Jackie Chan recalls doing odd jobs at film studios, and getting his big break
HONG KONG: Jackie Chan has recounted that as a teenager, he and other students would hang around film studios begging for odd jobs.
Initially, they were satisfied with a HK$5 payment from the HK$65 Yu Jim-yuen received for each student, until the youngsters rebelled and received HK$35 a day.
Writing in his just-released memoir Never Grow Up, Jackie also recalled that he left the academy in 1971, aged 17, and worked in the Hong Kong film industry as a stuntman at a time when safety standards – and salaries – were scarce to nonexistent.
His big break came came when a director wanted someone who could “vault a high balcony railing, fall with his back to the ground, flip in mid-air, and land steadily before continuing his fight” – all without cardboard boxes to break the fall, so it could be captured in one take. Jackie nailed the stunt but insisted on doing it a second time, to make it perfect.
He was then offered leading roles, but failed to make a splash as kung fu films at the time were dominated by Bruce Lee. After Lee’s death, in 1973, Jackie signed to the Lo Wei Motion Picture Co, which had made Lee famous, but the studio wanted him only as a double of the dead superstar.
In New Fist of Fury (1976), Jackie played “a cold-blooded, rage-filled inhuman killer who sought revenge only”. The film flopped. Similar movies followed, all meeting the same fate.
Finally, independent producer Ng See-yuen asked Jackie what he wanted to do. Jackie’s reply: “Bruce Lee would scream and roar while fighting in order to demonstrate his power and rage, but I prefer to cry out and pull faces. Bruce Lee is superhuman in the audience’s eyes, but I just want to be a regular guy. I want to play ordinary, flawed people who sometimes despair. They aren’t heroes; there are things they can’t do.”
In 1978 and 79, Jackie appeared in the films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Drunken Master and The Fearless Hyena, and “seemingly overnight” became a hit. After making HK$3,000 a month plus HK$3,000 per film, Hong Kong film giant Golden Harvest swooped in and offered him HK$4.8 million per film. Jackie had arrived.
Then he crashed. Still a country bumpkin, Jackie carried huge wads of cash, travelled with an entourage and drank so much that it affected his work.
He often drove drunk, even crashing two luxury cars in one day, and wasted money on gambling and prostitutes, in particular, one woman he knew only as “number nine”.
In his memoir, Jackie wrote: “I behaved so badly because of my deep insecurities. Ever since I was a little boy I’d been looked down on by rich kids.”
Then Hollywood called. Jackie made The Big Brawl (1980), which disappeared, and Cannonball Run (1981), in which he appeared as a nobody alongside Burt Reynolds and Sammy Davis Jnr. He returned to Hong Kong chastened, but then made one of his best-known films, Project A (1983), which features one of his most famous stunts: he climbs a flagpole, jumps onto a clock tower, and then falls face-down onto the ground – the fall broken only by two cloth awnings.
In his book, Jackie also recounts courting his wife, Taiwanese actress Joan Lin Feng-jiao, spending more time on the difficulties of raising their son, Jaycee.
Jackie’s explanation of Jaycee’s 2015 jail sentence in Beijing for drug offences is matter of fact, and his description of his 1999 affair is cursory. There’s no mention of the woman, or of the daughter that resulted from the affair, or of the media scandal that followed.
Maybe that’s for another book.