Turning A Problem Into Potential
20TH CENTURY FOX
James Hong and John Carpenter
Kwong’s on-screen rival, Dun, was familiar with the outrage over Year of the Dragon, as he made his big screen debut in that film. After Fox shot down the idea of casting Jackie Chan as Wang, Carpenter chose Dun because of his previous role. But Dun’s wife told him not to take Big Trouble in Little China. Instead, she urged him to accept a role in another project that was more positive for Asian-Americans.
“My wife read it and didn’t really like it,” Dun tells us. “I had an offer to do a TV movie [Blood and Orchid] about a true story in Hawaii, playing a lawyer. My agent wanted me to do that and my wife wasn’t sure because I had just done Year of the Dragon, that was my first film. So, this was only my second film. I didn’t protest it. There were some questions about the script and I saw a lot of possibilities. I was a W.D. Richter fan. I saw Buckaroo Bonzai and liked the way he kind of mixes all these genres and cultures and put them together. Kind of multi-cultural, futuristic. I saw the humor in Big Trouble, it felt like the right thing. It was like a childhood fantasy come true: You get to be a hero, you get be funny and kind of goofy and silly, which I am in real life. It was just fun.”
As Kwong recalls, the outrage over Big Trouble in Little China began as soon as the plot details leaked. The protesting organizations sent letters to Carpenter and 20th Century Fox officials to express their concerns over what they believed to be offensive portrayals of Chinese characters. Once Dun accepted the role of Wang, Carpenter shared one of the letters with him so that he’d be aware of the real troubles facing the film’s production. Dun refers to that period as “an interesting time,” because if not for these controversial roles, he would have never become an actor.
“In the mid-’80s, China was just opening up at the end of the cultural revolution of the late ’70s, and there were these things about China [Americans] were curious about,” Dun says. “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 and then I got cast in Dragon. 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.”
Dun was no stranger to racism in the ‘80s, sharing one particular incident that took place around the same time that he was filming Big Trouble in Little China. “Someone would say, ‘Go back to Vietnam,’ and I’m Chinese-American. So I’d say, ‘Well, go back to Chicago!’” he laughs. “There was a big transition starting in the ’80s. People knew there were the Four Asian Tigers, but they didn’t really come on that strong yet. It was a transition for everybody, just awareness of Asia in the presence of America and the world. The ’80s was a time when it was just starting to happen. Japan had come as an economic miracle and I just remember them destroying Japanese cars in Detroit and all that stuff.”
“All the Asian communities were ready to attack, anything down the line,” Kwong says. “Big Trouble in Little China was next, even though it was a comedy, even though it was tongue-in-cheek. They said, ‘No more negative stereotypes,’ and so they were developing on the outside a huge Asian Pacific coalition against Big Trouble in Little China. This was a very politically heavy time, so Big Trouble in Little China was a very pivotal political message besides it becoming a cult film. How did John Carpenter handle this? He had meetings with the cast and crew and he asked us for a lot of input. It affected the script in that now people wanted the real deal. He said, ‘I want you guys to bring what you can to the table,’ and he gave certain people a different title. From stunt coordinator, now he’s an associate producer. Then, us as a group met with the community and we talked things out and watched the community uprise. It wasn’t that Big Trouble in Little China or 20th Century Fox was ignoring the community, we chose to engage them and brought them onto the set. It was diffused because we, as the cast and crew, said, ‘Look, this is our project, we’re making this happen. So, what’s the problem here?’”
From ‘Big Trouble’ To A ‘Golden’ Opportunity
20TH CENTURY FOX
Dennis Dun and John Carpenter
As far as the doors that Big Trouble in Little China opened for Kwong, Dun, and many of their castmates, the progress was evident almost immediately with the release of The Golden Child in December 1986. One of the problems that dogged Carpenter during the production of Big Trouble in Little China was Fox rushing it to beat The Golden Child to theaters. Carpenter tells us that it was a little odd that two movies that focused on Chinese mysticism were in production at the same time, but the silver lining of his film being fast-tracked was that some of his actors were also cast in the Eddie Murphy vehicle.
“Half our people went from Big Trouble in Little China to The Golden Child,” Kwong recalls. “James Hong, Victor Wong, I was on Golden Child — a lot of people that were from our camp were cast. Again, I had to do the martial arts stuff, so in the audition I’m there with the director and of course, what do I do? I bring my whole bag of weapons. I walk in there and I’m ready for this audition, this verbal part of the audition and they say, ‘What’s that?’ And I throw the bag down and it goes clunk and crash, and I look at them and point them in the face and say, ‘That’s in case I don’t get the job.’”
Unfortunately for fans, the cast, and Carpenter, Big Trouble in Little China being a bomb meant there was no chance there’d ever be a sequel. Even Larry Gordon, the head of motion pictures for 20th Century Fox in 1985, was gone before the film was released. Just as Carpenter remembers, Kwong points the blame for the lack of success squarely on the marketing department, while pondering what could have been.
“I wish there was a sequel,” he says. “I wish that at the beginning that John Carpenter got the kudos he deserved. Because time has proven that it’s a great film. And unfortunately it took all that time to become a great thing. And if they would have marketed it better, history might have been changed, because it was really interesting to follow that. That year was really good for me because I think I did three or four feature films in one year, right after that, almost back to back.”
Box office returns aside, Dun still remembers a different kind of response, perhaps far more important to him than money was to the studio. “When it came out I talked to some people in Hong Kong I had met and they really hated the film. With Richter and Carpenter and actors and everything it became something else. I wonder if they would like it now. I know even some Asian-Americans didn’t like it and they saw it recently and thought, yeah, I like it a lot better now. But I think back then the consciousness is very different and even Asians are very ambivalent about how they thought about themselves because we’re usually gangsters, sex trafficking white women in Asia, or gamblers, pimps, drug dealers. I mean, there is that element in any culture so I think that’s pretty much what the portrayal was before, we were just mysterious people. So the whole ’80s with the films like Big Trouble was a transition of just the world. A continuum of a civilization,” he laughs. “People evolving and learning about themselves. I know it sounds so intellectual but I think that’s really what it is.”