JOURNEY TO THE WEST, PART TWO [298 a 300]

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JOURNEY TO THE WEST, PART TWO

Sometimes mistakes teach you lessons. 

Sometimes they teach you the wrong lessons. 

I was sitting back in the offices of Golden Communications, the U.S. subsidiary of Golden Harvest. David Chan and Andre Morgan were sitting across from me, telling me about their idea for my latest attempt to break into the U.S. market. 

“The problem we had last time, as far as we can tell, is that we were trying to make you look too, uh, cute, you know?” said Andre. “Cute doesn’t fly in America. Americans don’t want cute action heroes; they want hard guys. Tough guys. Look at Clint Eastwood. ‘Make my day,’ right? We’re going to make you make our day, Jackie.”

The only thing this new idea was doing was making me feel a little sick. No one expected Jackie Chan to be a “tough guy” in Hong Kong. Well, maybe tough in the sense that I could take a punch or a kick or a fall and get up again, but not tough in the sense of mean, vicious, or hard-boiled. And certainly not in the Clint Eastwood sense. I didn’t enjoy hurting people. I wasn’t a killer. I fought only to defend myself or to protect my friends. 

Even when I was forced to punish someone, it was only when I was driven to the end of my rope—and it never ended the way Eastwood’s movies did, with a smoking gun, a corpse, and a cool one-liner. 

But in The Protector, which would cost Danny Aiello and be directed by James Glickenhaus, that’s the kind of Jackie Chan they were looking for. 

I play a New York City cop. Danny Aiello is my partner. A wealthy man’s daughter is kidnapped and we’re assigned to the case. The plot thickens, as the trail leads us to Hong Kong, where we discover that the father may be involved in a Triad drug-trafficking scam. The script included all the typical Hollywood action clichés—swear words, casual nudity, and barrages of bullets. The action was stiff, slow, and predictable. 

If The Big Brawl was a mistake, The Protector was a catastrophe. 

Halfway through the production, I even called Leonard in Hong Kong and told him that either Glickenhaus would have to go, or I would. 

“Now, Jackie, I’m sorry, it doesn’t look like things are going so well,”

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said Leonard, sounding sympathetic. “But we can’t do anything about this right now; James has an iron-clad contract, and we can’t simply replace him.”

“He’s destroying me,” I said curtly. “You know how long his fight sequences take to shoot? Four days. Four days! I’ve never shot a sequence that took fewer than twenty days. Even when a scene looks terrible, Glickenhaus just says forget it, let’s move on. This film is making me look like an idiot.”

Leonard sighed. “Jackie, it’s obvious that we made an error,” he said. “But we need to finish this production. Just finish the shooting in America and come back to Hong Kong. If you’re still upset, we’ll figure something out.” 

I never hang up on people in the middle of conversations, and I certainly wouldn’t do that to Leonard, to whom I owed so much. But I was tempted this time. I knew it wasn’t that he didn’t understand what I was going through. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. But it wasn’t just his call on this. The U.S. subsidiary thought it knew what American audiences wanted, and they had made a lot of decisions on the casting, the script, and, of course, the director. 

When I’m doing a movie in Hong Kong, I make sure that every shot is perfect—that it follows the rhythm of the fight, that it properly captures the flow of the choreography. I plan the action. I supervise the editing. I hire the fighters and stuntmen. I can make sure that what I see in my head comes out on the screen. In my Hollywood movies, I never had that kind of freedom or that kind of control. 

So even if the films starred Jackie Chan, they weren’t Jackie Chan movies. And when someone pays ten dollars for a ticket to one of my films (the price keeps on going up and up), they expect to see a Jackie Chan movie. 

Let the American audiences watch their American-style film, I said to myself. I wasn’t about to give my Asian fans something less than first-class. And so, when I got back to Hong Kong, I demanded what I should have asked for from the very beginning: the chance to do the film the right way—the Jackie Chan way. For the version of The Protector that was released in Asia, I brought back Aiello and Bill “Superfoot” Wallace—the American martial artist who played one of the main villains—and reshot the final fight, making it longer, more dynamic, and more exciting. I had Edward Tang write a subplot to the film featuring a new character played by Sally Yeh, the popular singer and actress. And I cut out all of the crude nonsense that Glickenhaus had squeezed into the film, including the scene in which I walk into a drug laboratory full of nude women! 

Compare his version and mine side by side, and tell me which is better. To me—and my fans in Asia—I think the answer is clear. 

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And as for the audiences, well, in the United States the film was a complete bust. But in Hong Kong and Japan, my version held its own. 

In any case, I told Leonard that I didn’t care about the American market anymore and that I didn’t want to make any more bad films just to try to break through. 

“I still think there’s a great deal of potential there, Jackie,” he said. 

“I’m sick of the word potential,” I retorted. “If I ever go back to America again—and I’m not saying I will—I’m not going as Bruce Lee, or Clint Eastwood, or John Wayne. I’ll go back as Jackie Chan, or I won’t go at all.”

Leonard knew I was right. 

There was nothing left to say.