The Floating City: Inside Hong Kong Now.My piece - a profile, attempting to encapsulate Chan's extraordinary story, his unique talents as a performer and filmmaker, his popularity across Asia, and the perils he faced in trying to win acceptance among moviegoers in the West - appeared in the magazine in January of 1996, and helped introduce Chan to the U.S. So it took some convincing - VHS tapes of Chan's movies and copies of articles that had appeared about him in the cinephile press - but I got the assignment and went to Hong Kong that summer to accompany him for three weeks during the shooting of Thunderbolt, a street-racing action thriller whose $HKD 200 million budget made it the most expensive Hong Kong film had ever produced.
Despite Chan's ubiquity across Asia and the real pandemonium that resulted anytime he made public appearances in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, there was no World Wide Web yet in 1995, no Wikipedia, and no YouTube where one could easily call up scenes from films or appearances on talk shows. I'd guessed correctly - the editor, who was knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, had never heard of Jackie Chan. I think you should send me there to write about him." "You've probably never heard of him, but he's going to be huge. "There's a guy in Hong Kong," I told him. I'd recently begun contributing to The New York Times Magazine, and so I called my editor. One day, the front page headlines trumpeted New Line Cinema's plan to distribute Jackie Chan's latest film, Rumble in the Bronx, in the U.S. In 1995, I was in Los Angeles staying with a friend who produced independent films and had the trade magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter delivered to his door early each morning. Once in a while, if you're lucky, and paying the right kind of attention, events align to give you a clear view of the future.
The Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan (Frank Micelotta/AP)
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