FLIPPING THE BIRD:
AN EXPLORATION INTO THE NONESSENTIAL

It's a free country, I suppose. Free enough that when some people watch the movie The Crow, they actualize a deep-seated need to wear pancake whiteface and run around in public like ghostly Littletonian assassins, while others blather on endlessly about mystic curses, those-goddamned-movie-people-anyway, or "what really happened."

Because what we're all really talking about, behind that blind, is Brandon Lee, and how he died.

"Fair game" topics are all about media freedom, so it would be wrong to suggest that the nearly talent-free Bridget Baiss should not have taken it upon herself to produce something called The Crow: The Story Behind the Film ("The Making of the Crow, Inc.," 2000)—not so much a "book" as a "book-length work," since it does not appear to have been published by anybody. There's a credit inside for the outfit in Florida that bound and printed the thing. There's a veiled reference to "a publisher from London" in the Introduction, so worded as to imply the project was professionally commissioned. But if it was, no imprint or colophon appears on the spine, the flaps, the legal page, or anywhere else inside this sturdy product. Amazon.com lists a UK outfit called Oliver Books as the publisher, when in fact it is merely the distributor. "Oliver Books brings you the coolest products with the biggest movie stars and celebrities in the world," proclaims its website, where, sure enough, you can score calendars, posters, and photo-books on Bruce and Brandon Lee. It's the place to go if you have a gnawing hunger for, say, a Gillian Anderson mousepad.

It's pitiably obvious that this product is completely home-made by amateurs. The typo-riddled text seems to assume the shape of paragraphs and chapters at random, the typeface hovers one baby step short of those vanity press film-book projects (the ones that usually turn out to be somebody's graduate thesis hidden between hardcover boards), and the whole enterprise looks like it was laid out in a hot garage during a rushed weekend.

It comes as no shock, at this point, to discover that Ms. Baiss, who never hesitates to plug herself as "an international television and print journalist," is qualified to write this tome by virtue of logging fluff celebrity interviews for outlets like E! Online or for (saith the flap) "America Online's entertainment portal—Entertainment Asylum." Enter her name into your search engine right now and check out her credits. It won't take long.

I will give her credit, though, for finding a way to counterfeit the Crow logo so as not to tromp on the trademark rights of Pressman Films, which, upon sniffing the slant of her enterprise, quickly bailed from cooperating or permitting any usage of licensed Crow material.

Hoisting herself upon the platform of a commercially exploitable tragedy, Baiss dutifully interviewed selected elements of the film crew, and, like a hard disk, interpreted every bit of input fed to her as truth. The result is so predictable it barely qualifies as reportage and cannot qualify as news, especially to any reader who has taken the whole "Crow Mythos" to heart. For Crow fans, this data is previously-chewed carrion, shat out, eaten again, and upchucked—hence, bile, which the text serves up to a dismaying degree. In particular, bile from disgruntled employees—many of them fired or dismissed—whose righteous hyperbole frequently masks the sheer irrelevance of much of their commentary.

What is the sound of a dozen axes, grinding?

Or consider the overabundance of commentary by Jeff Most, the barrel-bottom of the food chain of producers connected to The Crow. In most instances, it is merely inaccurate, simplistic, and overly self-congratulatory. In others, it is so full of over-the-top howler-monkey bullshit that it propels the work at hand into the realm of fiction, if not an alternate-history take whose sole purpose is the glorification of Most's own (inconsequential) status during the production of the original movie. He grandly brags of plot elements which, by this late date, I'm sure he thinks he contributed...though Alex Proyas, the director, is certain to find them a revelation.

Nits could be picked here, and details haggled, and a flotilla of lies contested. But what would be the point? It would be like saying the Nazis were flawed because their trouser cuffs were cut inaccurately.

(And speaking of the Third Reich, one completely detestable fabrication of Most's is his claim that swastikas were a common part of my wardrobe—and sure enough, Bridget Baiss picks this up and runs with it in the very next paragraph, which sort of demonstrates in microcosm the airheaded, believe-anything abandon of her approach. I have not, do not, would not, and will never wear a swastika; my father was a B-24 tail gunner shot down in action and incarcerated in Stalag 17-B in Krems, Austria, for the last year of World War Two...which makes Jeff Most a lying fool, and Bridget Baiss someone who would believe the lies of a fool.)

(Okay, so that's one nit picked. Flaws are as abundant in Baiss' work as potato chips at a picnic, and it's hard to nibble just one.)

This project, this casserole of spoiled orts and leavings, is the sort of cut-and-paste scavengery in which the writing itself lacks the passion to inflame actual anger, leaving a residual emotion more on the order of annoyance or irritation—as when a pesky fly persists in planting its feces-smeared feet in your salad dressing, over and over and over. And over. After awhile, the fact that Baiss apparently doesn't know the difference between a revolver and an automatic, or a blue screen and a green screen, or how to properly spell the names of her principal interviewees (two out of five are misspelled on the tome's back cover) merely evokes a sigh, mostly in recognition of the opportunity being squandered here. Conversely, it's cold comfort of a sort that even more people weren't victimized by this project's hammer-thumbed idea of journalism, or maladroitly sniped by Baiss' idea of payback for noncompliance.

(Harsh? Yeah, but I'm one of the snipees. Baiss even hijacked a photograph to which I hold the copyright and ran it sans attribution. Sour grapes? I just said no. The Dutch angle, Bizarro World slant of this project is the obvious result of a trade off—Baiss' gratitude for interview material expressed as favorable portrayal, versus a vindictive tone that repeatedly casts, in the most villainous or trivial light possible, anyone else who "just said no.")

Some years back there were two competing Rod Serling biographies on the bookshelf. One, by Joel Engel, admitted upfront that Rod Serling engendered fierce loyalties and proportionately large hatreds, and that no report could hope to be even-handed. It strove for balance and weighed its research with a critical eye. The other, by Gordon Sander, dug first for dirt, and lost fundamental interviewees in exchange for the freedom to indulge in scandal-mongering, which boiled down to a few pointedly leering hints about Serling's assorted misconducts that essentially changed or revealed nothing. It is too easy for the latitude offered by any such "unauthorized" endeavor to become a de facto license to lie and whitewash, which is what happens in the very first sentence of the Sander book, which claims it to be "the first comprehensive biography of Rod Serling"...when the Engel book came out two years earlier. Hence, a number of fundamental names are expectedly missing from Sander's acknowledgements page—names indispensable to any examination of Serling or his work. Like, say, Richard Matheson. Like Carol Serling.

Similarly, the Baiss Crow project is devoid of far too many fundamental players to be comprehensive, or even comprehensible. Often the most critical non-interviewees suffer are Baiss' diminishing tactic of referring to them by job title, when she knows damned good and well who they are. Forget me, forget Proyas, what about Ed Pressman, Caldecot Chubb, Andrew Mason, Dariusz Wolski, Simon Murton, Steve Andrews and Alex McDowell? You sure can't look them up in the Index—because there isn't one. And you can find their names in the text—until the agenda demands they be "unnamed."

I don't blame her for feeling persnickety. Without us, there's no book, not really.

And that's what this production is: a non-book. Which means this isn't a book review. It can't be. It's an opinion piece—my reaction to a gang of people who so craved an outlet that they advantaged something sacred only to do dirty on it—some by mistake, some by incompetence, some innocently, and some with chokingly thick malice. After all, it's a free country. I ran into one of the interviewees, Laurence Mason (Tin-Tin) at my local supermarket, and his exact words to me were, "If I'd have known you and Alex wanted nothing to do with this, I'd've been down, too."

As for finding out the skinny on how Brandon Lee died—the reason most fans might be tempted to bother with this trifle—you've read it all before, and you don't need know-nothings to regurgitate chum upon you. Spare your psyche and your wallet. Go to any Crow fan website instead; as awful as they can be, at least they aspire to nobler sentiments than the perpetrators of this lamentable non-book are even capable of comprehending.

As for Proyas and I, we'll have our say soon enough, if anyone out there is still interested in the truth.