Here’s a pic of Kurt Russell and John Carpenter taken while they were filming Big Trouble in Little China:

I must confess that I didn’t get Big Trouble when it first came out back in 1986. I’m not sure anyone at the time really did. I remember thinking it was weird and stupid and I couldn’t decide what the hell kind of movie it was supposed to be. I don’t think I understood the plot, as hard as that is to admit.

But then about ten years later, I was introduced to the work of Jackie Chan and suddenly I figured it out. Big Trouble wasn’t stupid at all, at least not in the way I’d believed it was. It was merely ahead of its time. Carpenter had made a Hong Kong martial-arts action-comedy before we folks in flyover country had ever seen one. No, that’s not entirely correct… what he’d done was melded the sensibilities of those HK flicks with his own, specifically by dropping an American action hero and tropes of the American Western, along with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence toward both, into a martial-arts action-comedy to create something wholly unique, a synthesis of two very different — and yet both supremely entertaining — filmmaking cultures. In short, I re-evaluated the movie and realized it was pretty damn cool.

Russell and Carpenter… two of my favorites Hollywood artists. Sadly, both have been in decline for years. But during the ’80s, man, what a combination they made… no less than a latter-day John Ford and John Wayne, in my humble opinion. It’d be awesome if they managed to make one final good movie together; hey, I can dream, can’t I?

The picture came from here, incidentally, a really awesome photoblog that manages to dig up lots of stuff along these lines. Check it out!