MOVIE TRIVIA!

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The

Cannonball Run, which was produced by Hong Kong company Golden Harvest. It starred Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett and other big names, and also featured HK’s own Jackie Chan in only his second Hollywood film. Though it performed well at the box office (the opening weekend gross was the fourth highest ever recorded!), the critics weren’t so kind – famous reviewer Roger Ebert called it “an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition.” Reynolds later admitted doing the film “for all the wrong reasons”. Here are a few more fast facts about it. • Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest (which produced Bruce Lee films in the 1970s) specifically requested Jackie Chan be in the film, even though he’d only been on Hollywood screens once before (in The Big Brawl).

• Chan played a Japanese (!) race-car driver in The

Cannonball Run; he’s listed in the credits as “Subaru Driver #1”. Needless to say, this wasn’t Jackie’s big break in America. That wouldn’t come until much later, in 1995, with Rumble in the Bronx.

• Coincidentally, the nickname that Chan’s parents gave

to him as a young child was Pao-pao, or “cannonball”.

• If the film didn’t exactly build on Jackie Chan’s legacy as a movie star, it at least gave him some inspiration: “One thing I picked up from The Cannonball Run was the use of bloopers and outtakes under the final credits, which I’ve done in all my movies since.”