The Official Making Of Big Trouble In Little China (1)
Category: Books,Comics & Graphic Novels,Graphic Novels
The Official Making Of Big Trouble In Little China (1) Details
About the Author TARA BENNETT is a New York Times Bestselling author and entertainment journalist. As an author or co-author, she's written more than 20 official movie and TV companion books including Sons of Anarchy: The Official Collector's Edition, Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show, Fringe: September's Notebook (an Amazon Best Book of 2013), Lost Encyclopedia, The Art of Ice Age, and many more. Tara is also a contributing writer for SCI FI Magazine, Total Film, Blastr.com, and is a U.S. editor for SFX Magazine. She is also an adjunct TV writing professor at Rowan University.PAUL TERRY is a bestselling author and award-winning music artist. He has written/edited official publications for the Bad Robot TV shows Alias, Lost, and Fringe, as well as for The Blacklist, LEGO, DreamWorks, Stars Wars, The Simpsons, Futurama, and Sleepy Hollow. Paul is also the author of the Top 10 book franchise. When he's not writing books, Paul writes music. His film scores include Emily (starring Oscar-nominee Felicity Jones and Emmy-winner Christopher Eccleston) and the highly acclaimed chiller Care. Under his solo moniker of Cellarscape, his records include the award-winning album The Act Of Letting Go. Read more
Reviews
Everyone’s got a favorite movie, or at the very least a film that you watched every day as a kid, a film you never have and never will get tired of. It’s something more than just a movie, it’s a part of who you are and what you’re about. For me, that was/is Big Trouble in Little China. I couldn’t even tell you the first time I saw Big Trouble, but I know I’ve watched it probably more than 1,000 times easily. Directed by John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York, They Live), written by W.D Richter (Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension) and starring Kurt Russell (Escape From New York, Stargate, Hateful Eight), this is a Kung-Fu action film with monsters and magic and all the action and comedy you could want. This movie just oozes cool!I grew up about 150 miles East of San Francisco, where this film takes place. And about 50 miles south of “Mutual Fidelity Insurers of Sacramento” I’ve been to some of the film locations, and grew up in the 1980’s so yes there is some biased on my part when I tell people that “big Trouble in Little China is the best film ever made, period”. I take ownership of it, like it’s my movie. When I show people Big Trouble for the first time I do it with a sense of pride, as if I took any part in shaping this piece masterpiece. Most of my life I’ve not gotten any Big Trouble merch, K2 made some action figures a decade ago, BOOM Studios started/finished a Comic line last year, but by and large Big Trouble In Little China gets no love from 20th Century Fox, so luckily there are more diehard fans out there like me.I am like Jack Burton, minus the Pork Chop Express, mullet, and overall coolness, I identify a lot with the character. Motor mouthed, abrasive type who “sooner or later I rub everyone the wrong way”, I think I identify with the character because we are so similar. I’ve been clamoring for Big Trouble any and everything for decades now, I pre-ordered this book over a year ago (Dec 29th of 2015) and the wait has been real. This official Making of Big Trouble in Little China was put together by Tara Bennett and Paul Terry (who both worked on the Lost Encyclopedia, highly recommended) and while I knew I’d enjoy the format and high quality pictures, I had a feeling I wouldn’t get much new info or pictures out of this book and had resigned to the idea of just having a cool coffee table book on my favorite film. But boy was I glad to be wrong, not only did I get tons of new info out of this, there were quite a few pictures I had never seen before.There are some great pics of Richard Edlund’s creature effect work on the Wild Man and Thunder (who blows up), lots of great promotional shots and behind the scenes stuff here for fans. One of the best things I read here was from Dennis Dun (Wang Chi) who happens to be from my home town of Stockton, CA, said something I had wondered about my whole life. In between takes and blocking shots and with time to kill, Russell and Dun worked out how their characters are friends. Dun says “We decided we’d only been friends for about 4 or 5 years, didn’t know much about each other’s personal lives. We got together to drink and gamble”, to me it was great that they had built a background for the characters. Within the actual film we see they don’t know too much about each other’s lives but it’s awesome to find out that the two haven’t been friends for very long and mainly hang out to booze it up and play Pai Gow (the book says they’re playing Pai Gow but Jack Burton actually says “better learn how to play Fan Tan buddy boy” so they actually played both Pai Gow and Fan Tan ). These are the kinds of things I wanted out of this book, to hear new stories from the set, to read about how the actors prepped for roles. Learning about how important it was for Dennis as Wang Chi to accurately represent an Asian American in the film was really awesome to read.My favorite part of the whole book was Kurt Russell’s afterword. It reads like how he talks, I was laughing so hard I cried, and then I got kinda choked up about some things good ol’ Jack Burton had to say about us Big Trouble fans. I cant tell you the last time I read a book from cover to cover that wasn’t a comic book. I just couldn’t put this down. If you’re a fan of Big Trouble in Little China (and everyone should be, but I get it, not everyone is) then this is the definitive book about everyone’s favorite pig hauling, loud mouthed side kick truck driver Jack Burton and his Big Trouble in Little China. Terry/Bennett killed it with the page layout and high quality pictures, I loved all the interviews and info, the foreword by director himself John Carpenter and afterword by Kurt Russell just book end this terrific piece. This is exactly what I wanted it to be, informative, funny, cool, it really shakes the pillars of heaven. Do yourself a favor, take a swig from your Six Demon bag, put your check in the mail, do whatever you’ve got to do to get your hands on this book before the Wing Kong buys them up and puts them on coffee tables inside The White Tiger. This book comes FULLY APPROVED.
