Hey folks, Harry here, and believe me I am familiar with this injury. Swelling and damage to cartilage around the coccyx was what put me down for that period of time at the beginning of the site. Having to have people help you do everything in life sucks... While I love Jackie Chan's stuntwork... I really hope he takes care of himself... as El Cosmico lamented the other day, "Oh, if only Jackie Chan could stay young and athletic forever..." Amen...
Hi, Harry!
Ye is here!
Do you know Jackie Chan almost got paralyzed for making The Accidental Spy?
One day during the shooting in Turkey, Jackie suddenly felt he couldn't move the lower part of his body ˆ he later found out the cartilage around his coccyx was damaged. A local doctor told him if the cartilage got hurt again, he would have to sit on a wheel chair for the rest of his life. Although Jackie felt it didn't matter, the director and the fight director had asked him not to shoot the same scene over and over again. However, Jackie Chan was not the only one to see the doctor. High stress had sent all ten producers into hospital during and after the shooting. The film has also suffered from Titanic syndrome ˆ over-budgeting. Additional $17 million HK ($2.2 million US) were put in only after the full support of Jackie, as a co-producer. A taboo has been broken in this movie ˆ the female leading character died for the first time in a Jackie Chan movie.
The most "fantastic" scene is Jackie running around in a Turkish bathhouse wearing nothing at all ˆ his entire butt got exposed and the scene has been censored in mainland China and Malaysia. There is a big fighting sequence after the Turkish bath, which was shot in a local spice market in Istanbul. The daily sales for each vendor is about $2,000 - $3,000 US and 80 vendors' stores were rented for 10 days - You do the math. During one shot, Jackie's character "accidentally" sit on a bag of curry powder. Real curry has to be put on Jackie's poor butt because any substitute didn't look real enough. After the shooting, Jackie run into a bathroom to wash himself, but no matter what, it still hurt. Other fighting scenes include: destroying an entire floor of a building in Hong Kong, leveling a Turkish fishing village to save a girl, smashing more than forty vehicles including an oil tanker, head-on collision with a propeller plane while riding a BMW heavy motorbike, and jumping off a 50-metre (150 feet) high bridge and rolling down the side of a valley.
The flick's North American releasing right has been sold to Miramax for $11 million US, a record for Asian movies. The bad news is pirated copies have been in the market long time ago even before the official release.
By the way, yesterday's news "MATRIX 2 & 3 cursed? I hope not" by The LMWannaB has been referred by Hong Kong's Apple Daily. A lot of my reports are originated from this paper.
Ye Meng
