the Rope-a-dope series
My first job out of college was a fight choreographer. It was all I wanted to be growing up. At age 16, my cousin loaned me a bootlegged VCD called Jackie Chan: My Stunts, which taught me the fundamentals of staging fight scenes, editing, composition, and discerning the difference between good and bad acting in a fight scene. In the early 2000s, I stumbled upon a messageboard for aspiring stuntpeople and filmmakers, who all saw the same DVD (years later I would’ve discovered that my buddy Bing did the same but for skating videos…I wonder how many of these boards became filmmaking hubs). Eventually San Francisco became a little hub for many of these stuntpeople. I flocked to the Bay around then as well, it was glorious. We made shorts and features constantly, and it became a fertile breeding ground for some of the best fight choreographers working today. The Rope-a-Dope series was a tribute to those times.
Behind the scenes
Did you know more than 20 stuntmen were killed in the making of this film?
Ok fine I don’t think we even had 20 stuntpeople in the film, but here are some true facts: