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COVER STORY:
Brain Drain: |
ASIA | January 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 3 |
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A comfortable presence on Hong Kong TV serials from 1976, Chow blasted to big-screen stardom a decade later as the charming gunman‹a sociopath with a soft heart‹in Woo's A Better Tomorrow. The film triggered a long fascination with "heroic bloodshed"; the producers must have gotten their ammo wholesale. The bullet ballets took place all over the city. They made restaurants a perilous place to be even before the chicken-flu scare. Neighborhood streets were torched to cinders; Tsimshatsui could have been mistaken for Beirut. For a decade, thanks in part to Chow, Woo and director Ringo Lam, Hong Kong was a city and a cinema on fire‹the world leader in action movies. Chow's eminence exactly paralleled the golden age of Hong Kong cinema: 1986-95. And it wasn't limited to killer roles. He could be funny or sensitive; one of his three Hong Kong Film Awards for best actor (he was nominated 12 times) was for his role as a father in Johnny To's 1989 All About Ah Long, a kind of Hong Kong Kramer vs. Kramer. And Chow always scored with the paying customers. His God of Gamblers' Return was Hong Kong's top-grossing film of 1994, beating two stalwart contenders: the Jackie Chan Drunken Master II and Stephen Chow's Bond spoof From Beijing With Love. Chow's characters were richly cosmopolitan. He played the dapper gunman in scarf, tuxedo and color-coordinated Uzi. When he wore T shirts, they became the cream of chic. The bold fashion statement of Chow's long coats and dark shades so impressed a California videostore geek named Quentin Tarantino that the kid rushed out and bought the same outfit. (Tarantino, who helped Chow when the newcomer came to Los Angeles, is also Sorvino's boyfriend.) In Woo films, Chow occasionally got to dazzle in foreign climates, and even to speak English. In Once a Thief he swanked around Paris and the Riviera with Leslie Cheung. He does bilingual tough-talking in A Better Tomorrow; his on-screen pal Ti Lung says admiringly, "Your English is improved," and Chow, with a no-big-deal grin, almost sings out, "Of courrrrrse!" In A Better Tomorrow II he played a Chinese restaurateur in New York City and got to practice such primal Hollywood argot as "Drop the gun!" and "Don't f--- with my family!" Speaking English in a $26 million American film is something else again. In fact, getting there was quite an achievement. Chow's agents at William Morris and his manager, Terence Chang, at first hoped to land him a strong supporting role to, say, Robert De Niro in, oh, a Martin Scorsese film‹a property where he could shine but didn't have to carry the picture. Then Columbia's Zee started taking Chow to Hollywood premieres. "People would pull me aside and say, 'Who the hell is that guy? He should be a star.' He is a star." When Zee read the Replacement Killers script, originally angled as a smart-guy action film for a Bruce Willis type, he thought it could work for Chow. Ten exhausting drafts later, it did.
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