposed to be Chinatown with a gang's brawl during a funeral took over two square blocks at Fox's Stage six, which Dean Coundy made to look like foggy San Francisco by draping a silk over the entirety of the stage's ceiling. Hilariously, Dean Coundy said in the making of book that John Copper offered him the gig. Well, the pair were flying a helicopter over Santa Barbara. I guess John Carpenter had gotten his license before Cundy and brought him out claiming to help him practice for his own test, and had offered him the gig. Wait. I so, okay, yeah, I don't understand how you drape silk over the entirety of a stage set to make it look foggy.

00:34:55
Speaker 3: Well, so the sets.

00:34:56
Speaker 2: Are ceilingless right, like that's the classic thing, and so the storefronts probably only went up like maybe a story, a story and a half. So you find a load of silk.

00:35:08
Speaker 1: It seems like there should have been a cheaper way to do that.

00:35:12
Speaker 2: I mean, Dean cash, our boy, Dean Kundy is you know, the guy who was filming in sub zero temperatures for the thing. So I'm sure he tried a variety of materials. It's like, wait, oh, I can feel my face. Oh this is great, this is so easy. How much silk can we buy? I'm so happy I could buy a load of silk. I mean I think this is the highest budget Carpenter ever had, so like there was there was money.

00:35:37
Speaker 3: Flowing for this.

00:35:40
Speaker 1: What did he make before this?

00:35:41
Speaker 3: Starman? Okay, so yeah, yeah, which you might like.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: Actually it's a little bit sweeter and more. It's like it's like if it's like him doing et HM out of allegiance to David Bowie, I can't fair. Carpenter then hired casting director Joanna Merlin to fill out the majority. He's an American cast once again, truly amazing that there's like three.

00:36:03
Speaker 3: White people in this movie.

00:36:04
Speaker 4: Ah.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: She pulled in Victor Wong who plays the good sorcerer Eggshen, Dennis Dunn, who plays Wang Chi, the film's hero, as well as James Hong, who is a legend. You know, he was finally basically re recognized for his role as the Grandfather and everything everywhere all at once. But the guy, he was one of these guys who was making like ten movies a year for fifty years, and my god, he is so damn funny in this movie. Funnily enough, Jackie Chan turned down the role of Wang. Can you imagine that? It was because John Carpenter had seen him in his first American language movie and wanted to cast him, but his English wasn't good enough, and I think the film had kind of flopped, so he went back to Hong Kong. Dennis Done. This is his second film role. He is so good, he's so charismatic, he's so great and so funny. He had only been in this movie called Year of the Dragon, which we'll talk about later. It was a Michael Simono's movie after doing I think right after Heaven's Skate maybe not.

00:37:10
Speaker 3: Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Doo.

00:37:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was his first film after Heaven's Gate. You're the Dragon and it was it is so racist, starring Mickey Rourke. It was co written with Oliver Stone, so like, of course it is. But John Carpenter saw Dennis Done in that and was like, come be in my movie. That's not going to be racist. Victor Wong is also amazing. He's like a Bay Area icon. He was like hanging out at City Lights in the fifties with all the beat poets. He's like a genuine Bay Area like eccentric and those guys actually have a beautiful friendship. And they also went on to start in Prince of Darkness, which is like a Bee Tier John Carpenter movie from eighty seven or eighty eight, and but yeah, he just he wanted to work with those guys again anyway. Joanna Merlin also brought in him Patrol. Beautiful. God, she's so pretty in this movie and such a delight they're doing like that ratitat like mid century hup, Oh my god, it's so good. She was mostly unknown at this point. The studio wanted her in there because of Porky's and Police Academy. Perhaps more Germaine to your interests. Kate Burton, the daughter of Richard Burton, is playing the journalist Margot Price.

00:38:26
Speaker 1: Did she do anything after this? I can't believe Richard Burton's daughter was in this. Hell yeah, mostly theatrical stuff, I think.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, but she says she said an interview that she teaches like acting master classes, and she says the film, this is the film she gets asked about the most.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: Oh oh, she was in First Wives Club. Okay, she was a woman in bed in the First Wives Club, A classic befitting the daughter of the Burtons, the Burton lineage. Yeah, wow, that's wild. Hilariously. Kim Katrol, speaking of classically trained, was classically trained. She would leave the Big Trouble in Little China set and go to star in stein Winge's staging of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the New Los Angeles Theater Center. She recalled having to explain to studio executives who check off the legendary playwright was. It also took her fifteen minutes to be able to film after inserting the green contact lenses into her eyes for her character, because that's how long it took her eyes to stop watering.

00:39:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Carpenter, actually, I think put in a bit of backstory for her character that was ultimately not used in the movie Gracie Law. The character was supposedly born. Don't panic everyone, It's just me Gracie Law.

00:39:43
Speaker 1: It's like, it's very comic book. It's very yeah. Yeah, I mean in the way that the Indiana Jones movies were sort of a tribute to those thirties pulp comic books. It feels very.

00:39:53
Speaker 3: Similar Indian Jones.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: No, they're playing it's straight right, yea, And this film has a wink to it.

00:39:59
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:39:59
Speaker 2: So the to her exposition, she was born in China to missionary parents and they were massacred. They wisely cut that as a bit of exposition, and it's a little bit confusing the film. I never got this until doing this research. When they show up to rescue the women, she is hogtied and gagged, and that was due to a scene that had also been cut from the shooting script. It was never filmed where she's like sassing the guards, so they hogtire and gag her and Kim Control showed up to set and because this scene had been cut, she was unaware that she was about to be hog tied and gagged for a day of shooting and John Carpenter said she was a trooper about it. He would be like, okay, like are you how you doing this?

00:40:46
Speaker 3: Do you want?

00:40:46
Speaker 2: She just asked for drinks of water, and when he asked if she was uncomfortable, she says, I've been in tighter situations than this.

00:40:54
Speaker 3: She is a true.

00:40:55
Speaker 2: One of the things that Carpenter is constantly cited for is having hawksy in heroines. The archetypal Howard Hawk's heroin is very you know, sassy, brassy, can do woman. And that's most I think notable in Assault on Precinct thirteen where one of the like three leads is this like brassy lady.

00:41:17
Speaker 1: He did the big sleep. Yes, so it's got that dialogue.

00:41:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, And sharp eyed students of Hong Kong cinema or nerds will notice a number of distinctive martial arts heavies filling out the ranks of the film. Probably the most non nerdy one for this is a guy named Aliong who has the incredible combination of balding with shoulder length hair and handlebar mustache. And he is most familiar to non nerds as Genghis Khan in Bill and Ted.

00:41:45
Speaker 1: That was his real hair and facial hair setup.

00:41:48
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, it was Wow.

00:41:51
Speaker 2: He's also the bad guy in Lethal Weapon who electrocutes Mel Gibson hit him again Endo, and he's also in Diehart Gerald A. Kamura is a. James lou and Dan Inosanto fill out the ranks of these of the martial artists in the film. Uh Dan Inosanto credited is the guy who showed Bruce Lee the nun Chucks, which is a pretty cool thing to have on your CV under Skills Special Skills. Okamura is interesting too, because he's got this great heavy look. He's got the kind of Fu Manchu and bald and his tremendous eyebrows. But he's a real deal martial artist. He's designed a number of weapons, which I guess is a thing that you do if you get really into this sort of stuff. And then when he was at this giving an interview with a cast reunion, how he shows up and he's like, yeah, all right, I'm a black belt. I'm like, I'm in a bunch of different disciplines. I'm a weapons specialist. And they were like, cool, take these six guns. And he was also laughing because he didn't know how to use them. But he's given these big like, uh, you know, Sancho Panza bandoliers, and he was laughing because he was like, there's no way those cartridges would actually fit in those guns, so that's a technical error. Cinema sins ding. Also, Jeff Imada was another guy in there who talks about there were simply weren't a lot of Asian American stunt men at the time, so the people who were working on this film were often just redressed as different people. They were like slapped a mustache on him or a hat or a new wig, and they just had him play multiple roles, so everybody wound up beating everybody else up as different people, which I love. Also, the guy who plays one of the henchmen who inflates himself to death later on, the character's name is Thunder. He was played by a guy named Carter Wong who was supposedly, according to Hong Kong legend, one of the only people that Bruce Lee was afraid of. And John Carpenter talked about how sweet this guy was. He's this you know, muscle bound martial artist who like trained the Hong Kong Police Force as part of his day job, and he talks about him just having this like solid ridge of callous across his knuckles. But he said he had an incredibly high voice. Just there's a little details about this that I have loved since I began researching it, since this afternoon.

00:44:20
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a.

00:44:21
Speaker 5: Quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Though the character of Wiley Prescott would be reborn as Kurt Russell's trucker Jack Burton, the character's dynamic, as you indebibly put it, a completely inepty loser to everyone but himself, was there from the start. The original one of the original writers, Gary Goldman, told up Rocks instead of a comical cowboy hero, he's a blowhard. He has real skills, but he's not the scary cowboy and in the end he's just all talk. And much of his rewritten dialogue for the next draft of the script, through writer W. D. Richter, was based apparently on Richter's interpretation of if Donald Trump had been a truck driver.

00:45:17
Speaker 1: Sort of makes sense.

00:45:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, Carpenter wanted to reteam with Kur Russell. You know, he's leading man from the thing and escape from New York. But the studio, aside from winning Clint Eastwood. They wanted Jack Nicholson for this. I can imagine him doing the CB scenes, but not my chalice. Yeah, doesn't Jack Nicholson not like to move just in his movies since like nineteen eighty after The Shining he was like, I'm.

00:45:47
Speaker 3: Not gonna do any more moving.

00:45:51
Speaker 1: Does that work for you? I mean I could hear him doing a bad John Layne impression. Her choice is a bad John Wayne impression.

00:46:02
Speaker 3: Real, Yeah, that's true.

00:46:04
Speaker 2: Neither of those panned out, and so Kurt Russell was in and per the May nineteen eighty six issue of Cine Fantastique, Russell turned down the movie Highlander, also another iconic eighties action property, on the advice of Goldie Hawn, his girlfriend and common law wife. She was like, no, you should do Big Trouble, Which is another check mark in my column of reasons to love Goldie Hawn is that she got Kurt Russell a star in this movie. He had never driven an eighteen wheeler before, which he learned to do for this film. He said he was a little bit concerned about it because the set was very tight, and to get in character, he installed a CBE radio in his Chevy Blazer. He actually got sick during filming. Part of the reason that he looks so sweating all the time is because that he was filming through like a one hundred and five degree fever. I love the friendship between in I love male friendship in quotement on that I'm not afraid to say it and the listeners of this show and the male friendship between Kurt Russell and John Carpenter is adorable, especially knowing that Carpenter has described Russell as to the right of Genghis Khan politically, and Carpenter is such.

00:47:21
Speaker 3: A like old hippie dude. I have you ever seen They Live?

00:47:26
Speaker 1: No.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: The movie that he made after this that has a that I believe is responsible for coining the line I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum starting in the South Park. Yes, yeah, So that movie is so wildly anti quote unquote anti American and anti leftist. It has cops getting shot, it has cops clearing homeless encampments. The whole film is structured around the idea that the America's ruling class are aliens who are just using earth for its resources. Anyway, John Carpenter and Kurt Russell are besties.

00:47:57
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:47:58
Speaker 3: Their commentary track for this movie is hilarious.

00:48:00
Speaker 2: They are just shooting the ship openly at certain points, like I think Russell asked about Carpenter's kids baseball game or basketball game at one point, just like while they're recording, and so Russell.

00:48:12
Speaker 3: It was like he actually he was leary.

00:48:16
Speaker 2: That he was being cast because he was in kind of a foulo period as far as his career was a concern because the thing, well, if you recall was had been a big flop, and Carpenter said he just wanted someone who was right for the role, his pal Kirk coming in, and so Russell says, he's the reason I'm building to this as a Russell says he was concerned about hitting someone with the truck. Carpenter says he was more concerned about damage to the truck. And another point, he says he was too busy smoking weed to ever have seen The Computer War Tennis Shoes, which is one of Kurt Russell's early Disney movies.

00:48:55
Speaker 1: This is the point of the episode where after remind folks at the day that Walt Disney died in December nineteen sixty six. He wrote the following on a notepad by his bed in the hospital, and no one knows why He wrote the names Ron Miller, which was the son in law way Down Sellar which is an episode of the Magical World of Disney which would eventually air in January nineteen sixty eight, a year after his death. Kurt Russell with his first name misspelled krt Cia Dash Mobley thought to be Roger Mobley, who was a frequent cast member on the Magical World of Disney TV show who later went on to be a Green Beret. So maybe Cia Dash Mobley. Maybe there's a deeper meaning there, and then he.

00:49:41
Speaker 3: Died with Kurt Russell the last thing on his mind.

00:49:43
Speaker 1: May we all go so well musing over Kurt Russell has the Cia.

00:49:50
Speaker 2: One of the most quietly revolutionary things about this film, maybe not quiet, it's pretty on the face about it is how it flips literally every convention of Hollywood action movies at the time on its head. Burton is the quote unquote fish out of water. Yes, and he's the audience's POV into this fantastic world. Yes, But if you compare this to every other martial arts or action movie made at the time. That's where the similarities end. John claud Van dam and blood Sport is also a fish out of water. He goes into this topsy turvy, you know, world of Hong Kong, bare knuckle brawling matches, but ultimately he triumphs handily. Chuck Norris steven Sagall like the archetype of these movies is like these, you know, hard bitten American archetype characters go into these worlds and then beat them, and their preternatural competence in ass kicking grants them safe passage and eventual triumph. But in Big Trouble, Jack Burton strides into every situation like a macho man before the film immediately makes it clear that he is a hapless moron. And as John Carpenter's told Entertainment Weekly, Jack Burton is a guy who is a sidekick but doesn't know it. He's an idiot, blowhard, an American fool in a world he doesn't understand. Tremendous, he told up Rocks. Carpenter did, Kurt's not the kind of actor who brings his personality into a movie. He's just a constant actor. So he plays the role. He plays the script. We thought about it for a long time and I said, well, what do you want to play here? And Kurt Russell said, I think he plays his blowhard John Wayne.

00:51:28
Speaker 3: That's what I've decided.

00:51:29
Speaker 1: Do you feel that that's a fair assessment of Kurt Russell's acting ability. Do you feel that he doesn't bring his character into a movie?

00:51:37
Speaker 2: No, actually, I don't think I think every well, part of it is that he's just got that fucking face. You know, He's got that like lantern jaw that his kid have you ever seen his kids acting now?

00:51:49
Speaker 3: Wiley Wyatt. Russell just has that jaw, you know.

00:51:54
Speaker 2: And I granted of not seeing the Elvis movie that they did together that and Kurt Russell did, but yeah, he does a lot of coasting on the hair and the jaw line, but yeah, he delivers the lot. This is my favorite performance of his I think. I mean, the thing is great. He has that kind of steally, but he's just it's like you said, man, the dialogue in this is all endlessly quotable.

00:52:24
Speaker 3: The timing can have of this movie.

00:52:25
Speaker 2: Where he's like they're fighting their way out of the hideout and he's like all right, here's how we're gonna play this, and like gives him the whole thing and then opens the door and is faced with a wall of bad guys, slams the door shut, turns around and goes, we may be trapped.

00:52:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, he's so funny in this. And to his credit, Carpenter knew what he was doing here was risky.

00:52:48
Speaker 2: He told up Rocks. Jack doesn't do much throughout the film in terms of being an action hero, which is very different from all the other action here is that were out around the time. Also one of the reasons why the studio was less than happy with it. Dennis Dunn, who plays Wang, said he remembered Carpenter telling him I don't know if they're ready for this, and done actually got this role because he was he was often a part of a TV movie around the same time, and his agent was like, you should pass on this big trouble thing. But Dennis Dunn decided to take it because he was a fan of the aforementioned to Buckeru Bonzai and recognized WD Richter's name, so he's like, I'm.

00:53:23
Speaker 3: Gonna go for that.

00:53:24
Speaker 1: The studio certainly wasn't ready for what John Carpenter was doing with this protagonist. Presented with the original cut of Big Trouble in Little China, Studio had Barry Diller mandated that the scene in the lawyer's office at the top of the film, in which Eggshen recounts how great a man Jack Burton is be added. You know that he's we're all in Jack Burton's debt just to give audiences, just to make them seem like less of a screw up. I had to. Yeah.

00:53:50
Speaker 2: They were like, you cannot have a hero that is not like you have to underline his quote unquote heroism. So they shot that after everything else. It's just like, and the guy they got in it is that the lawyer who goes on to play Deep Throat and X Files, which I love. That's where you recognize that guy from.

00:54:07
Speaker 1: You know what. I think you're right. Yeah, there are some very dear to me friends of the pod whose name I won't mention who because I feel like it would embarrass them. I've been begging us to do it X Files Files episode so Deep, so much.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: I know.

00:54:22
Speaker 1: I still feel bad though. Another mandate from the studio for Big Trouble, Little China, the exposition explaining the two gangs during the funeral scene. Apparently having all the bad guys in black and the good guys in white was not clear enough. John Carpenter said that all this kind of what I was talking about earlier, kind of confusing. Just tossing it at the deep end of this movie was intentional because Jack Burton is a point of view character and the audience is supposed to be a little confused by what's happening. Critics also really didn't like the fact that Jack Burton doesn't appear to really care about Gracie Law, the female lead, by the end of this movie, and he actually rejects her offer to go on the road with him, which was meant as like an inversion of the common action movie romance Trowe. It's pretty funny.

00:55:09
Speaker 2: It's one of my favorite quit like cuts because they she does the like whole sexy come hither thing where she's like, the only way I think we could make it work is if you got one of those trucks with the little sleeping compartment in the back just big enough for two with Petulia, and then the next scene is him on the CP again, just like the same way you started the movie. Just talking to no one, soliloquizing to no one.

00:55:32
Speaker 1: It's the Seinfeld law, no hugging, no learning.

00:55:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, I found this great interview.

00:55:37
Speaker 2: I want to put the time stamp in, but you'll hear it now.

00:55:41
Speaker 5: Did you get the depression that made your view?

00:55:45
Speaker 4: Foxes from Ah?

00:55:50
Speaker 6: After I finished shooting the film, After I finished shooting, they've seen Holiday Ladies. They watched everything that I shot. I kind of together and showed it to them, and they they had never realized it was a comedy. Maybe that wasn't it exactly. They didn't realize it was this kind of comedy.

00:56:12
Speaker 4: They were worried that the white.

00:56:14
Speaker 6: Guy was too stupid in the film, that all the agents were better than I said. Yes, the point, that's what the movie is about. It's about this idiot, you know, stumbles into a world he doesn't understand. Stagger's through it does absolutely nothing. It's thanks, He's thanks, He's done everything, and Stagger's away into the night the middle.

00:56:35
Speaker 4: This is the script I read.

00:56:36
Speaker 6: This is what the movie is.

00:56:38
Speaker 1: Here's a question, and I'm sure that there's a better way to phrase this. Was that done on purpose to make a political point or was that done on purpose? Because they just thought it would be funny to have this big beefcake guy bit dope.

00:56:52
Speaker 3: You know, that's hard to say.

00:56:53
Speaker 2: I don't think I can't parse Richter's intent with rewriting it or those original guy. I certainly know that, like once Carpenter decided that that's what he wanted to do, that's what he did. But I don't think it was from any particular advocacy standpoint, which brings us to our next point. During Big Trouble, Little Chinese production, several Asian American groups were actively condemning the nineteen eighty five movie that we just mentioned, Year of the Dragon for its negative depictions of Chinese and Chinese American people. I have never seen this movie, but it is apparently quite racist in the way that something co written by Oliver Stone and starring Mickey Rourke must be really bad. Apparently, And so at a twenty fifteen cast re union for Big Trouble, Peter Kwong, who's the actor who played Rain, one of the three storms, the supernatural henchmen, the one with the great hair which is a wig, he explained that Carpenter was in fact sensitive to this. He said he really asked for all of us to put in our input, and community leaders from San Francisco were invited to the set to get a closer look at production. James Hong, the aforementioned legend who plays David Lopan, said in an interview that John gave us all a chance. Jim Low, James Lou and Jeff Imata were the stunt coordinators, choreographers, and they were promoted to associate producers by the end of the film. That's the work that they put in. So I don't really think, yeah, I don't think Carpenter was deliberately trying to make a statement. I think that once it came together and he treated everyone well and stuck to the conceit of it. But I didn't think he was like, let's put one up the ass of Michael Simono and anti Asian American discrimination. He might have been thinking, let's put one off the ass of Michael Simono, but probably not the second thing.

00:58:46
Speaker 1: Peter Kuong, the actor who played Ray, and recalled the uprocks that protests over the film began as soon as plot details were leaked, with organizations sending letters to John Carpenter and twentieth Century Fox Dennis Dunn who played.

00:58:59
Speaker 3: I can't remember the the rank ching Wang Wang Chit.

00:59:03
Speaker 1: Yes. I explained that John Carpenter shared one of the letters with him so that he'd be aware of what was going on. Dunn said, in the mid eighties, China was just opening up at the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late seventies, and there are these things about China that Americans were curious about. That's why I started getting work. Actually, I was going to quit acting. I was doing theater for nothing in San Francisco for about seven or eight years. I had to make a living, so I was going to quit. Even then. I saw there were a lot of things people were going to protest, but I thought, I don't really know anything about this business. I guess I'll just go back to retail. That's what I was going to do for work. I was doing marketing. I know.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: It's so amazing to me that he was in near the Dragon, which everyone slams, and then Carpenter is like, all right and gives him his a role. He'll be remembered more forever. And then he decided to go back to theater. I think that's all he does now. But there's a fascinating la Times article about this controversy that mentioned leaflets were distributed by protesters that called Dennis Dunn's character a yes man to Russell, which is of course wildly inaccurate to anyone who's watched the movie. The film's marketing coordinator, guy named Daniel Kwan, said that he met with the groups over the script and asked them what specific changes that they made, and nobody had anything specific.

01:00:16
Speaker 3: They just objected to the overall vibe.

01:00:20
Speaker 2: Literally, one of these groups told the told the La Times for the article, we aren't objecting to specific lines, but the overall impression of the movie.

01:00:27
Speaker 3: And this is really fascinating. I love this too.

01:00:30
Speaker 2: One of the characters that they objected to is the Noel Toy as the actress who plays the Madam, and they said that she was like a dragon lady stereotype, which to be fair, she is, that's her role.

01:00:42
Speaker 3: In the movie.

01:00:44
Speaker 2: But that woman, Noel Toy is a incredibly famous in the Annals of American Performing Arts and San Francisco. She was the first Chinese American to perform the fan dance, the like you know you strip and you're hiding the choice bits behind the big fans. She got famous for doing that in San Francisco and New York. She was literally nationally famous and worked at a nightclub in San Francisco called Forbidden City, which is the nation's first and only Chinese nightclub. So even in this, I mean, that's the duality of this film, like it might traffic in this stuff, and I'm never going to tell people that they should not be offended by what they're seeing, but the fact that there are people from this community who were given these cameo roles in maybe I don't know if it's intentional recognition, but I like to think it was. I just love that so much. And obviously Big Trouble had a bigger target on its back because You're the Dragon had just come out the year prior. That's set in New York, and that movie stars Mickey Rourke as a detective taking on the triads in New York's Chinatown, and it is liberally sprinkled with racist slurs, and Rourke, true to form, stuck his big old meaty mickey foot in his mouth when he was asked about it. He was talking to The New York Times in nineteen eighty five about the controversy, and he railed against La City Councilman Mike Wu, who is one of Year of the Dragon's most vocal opponents, and Mickey said he's only become involved in that issue to elevate himself politically. Year of the Dragon was nominated for five Razzie gnombs and made eighteen point seven mill at the box office, failing to recoup its twenty four million dollar budget, which is the nail in the coffin for old Mikey Simms and probably Bicky Mickey.

01:02:35
Speaker 3: Rourke for a little while. So anyway, all that said, though, there are some airs in big trouble in Little China. Here's a funny bit.

01:02:41
Speaker 2: When the three storms first appear in thunder, says Huwondo and pulls out. They all pull out those knives and throw and do a sweet front flip and throw the knives and it's really cool at rocks. Huwan Du translates to soul returning blades, which is metal as hell. However, those knives are Nepalese Kirkie blades used by the Gurkha military regiments in the British Indian Army, so cineamasens ding Lopan's backstory is also incorrect. Funnily enough, when Jack is it's explained to Jack that the first sovereign Emperor of China defeated Lopan and imposed upon him the horrible Curse of no Flesh in two seven to two BC.

01:03:22
Speaker 3: That's incorrect.

01:03:24
Speaker 2: The first sovereign Emperor of China was Ching shui Han, but he did not become emperor until two twenty BC and wasn't even born until two sixty BC. I mean, God, I sure hope someone lost their job over that one. But that character that that sovereign Emperor Chin chi Huang is the same emperor who is resurrected as the villain in Tomb of the Dragon. Emperor, the much maligned third entry in the Mummy Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy, where he's played by Jet Lee, and there's a there's a translation or I don't know ido idiomatic error. Bigshen describes low Pan at one point as the Bodhisatfa of the underworld. Bodisatfa, aside from being a killer steely Dan deep cut is an Old sanscrit term for someone who has attained buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. The term would never be used to describe an evil spirit. So there, and I mention I love this movie so much and have so many of these line readings burnt in my head.

01:04:25
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start to go fund me to get you that coffee table book. It's damn shame you don't have it.

01:04:30
Speaker 5: Yeah.

01:04:31
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think I was on like online enough when it came out. Anyway, John J.

01:04:36
Speaker 2: Lloyd, who's a production designer, does a beautiful job with the interior every set of this movie. The sliding doors, all the lacquered stuff in the hideout, the layer at the end of the movie with that crazy Neon demon sculpture and the skull that the elevator comes out.

01:04:52
Speaker 3: What the hell is that?

01:04:54
Speaker 2: What kind of drugs was this old, crusty white guy on to design that? That is just an incredible interior set.

01:05:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:05:04
Speaker 2: And so in the aforementioned I went watched his AFI's American Film Institute interview and he just recalls this one being a fun script and he said it was a rushed production.

01:05:13
Speaker 3: That's all he had to say about it.

01:05:15
Speaker 4: I believe me.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: I looked I wanted to know so much about it. Yeah, and that's true. They had three weeks of post production. Dean Cundy told the American Society of Cinematographers that he had twelve weeks to shoot and four months of post which is not a lot for a movie that I think it was his twenty five mili hefty budget too. Jordan take us into creature Territory.

01:05:38
Speaker 1: Yes, the real MVP in the world, a big trouble, Little China as FX designer Steve Johnson, who created the incredible old age makeup, James Hong Warriors as the wheelchair bound LoWPAN, as well as the array of fantastic monsters the populate the underworld, like the hairy wild man that snatches Kim Catrall's character, the bug monster that eats one of the good guys, and of course the eyeball tongued Guardian character. The prompts one of Jack Burton's best lines in the film, please do it for us?

01:06:07
Speaker 3: Oh my god, what is that? Don't tell me. It's that in the end that you will come out no more? Or on what what will come.

01:06:19
Speaker 1: Out no more?

01:06:20
Speaker 3: That's just my favorite lines in the movie.

01:06:22
Speaker 2: Man or wait at the end when he went He's like, you know what, Old Jack Burton says a time like this, and and Lo pen Is like who He's like.

01:06:30
Speaker 1: Jack Burton Me, sorry, you guys, I cannot I cannot match your enthusiasm and joy. Actually no, I can't match your enthusiasm. But but not your not your expertise on this, please please, Well.

01:06:48
Speaker 2: So he's Steve Johnson said when he got this script, he said, it's loaded with the kind of all kinds of animatronics and makeup effects and a Schmorgsberg of everything that we people affects, people get hers over. And the man said that to Entertainment Weekly, God love him. James Hong, it, you know, cannot be said enough. That he's in like twelve inch heels to play tall wizard LoWPAN and then that crazy old age makeup to play wheelchair David Lopan and he, James Hong told Entertainment Weekly, when Steve Johnson worked on me, he took the utmost care with every hair because nothing was digital in those days. The first day of work, I think it took him nine or ten hours to put that makeup on. So James hung makeup for the film was ten overlapping facial appliances, a shoulder hump, and hair that was hand punched into like a bald cap and then when he transforms or whatever.

01:07:47
Speaker 1: I love this.

01:07:48
Speaker 2: They just made a dummy head and stuck a thousand watt bulb inside of it, but they knew that it was going to burn so hot that it would melt down the effect, so they had to like actually really plot out the shot and then they ended up getting it on the first take. James Hong is soing funny in this movie that opening scene where he comes in like shut up, mister button, and indeed, that's our buddy Ben Triven's favorite line from that movie. A lot of times Ben will just hit you out of.

01:08:18
Speaker 3: Nowhere with indeed.

01:08:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:08:23
Speaker 2: And he had to drape that incredible kimono robe that he wears over those twelve inch lifts, and when he was talking about going down the elevator, he wanted to get his stunt double to do it, and John Carpenter was like, here's my smoking impression. Uh no, James, we don't have enough time. You gotta do it.

01:08:41
Speaker 3: Rolling sound.

01:08:44
Speaker 2: Steve Johnson said he found James Hong's performance in that scene so funny that John Carpenter threw him off the set after he've ruined three straight takes by bursting into laughter, which is amazing because James Hung. You know, he was doing this kind of inscrutable Asian. He was typecast a little bit, so he's doing this kind of inscrutable Asian character. But he got to start doing performances for the USO, doing Al Jolson routines in blackface during World War Two. For the wild Man character, Steve Johnson told Sin Effects that they used a modified version of the Ape suit that fellow FX god Rick Baker used in the Tarzan flick Greystoke Legend of the Apes.

01:09:31
Speaker 3: I think that movie is subtitled.

01:09:32
Speaker 2: Starring Christopher Lambert, if memory serves, which is our second Highlander reference. Third, because we talked about our boy Clancy. It all comes back to Highlander.

01:09:41
Speaker 1: Have I not mentioned Sean Connery in this episode yet?

01:09:44
Speaker 2: No, but I was about to hit you with Actually I don't remember any of his lines in Highlander.

01:09:50
Speaker 3: That could only be won.

01:09:51
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's the only one I can know.

01:09:53
Speaker 2: Yeah that. So that monster suit for the wild Man is three layers. It's spandex and then muscle padding over that, and then another spandex like layer which is painted to look like skin and every one of those hairs was hand punched and nodded one at a time for that suit. The head of that was rigged with a mechanism that let the guy kind of do the mouth and stuff for his roaring and everything. And then they use they rigged another head for just the insert shots of it, and that had twenty different cables inside of it that let them individually control the eyes, ears, lips, cheeks, and brows.

01:10:34
Speaker 3: Of that thing's face.

01:10:36
Speaker 2: And then in that making of book, they never even mentioned the guy who's in the suit because he was a diva about being in it. He was constantly complaining about how hot it was. He was asking for extra padding when he has to do the little jump, and he wouldn't walk in a particular way that Steve Johnson asked him for, so they dragged him. Yeah, I've already talked about my favorite line when the Monster Super Monster come out. That is a segue for one of my favorite guys of all time, SFX guys, Screaming Mad George. Yes, the name is a tribute to Scream and Jay Hawkins. Screaming Mad George. His specialty as an FX artist is gross body horror stuff, usually things that involve distensions or inflations or melting. I cannot in good conscience actually tell anyone to go in YouTube the closing sequence or the climactic sequence of a film called Society. It is decidedly NSFW and maybe emotionally scarring, but it's incredible. It's one of the high water marks of rubber work at the time. My god, it's so gross. Anyway, so he did some work on this film. He is responsible for the sculpt of when Thunder Self inflates and blows up. But the sewer Monts is also scream and Mad George, and that was a full sized puppet. That thing was the size of a car. It was foam latex over a solid steel armature, and they used sculpted glues sticks for its fangs, and it was mounted on a track in that tunnel. So they had a puppeteer inside it who was rigging the head and movements, and then its arms and legs were manipulated by guys outside of it with wires, and the thing was potentially deadly. Johnson said, we had to be extremely careful that when the monster shot out on the track it didn't accidentally hit the guy, because if he had been hit, it would have been like he was hit by a car. So they basically forced perspectived it. They had hit shot in a way that there was no way that it would actually impact with his body. And then they cut to a reaction shot and then they scream and Mad George created spring mechanized legs that they shoved in this full sized puppet's mouth, and then so and they when the guy moved the monster's mouth, the legs would jimmy around like they were being eaten.

01:13:05
Speaker 3: God, I love it.

01:13:06
Speaker 2: Screaming Night George had a punk rock band at one point that he fronted in La that all of his like creations were trotted out during part of the stage.

01:13:14
Speaker 3: Show, which makes him kind of an early forerunner to like Gwar. What do oh well?

01:13:19
Speaker 1: Gar were all art.

01:13:20
Speaker 2: School kids who they wanted to make a metal band, But they also have all these horrifying practical monsters and makeup and oh yeah, all their costumes are really ridiculous. But Screaming Matt George was doing the same thing Jordan tell us about the eyeball monster The Guardian what it sees Low Pan knows, I'm doing the spirit fingers at my camera in Jordan and Jordan rant as he just sees my pale fingers waving at him.

01:13:50
Speaker 1: Special effects asigner Steve Jordan's not's Nott's his name Spifferent.

01:13:54
Speaker 2: Guy, the Session drumming icon Steve Jordan, renowned for his place in The Rolling Stones and also designing FX for Big Trouble, Little Child.

01:14:05
Speaker 1: A Special effects designer Steve Johnson told Entertainment Weekly about this eyeball being that was probably the most complicated thing we did on the film, and I think it may have been one of the most complicated things ever at that time. The only way to do it was with a huge animatronic puppet. But imagine how many motors go inside it. The eyes all had to have upper and lower blinks. Some of the eyeballs were actually on stalks that could retract into and poke out. And then of course he had a face, he had a mouth, he had a tongue. We had so many motors in that, and what you see in the film was actually two different twenty four inch puppets that were shrunk down and composited for when it's flying, and each one took up to two dozen puppeteers to manage, mostly because of its highly expressive face.

01:14:53
Speaker 2: It's crazy to me that they made those things bigger. They made them two feet in diameter, and then he shrunk. If I was this even that put this together, I'd be like, you made it smaller. But they did not talk about how they composited that. They literally just like it was like a cutout shot for the compositing, and they just made a cut in the print of it the background where it was supposed to be, just like pasted.

01:15:18
Speaker 3: This thing in.

01:15:19
Speaker 1: Oh my god. And that costs one hundred thousand dollars of the film's what twenty five million dollar budget.

01:15:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, impressed every penny.

01:15:27
Speaker 1: I mean, that's up there with Foucore for the never Ending Story. Didn't that some insane number of puppeteers to activate?

01:15:34
Speaker 2: I mean, this is where the to paraphrase Unter S. Thompson, this is where the wave crested and broken. Yeah, this is the era when that that has just had an all time high.

01:15:42
Speaker 1: I think, I mean we our first episode was Hook, and I think that I would argue, having put zero research into this, that Hook might have been production design in sets.

01:15:55
Speaker 2: Production design in sets certainly, but I think as far as makeup you're not going to get more than this, like the thing American Werewolf in London.

01:16:04
Speaker 3: I mean like.

01:16:05
Speaker 2: Skin on gross stuff, goop, wet puppets, if you will. Speaking of enormous chunks of the film budgets, Peter Kuong's Wig as Rain costs three grandny. Once again, much like the studios, he said he had no idea he was shooting a comedy until he was fighting Wang at the end, and you know, Dennis Dunn does a little eyebrow raise at him in the middle of the fight, which I love, and then he was like, oh, this is camp. That scene is great when the two of them are fighting, flying through the air, fighting, which John Carpenter I think like he clearly saw this stuff like wirework in like the movies that he name dropped, and then was like, yeah, but I don't want to do that. I want to spend more time on the monsters, and so that those scenes of them flying through the air they are just upright and stationary dueling. And then the camera is the print is actually like cant it at forty five degrees and it's rear projection to make the background look like it goes flying by Dennis Dunn was not an experienced martial artist, but he did learn how to use the sword for that film. And yeah, like, that's not wire work. It's just guys bounced around on trampolines at the end, which is another thing I love there, Like, yeah, the one hundred thousand dollars on this puppet, but no wires.

01:17:24
Speaker 3: You guys get trampolines, and.

01:17:26
Speaker 1: We blew the cigar chopping executive, We blew the budget on the guy's wig. Yeah, exactly, whitched every hair punch, the wire budget.

01:17:39
Speaker 3: They get trampolines, used trampolines.

01:17:45
Speaker 2: As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

01:17:59
Speaker 1: Wow, I love that you were so much of a nerd that you're giving me the background on a bus that was used in this movie. The bus, yes that Eggshen drives, is a nineteen thirty six Yellowstone National Park tour bus, and at the height of the popularity within Yellowstone in the mid nineteen twenties, more than four hundred of these vehicles operated within the park, the second largest bus fleet in the country after Greyhounds. I did not know that.

01:18:30
Speaker 3: Hell, yeah, National Park System.

01:18:32
Speaker 1: And you're not sure if there are any more. But for a while, the actual bus from this movie was still in operation at the park, so they got a loaner bus and it earned the nickname Hollywood This Bus for its appearance not only in Big Trouble in Little China, but also on the TV show Mash or the movie Mash probably.

01:18:50
Speaker 3: The Problem movie.

01:18:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:18:51
Speaker 3: I was unable to track it down.

01:18:52
Speaker 2: There are no references to it on the actual Yellowstone site, but if you can find people's like trip advisor reviews where they're like, we rode in the bus from Big a Little China that rule.

01:19:02
Speaker 1: I'm kind of shocked you haven't made a pilgrimage.

01:19:04
Speaker 3: Again, I don't know. I didn't. I didn't put in a call to Yellowstone to confer, confirm or.

01:19:08
Speaker 2: Deny that that Hollywood was still in circulation, but I would, Well, you live in.

01:19:14
Speaker 1: The San Francisco now, are there were there any location shots that you could go visit?

01:19:18
Speaker 3: Uh, well, the Oakland Waterfront.

01:19:20
Speaker 2: I don't know where they shot the early stuff in the Oakland Waterfront, but yeah you can. There's there's like parts of Chinatown that you can go through that are just establishing shots. Also, I've been to SFO a bunch of times, I get another great buffoon part for for Jack. He immediately strides into that situation with the gang members and he's like, all right, buddy, let's try that one more time and just gets taken out again.

01:19:42
Speaker 3: And Eggshen's high.

01:19:43
Speaker 2: Speaking of eggs Sheen, his hideout is fire Station twenty three in LA which is the Ghostbusters headquarters. Come on, it's in a bunch of movies apparently. But speaking of male friendship and egg Shen.

01:19:57
Speaker 1: Yes, Dennis Dunn, who played Wang She was so inspired by his experience working with Victor Wong, who plays Eggshen, that he named his daughter Victoria in his honor, and their friendship actually spanned years before this movie and after this movie, Dunn and Wong had performed and plays together at San Francisco's Asian American Theater Company, and they made three films together in three years, the aforementioned Year of the Dragon in nineteen eighty five, Big Trouble in nineteen eighty six, and another John Carpenter movie, The Prince of Darkness in nineteen eighty seven.

01:20:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, Victor Wong can't be stressed enough is like a bizarre legend, really, I mean he He's also in Tremor's another of the greatest movies ever made. And he's the grandpa in Three Ninjas, another movie. It was a big deal for me growing up. But yeah, he's literally in the Jack Carroak novel Big Sir. He's fictionalized a character at the Jack Karak wrote under a pseudonym Wow. Yeah, and he was like, you know, he was a journalist. He studied political science at UC Berkeley. He was a member of the Second City in Chicago. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under Mark Rothko.

01:21:14
Speaker 5: Uh.

01:21:14
Speaker 3: He won a regional Emmy.

01:21:18
Speaker 2: Like, this guy is just literally like he's like the friggin Forrest Gump of the Bay Area. He's just like in all of this stuff. He was friends with Lawrence fer Lengetti and city Lights. He had his first art showing at city Lights. Like fascinating guy. Speaking of automotives, Jack's truck is a nineteen eighty five freightliner FLC one twenty. This is the thing that grieves me most heartily about doing this episode is that I found a news story about this truck and I can't get past the paywall to get it.

01:21:53
Speaker 3: So this truck.

01:21:54
Speaker 2: This freightliner somehow made it to Calay, Maine, where it was owned and operated by a named Wilfred O'Brien who drove it up until twenty eighteen, and then in twenty twenty it was shipped off to England and I don't know if it's in a museum there.

01:22:08
Speaker 3: I don't know what's going on. I desperately need to know.

01:22:14
Speaker 2: A lot of people have speculated that Rayden from the video game Mortal Kombat is stolen from this movie, the specifically Lightning, who is one of the three Storms the henchmen in it, because if he has that distinctive conical hat, and Mortal Kombat co creator John Tobias confirmed that on Twitter. Another thing that's repeated is that the character in that game, Shank Son the Big Bad, was inspired by Low Pam But I wasn't able to pin that down. But those hats are actually a reference to another Martial Arts film. I think it's the Lone Wolf and Cub trilogy. I'm going to kicking myself for not putting that in there. But so they made it into Big Trouble as reference to another Hong Kong movie, and they made it into Mortal Kombat as a.

01:22:58
Speaker 3: Reference to Big Trouble, which I love.

01:23:00
Speaker 2: Speaking of that character Lightning when he dies, when he's crushed by Rocks and he explodes into lightning. The SFX team made some of the lightning spell out the Chinese character for the word Carpenter as a tribute to John Carpenter.

01:23:15
Speaker 3: Isn't that cute?

01:23:16
Speaker 6: Oh?

01:23:17
Speaker 1: I liked that?

01:23:18
Speaker 6: Yeah.

01:23:19
Speaker 1: James Hong explained to Entertainment Weekly that the duel between Eggshan and Low Pan at the end of the film was not outlined in the script, so he and Victor Wong decided how it would go. He said, Victor and I had seen all these Chinese films where the two opponents would fight each other with this hand magic where things would come out of their hands. That's an old Chinese fable type of magic fighting. So Victor decided to throw balls at me of fire, and I invented that I would cross my little fingers and little rays would come out, and Carpenter put that in the film. Surprised they didn't go to the GA for credit.

01:23:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, seriously.

01:23:54
Speaker 1: Jack Burton going through one of the last few scenes with Gracie's lipstick still on his face, which I actually totally missed, wasn't in.

01:24:02
Speaker 2: The scrow So funny, you see so many like promo stills from there, like like if you look up Jack Burton little in Big Trouble, like in Google, that's one of the things that comes up is just that gorgeous feathered mullet and just like bright red lipstick.

01:24:17
Speaker 1: Kurt Russell told an Entertainment Weekly one time, Kim and I kissed, then I noticed that the crew was smirking. I had lipstick all over my face. I said, you know, I've always wondered about that in kissing scenes. How come that big red lipstick is always magically not there when the guy pulls back. I looked at John and I started laughing. I said, let's leave the lipstick on at least a couple of scenes. And he said, all right, Ah.

01:24:41
Speaker 2: Kurt wants to leave lipstick on for a shot rolling those awesome boots that he wears in the movie. Yeah, hand made at a place he knew in Aspen.

01:24:54
Speaker 1: Do you know what brand those are? I feel like you need those.

01:24:57
Speaker 2: I did find a place that does custom like knee high leather moccasins, but not in the budget. They're marketed as The Big Trouble Boots. I don't know if it's the same guy. I assume that guy might be dead. This movie is almost forty years old. All the water scenes, which again the Hell of the Upside Down Sinners. Chinese people got a lot of hells. The what does Yeah, there's the I used to have all of them memorized. There's the Hell of the Upside Down Sinners, the hell where people are boiled alive. There's so many different Yeah, Chinese people got a lot of hells. Margo Burton recalled that every day I would come into work and go into hair and makeup and look absolutely stunning. Then the next thing that would happen is someone would throw a bucket of water on my head. When when they're swimming through the tunnel and they come up for air and Jack Burton's like, would you stop pressing your body up against mine? And the swimming it makes it really.

01:26:01
Speaker 3: Hard for me.

01:26:06
Speaker 1: When Jack Burton is running and being shot at near the end of the film, one of the squibs went off too early and a little too close to Kurt Russell's head. In the DVD commentary, Kurt recalls that it's one of the only times he's seen Carpenter lose his cool on the set, and I am going to speculate that it might be because this was around the same time that an actor named John Eric Hexham accidentally killed himself when he shot himself in the temple with a blank when he was just joking around on a set of.

01:26:35
Speaker 2: A TV show called Well there's the Twilight Zone death.

01:26:39
Speaker 1: No, that was show called cover Up, and he was just playing and I didn't realize it. With a squib, something actually does fly out if it's pressed like up against your skin.

01:26:50
Speaker 4: Jesus.

01:26:52
Speaker 1: So maybe he was just being extra cautious Carpenter.

01:26:55
Speaker 3: Or it was because he was worried about his best friend Kurt Russell.

01:27:00
Speaker 2: At the end of the DVD commentary track, Kurt Russell says of their day together recording. He says, the beer has been good and the cigarettes aren't stale. Just like such an American dude thing to say about you hanging out with your buddy. Well, now we have to talk about the theme song of the movie, recorded by a carpenter and the Coup de Vill's. The music video for this makes its rounds every couple of years because people are just struck anew by how ridiculous it is and how amazing does everybody wearing like big blazers. And I think he's playing a beatle bass. He's like playing a hopper in it in the video. That band is Tommy Lee Wallace, who is the film's production designer and one of Carpenter's cronies. They both grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and they were classmates at USC, along with the stuntman Nick Castle, who is one of the men who played Michael Myers. The three of them used to get together and sing like harmony, like three part harmony stuff. And they're and little novelty songs that they wrote while they were USC, and they reformed for the purposes of Big Trouble Little China to get together and play. And they have a full length album out under the name Coup de Ville is called Waiting Out the Eighties that's distributed only to friends and so consequently copies of this thing are going for hundreds of dollars online.

01:28:17
Speaker 3: But I have one of the songs here, this is the title track.

01:28:45
Speaker 2: Here that kind of goes like if you were to tell me that was a Fleetwood Mac demo from the Tusk era. I'd be like, oh sure, yeah, yeah, raw production really revolutionary what Lindsay was doing at the time.

01:29:04
Speaker 1: The cottage industry of really expensive side projects and things associated with this movie, from the making of hardcover book to this album. It's very impressed.

01:29:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, the apocrypha you can get into as a big Trouble fan is really bank breaking. So now we have to get into the sad part of the film, which is of course that it came out in the studio or when it was done the studio was like, what the hell do we have here?

01:29:29
Speaker 3: It is part of.

01:29:30
Speaker 2: The movie's lore that it is abysmally marketed. In the DVD commentary of Russell remembers and he's talking about this in other interviews. He was doing press for the film and people were like, how does it feel to be in one of the biggest movies of the year Because their test screenings were so good. People saw this and were like, rightly, We're like, holy, what is this? And then he said I kept waiting to see ads and things that just didn't happen.

01:29:54
Speaker 1: Oh. John Carpenter says in the commentary for the movie that Fox had a mandated that time to not spend more than three million dollars marketing of film. But even if they had spent that, they must have spent that poorly. Materials focused on Russell asking who is Jack Burton, which is just so not the angle you want to go with when promoting this movie.

01:30:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's Ker Russell, who's like in an interview, He's like everyone all the posters were asking who is Jack Burton? Everyone said, I don't know, I don't care. Also, like, the original poster for this movie is Drew Strusan, who's like one of the most iconic poster guys of all time. But Kurt Russell joked that he didn't recognize himself on the poster, which is fair. It is truly one of the shiest of Drew Strusan's incredible movie posters. He looks like a gremlin, Like, he looks like a completely different person.

01:30:50
Speaker 1: I mean, the real poster for this movie that you see more often these days is kind of weird because his head is very large.

01:30:57
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and it's obviously it's like him and Kim Control all up front, But this one's really bad.

01:31:04
Speaker 3: I don't even know what he looks like in here. What you would even describe a particular.

01:31:11
Speaker 1: Well, everything that's a part of his face has been shrunken down.

01:31:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you got the chin wrong. Do you get Kurt Russell's chin wrong?

01:31:22
Speaker 1: Anyway? John Carpenter pointed out another factor in a interviewed with the Ottawa Citizen in July nineteen eighty six, saying, in the time it's taken me to make Big Trouble in Little China, there have been major changes at Fox. Larry Gordon was the president when I began the film. Now Gordon is gone and Alan Horne as president. And another telling quote that he gave to Total Film in twenty twenty one on Big Trouble, I was working with the head of a studio is an intentionally cruel human being. I just didn't want to deal with that anymore. One big problem was that the film was up against some serious competition when it was released on July second, nineteen eighty six, including from Box Itself, its own studio, which sent Alien into theaters just over two weeks after Big Trouble in Little China. It also went up against The Great Mouse, Detective Prince's highly anticipated follow up to Purple Rain Under the Cherry Moon Stephen King's directorial debut Maximum Overdrive, and that was just all In July, critics didn't love Big Trouble in Little China. It pulled in a disappointing eleven point one million dollars at the box office, which means that even Psycho three outgrossed it, which does feel criminal. And also John Cassavetti's last film, also called Big Trouble, starring Alan Arkham Beverly DiAngelo, having released five weeks prior to John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China, so title confusion probably didn't help.

01:32:47
Speaker 2: Carpenter has said that the film's miss marketing and reception was basically responsible for him abandoning major studios and financing his movies independently going forward. He said in nineteen eighty seven, and one time I thought I wanted to be a big budget, major studio Hollywood director. Now I realize that I don't. There's no way I can't do it. I hate authority too much. After making four big budget, major studio Hollywood films, I was burned out the grind of production, the dishonesty of the studios, and the corruption involved in advertising, publicity and the press maybe want to quit. When you make a big budget film, you get trapped into so many situations that you don't want to be in. You're making a movie with the studios money, and they'll spend it the way that they want. I think it was this and Memoirs of an Invisible Man and working with Chevy Chase that he's oh sighted is the one two punch of him wanting to retire.

01:33:36
Speaker 1: That'll do it. But Big Trouble a Little China did have a long life, becoming a cult classic and a big hit when it was released on home media. But in basically every interview, it seems like John Carpenter is still stung by it. Asked about stuff like this and the thing, he usually says something to the effect of, well, better late than never.

01:33:56
Speaker 2: It's sad because he really seems to take it to heart. I really do feel for him because he is such a it's you know, he's one of the great examples of people who got chewed up by the system of their art form. And it's and like he might have let go of some of that bitterness because he's just high and watching the Warriors and playing video games and noodling around on synths, so he's had about as great as retirement as anyone could.

01:34:20
Speaker 3: But yeah, man, it sucks. Imagine like you may you have like an incredible ten year.

01:34:25
Speaker 2: Run doing like Halloween and the Thing and this, and they're flops except for Halloween, but like, you know, yeah, poor guy. I just feel bad for John Carpenter. I want to tell him it's okay. Maybe one day I will yeah you repeatedly. To Jordan's credit, he's repeatedly offered to use his clout to try and get me an interview with John Carpenter. But as anyone who is a John Carpenter fan knows, the man does not like interviews and only comes alive talking about video games or the Warriors.

01:34:56
Speaker 1: He would like talking to you, I don't know.

01:34:59
Speaker 3: I I feel like I'd get on and just start gushing.

01:35:01
Speaker 1: He'd be like, yeah, yeah, Sonic's not about to play itself.

01:35:06
Speaker 3: So yeah, Warriors are doing well this season.

01:35:11
Speaker 1: Everything from comic books to board and video games have added to the Big Trouble Little China lore, and for a long time it was rumored that Dwayne the Rock Johnson was going to star in a sequel or reboot or requel or whatever. The hell they call it now of big trouble, but that has thankfully stalled out.

01:35:27
Speaker 2: You say, yeah, it's one of the kind of like great unmade things of the past ten years, because The Rock has been talking about it for a long damn time. But has John Carpenter indelibly put at one point an interview that I read, He's like, the studio wants a movie with The Rock and they want the name, they don't want me. So yeah, I don't think it's ever going to happen, especially after Black Adam came out and The Rock used all of his clout money to get that made, and then that didn't do very well.

01:35:59
Speaker 1: So I don't know if I that.

01:36:02
Speaker 2: Was a big DC one that DC Warner d C had a year because they put out Black Adam, then they put out The Flash and Blue Beetle, and the next thing on their slate is Aquaman two, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest flops, or at least one of the most dramatic productions. The big news from that today was that James Wan and Jason Momoa wanted to cut Amber Heard's or recast her and Elon Musk because that he dated Amberherd threatened to sue them and the studio. Like his lawyers sent a legal letter to the studio threatening Lake. I believe the phrase was scorched earth if she was recast or cut anyway.

01:36:48
Speaker 1: So the story for the Flash the DC movie is written by John Francis Daly, who played Sam Weir on Freaking Geeks. Oh, the Littlest Freak or Littlest Geek.

01:36:58
Speaker 2: I guess I'm so sorry that he will not get another chance to make one after this. So Golden Child, Jordan, you are you familiar with The Golden Child?

01:37:07
Speaker 1: I only knew of it because didn't Barry Gordy finance. It wasn't in a Motown producer movie.

01:37:12
Speaker 2: I think you're thinking of The Last Dragon. I am so no, I'm not fun fact though, the woman with the.

01:37:19
Speaker 3: Bow staff that shoots smoke.

01:37:23
Speaker 2: In one of the scenes in Big Trouble Old China is also in The Last Dragon and is like a famous entertainment journalist, Leah Chang. So The Golden Child stars Eddie Murphy. It is also a movie about a smart alec Westerner descending into a world of Eastern mysticism. How did two of them get greenlit? At the same time Big Trouble. It seems at this point to have become the winner of the battle, but it is a weird coincidence. Eddie Murphy stars in the film as Chandler Jerrell, a Los Angeles social worker who's told that he is the chosen One who's faded to save the Golden Child, who is a kidnapped to boy with mystical powers said to be the savior of all mankind. The Golden Child evolved from a script by Dennis Feldman, who is a NEPO baby. Dad was an attorney, a Hollywood attorney who became a producer and an executive and yeah, he was involved in the Wild Bunch Anyway, this guy went to Harvard became a documentary filmmaker, and his only writing credit before he wrote The Golden Child was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night called Just one of the Guys.

01:38:27
Speaker 1: Oh, he's called a classic with.

01:38:30
Speaker 2: Someone, wasn't it remade with what's her name? A pre breakdown Amanda bends. Yeah, I like Joyce Heiser's like the woman's name. I think, Yeah, it's a classic movie. So Feldman's original script for The Golden Child was called The Rose of Tibet, which he would later describe as a Raymond Chandler movie with supernatural elements. He originally wanted the role to be played very straight, and mel Gibson was in mind for it, but Eddie Murphy loved this script so much that he selected the film from twenty different projects that were in development at paramount for him, following the hot streak of forty eight Hours and Beverley Hills Cop, which is hilarious because he ended up hating it and Carpenter turned it down. So Mad Max director George Miller was also in the running for Golden Child, but the Golden Chob was ultimately directed by Michael Richie, who did Bad News Bears and Fletch, one of the good Chevy Chase movies. Apparently, Golden Child, like Big Trouble, is subject to a lot of studio interference. Charles Dance Tywin Lanister himself, who plays the film's bad guy, numsot this guy you'll never in a million year's guest, what this villain's name is? Sardo Numbspah, No way, yeah, anyway, he told Fangoria when they first screened it. It was a very different sort of film for Eddie Murphy. Paramount took too much notice of the preview audience as unease about the unfamiliarity of Eddie's character. They had gotten to know him so well through Beverly Hills Cop that they wanted the character to me much more like like that. So the studio went back and reshot a lot of footage of Eddie doing quote Eddie murphyisms and put them in the picture. Then they took out a really sumptuous, weird and beautiful score by John Williams and replaced it with something more funky. So basically what you got was Beverly Hills Cop into bed. This is a big part of the lore of this movie that they went back and just had Eddie Murphy like riff and did a bunch of like button jokes to scenes, and he is obviously phoning it in so hard during it. And Carpenter backs this up. Since it was commonly known in the trays in the industry that he had turned down Golden Child to do Big Trouble, people kept asking John Carpenter about it, and he started off pretty sanguine about it, he told Starlog. The films have a similar theme in that they both explore Chinese legend and magic, but they developed in different ways. Golden Child is a very fine script. It has its problems, but it also has one big plus Eddie Murphy. It will be hard to pull off that script, but if they do, it could be a wonderful movie. And then later in that same interview, though he told if Big Trouble and Little China were released at the same time as Golden Child, we would be killed at the box office, which.

01:41:06
Speaker 1: Whoops, why did they do that?

01:41:09
Speaker 2: Executive brain So, in another widely cited interview that I haven't been able to source unfortunately, John Carpenter supposedly said, originally Golden Child was a serious Chinese mystical, very sweet, very nice film, but now they don't know whether to make it funny or serious, And then he doubled down on that. He continued, Golden Child is basically the same movie as Big Trouble. How many adventure pictures dealing with Chinese mysticism have been released by the major studios in the past twenty years. For two of them to come along at the exact same time as more than mere coincidence.

01:41:38
Speaker 1: It is not like Armageddon and Deep Impact. I feel like there's a phenomenon.

01:41:42
Speaker 3: Of Dante's Peak and volcano.

01:41:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.

01:41:45
Speaker 3: Mean it happens.

01:41:46
Speaker 2: Hollywood is a gossips like a small town.

01:41:50
Speaker 3: I'm sure these execs were like.

01:41:52
Speaker 2: Uh, we got one of those now too, don't we put one of those on our doc?

01:41:58
Speaker 1: So big Trouble Little China made a eleven point one million dollars on a twenty five million dollar budget. Eddie Murphy's Golden Child, I don't know what it was budgeted for, but made almost eighty million dollars. Wow, So I didn't realize that he got beat that bad.

01:42:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, and nobody talks about this movie. Yeah, that's what's really funny to me. And it's bad too. There was a famous like scathing Janet Maslin review of it.

01:42:27
Speaker 1: I can find it well most major parties associated with Golden Child. I hate it. Writer Dennis Fellman was disappointed with the film and thought they should have taken the script more seriously, but he says instead everybody wanted to make it an Eddie Murphy comedy, adding of Michael Ritchie, it's not what the director should have done, and he didn't even do it that well either. Meanwhile, Eddie Murphy himself famously told Rolling Stone, my pictures make their money back, no matter how I feel about For instance, the Golden Child, which was a piece of shit, The movie made more than one hundred million dollars, so who am I to say it sucks? And then he made Pluto Nash.

01:43:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, time has been equally unkind to the film. Big Trouble sits at a seventy four percent critical and eighty two percent audience score i'd Rotten Tomatoes. Golden Child has twenty one percent critical and forty seven percent audience, so suck it. One silver lining for the cast and crew of Big Trouble, though, was that Peter Kwang, who played Rain, told up Rocks half our people went from Big Trouble.

01:43:30
Speaker 3: Little China to the Golden Child.

01:43:33
Speaker 2: So it's a nice little hiring boost for the Asian American community in Hollywood, he says. James Hong Victor Wong, I was on Golden Child. A lot of people that were from our camp were cast, So I guess that's fine.

01:43:47
Speaker 1: I don't know.

01:43:47
Speaker 2: My love for this movie is apparent and abiding. As we go into our second and a half hour of talking about it, I'm literally going horse from being so effusive. I will give our boy JC the last word. Here from a twenty fourteen interview with Flashback Files. We don't need to revisit this, but I can say that when the movie came out, it wasn't a big hit, It wasn't reviewed particularly well, and they attacked Kurt.

01:44:13
Speaker 3: Come, I don't care. I love that movie.

01:44:20
Speaker 1: Goes for JC, goes for me too. Well, Heigel, we really shook the pillars of heaven, didn't we deliver? To my best John Wayne via Kurt Russell inflection, the beer has been good and the cigarettes aren't stale. Thank you for sharing this beloved film of yours with me.

01:44:42
Speaker 2: When some wild eyed eight foot maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you cook it in the eyes and ask you if you paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what old Jack Burton says at.

01:44:56
Speaker 3: Your time like that, Have you paid your dues? Jack?

01:45:00
Speaker 2: Yes, sir, the check is in the mail. This has been big trouble and too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.

01:45:09
Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan runtalg We'll catch it next Time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

01:45:48
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

01:45:51
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:45:54
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.

01:45:58
Speaker 5: With original music by That Apple Bomb and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

01:46:02
Speaker 1: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows