Guess who's featured in Timeout! Hong Kong. Yep that's right. Its my Hong Kong mentor Bey Logan. Check it out!
Infamous Asian film impresario Bey Logan tells Patrick Brzeski how Hong Kong cinema can live again on the page.
Owing largely to his bad-ass, action movie-ready name, Bey Logan’s biography could easily be the setup to a pulpy kung fu flick. Born to working class parents in the humdrum English city of Peterborough, Logan became obsessed with martial arts movies as a young boy. While his friends let their Bruce Lee worship wane in their teens, Logan dug in deeper, devouring mail-ordered martial arts mags, watching every kung fu film he could get his hands on, and finally fixing his fantasies on the source of the action movie culture he had come to adore: Hong Kong. “I had no qualifications, no film degree; my dad was an accountant, my mum was a nurse,” Logan explains at his new offices in Sheung Wan. “Imagine their excitement when they asked what I wanted to do for a career and I said, ‘I’m going to move across the world to work on movies with this guy named Jackie Chan.’” Despite his mother’s protestations, shortly after his 19th birthday in 1980, Logan set out to do just that, embarking on his first solo trip to Hong Kong. Cue montage: Fresh off the boat, a bright-faced teenage Bey Logan approaches the big studios of the Hong Kong movie industry and gets politely rebuffed at every door. Undeterred, he hits the cinemas, watching Hong Kong action movie after Hong Kong action movie, literally taking notes in his theatre seat, sedulously studying his genre, preparing the outlines for a new project. Cut to Logan sitting down with various Hong Kong directors and stars, interviewing them for his popular new martial arts magazine – Impact. Next see Logan charming PR people and coyly slipping scripts to directors at the end of interviews. Now he’s on set. Now he’s practicing Hung Kuen on the Hong Kong docks with old-school Canto martial arts choreographers. Suddenly he’s at lunch with Jackie Chan discussing future co-productions. Then he’s making action movies with his own company, Shankara Productions, cofounded with Maggie Q. Next he’s getting hired by Harvey Weinstein as a Vice President and Asian Rep for the Weinstein Company. Ramping up to the present day, Logan approaches an active middle age, rolling out yet another new venture of his own, B&E Productions, which will release three films this winter and spring – the Michael Biehn action vehicle The Blood Bond, the 3D animationLittle Gobie, and Beach Spike, a kung fu volleyball romp starring Chrissie Chau. As the montage music runs down – most surprisingly of all – observe Logan launching an all-new book publishing operation. “I’ve always felt that if I found the time and patience, I could write fiction and it might in some ways be more satisfying than writing scripts,” he says of the new publishing wing of B&E Productions. “Because so often scripts don’t get made, or if they do, they end up getting made entirely differently than how you imagined them.” As The Blood Bond was in production, Logan found himself generally agreeing with director Michael Biehn’s departures from his script, but he lamented that his original vision of the story would never reach an audience. Experimenting at his desk at night, he decided to see how his script would work as a novel. “Hong Kong cinema has this very unique energy that can be interpreted in different ways. What I’ve tried to do is say, if you were to tell the story of a Hong Kong action film as a novel, how would that play?” Action film ethos indeed runs deep through The Blood Bond the book. As the story begins, a revered religious leader by the name of Karmapata is vitally wounded in a failed assassination attempt and requires an emergency blood transfusion within 12 hours to survive. The leader’s enemies learn that he has a remarkably rare blood type and immediately execute all of the potential donor matches in Asia but one – John Tremayne, an alcoholic former Special Forces operative living a life of dissipation in northern Thailand. Karmapata’s loyal bodyguard, a female martial arts warrior named Deva, must retrieve Tremayne before her master’s time runs out. Battles, hijinks, and an unexpected bond between this odd couple ensue. Like every great Hong Kong action movie, the plot is shaggy, and the style scrappy, but Logan’s Blood Bond is also instantly addictive. After all his years working within the confines of the movie business, Logan says the freedom of novel writing came as a revelation to him. “Basically, if you’re a script writer and producer, everything you write is structured towards making it real in the three-dimensional world; you’re thinking: who’s going to play that part, how are we going to shoot it, what’s your location, what’s our budget, and so on. But when you’re writing a novel, the only place it plays is in the theatre of the mind, so it’s like working on the ultimate movie set – you’re totally free. That was a really fun thing for me to discover.” Logan is now at work on companion versions of a sequel to The Blood Bond, one for the screen, one for print. He’s also spending an hour or so each morning writing a semi-autobiographical book entitled, My Life in 36 Chambers. “I’ve chosen 36 of my favourite films and I’m describing my personal experiences with them, along with analyses and discussions of the role they played in the history of Hong Kong action cinema.” On top of his film work, Logan has always maintained a parallel career as an expert in Hong Kong cinema, consulting on various projects and lending commentary to over 100 action movie DVD releases. “I’m hoping that the world of Hong Kong film buffs that I’ve been a part of for so long will be curious to see what I can do with these books. I know I am.”
