GETTING CARTER : Catching up with the Hapkido hero.

I first met Carter Wong at his New York kung fu school, around about (according to my reckoning) twenty years ago. At that time, his earlier films were only available in the UK on blurry pirate videos, but that hadn’t stopped me watching them. At that time, Carter was making a determined assault on Hollywood. He had already shot his memorable performance as Thunder in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China, and would go on to film a low budget chop socky entitled Hardcase and Fist. Subsequently, Carter ended up in Hong Kong, and so did I.

One of the earliest Hong Kong actioners I worked on as a producer was the cop thriller High Voltage, starring Donnie Yen and Roy Cheung. We actually shot a scene with Carter playing the commander of Donnie’s fearless cop, but, for pacing reasons, the sequence was cut from the finished print.

I was working at Media Asia when I next ran into Carter, and he appeared in a BBC kung fu movie documentary that I helped produce. Since then, I’d lost contact with him, until a happy set of coincidences brought us back in touch.

As we’re prepping our Dragon Dynasty DVD release of Carter’s debut film, Hapkido, I had tried, in vain, to track him down. Then my step-father, Tino Ceberano (the bearded gentleman pictured at the top of this page) hit town. Tino is a grandmaster in Goju Kai karate, which was, coincidentally, the original style of Carter Wong. Tino was cooking up a storm of fine Filipino cuisine at my apartment, when he mentioned that he’d like to meet Carter. One of our guests, Capoerista Zen Berimbau, mentioned that he knew someone who knew someone who knew Carter… and so contact was re-established. (Zen, by the way, turns up in the forthcoming DD release Flashpoint, playing a boxing coach in the opening scene.)

And so it was that Tino and myself ended up meeting Carter in the coffee shop of Kowloon’s Eaton Hotel. For a guy in his 60s, Carter is in incredible shape. (Actually, for a guy in his 40s, he’d be in incredible shape…) He credits this to a new form of combined Tai Chi that he’s devised, and, with the same energy I remembered, was soon demonstrating moves for us. Looking at him in action, its hard to believe that here’s a guy who was being launched as a martial arts hero back when Bruce Lee was still alive.

Carter got into the business when a mutual friend told Golden Harvest director Huang Feng that he knew a karate instructor who might be a potential kung fu movie actor.
Huang was initially skeptical. In Hong Kong, most martial arts ‘masters’ were middle-aged or beyond. He was surprised by Carter’s youth, and impressed by his Goju-based fighting skills. Huang subsequently cast Wong opposite Angela Mao and Sammo Hung in the classic Hapkido. Carter got his trial by fire when he shot his own version of the classic Fist Of Fury ‘storming the karate dojo’ scene. Bruce Lee was shooting his directorial debut, Way Of The Dragon, on the neighbouring soundstages at Golden Harvest, and there are photos of him demonstrating kicks to Carter on the Hapkido set.

Carter was further teamed with Angela in The Opium Trail, which was produced by Andrew Vajna, who later moved to Hollywood, where he made such hits as the Rambo series and T3. As a Golden Harvest contract player, Wong made such chop socky classics as Back Alley Princess, When Taekwondo Strikes and The Tournament. My favourite of his Harvest films is The Skyhawk, in which he stars opposite the venerable Kwan Tak-hing. Though his star was soon eclipsed by the kung fu comedy generation (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and their fellows), Carter got to work with an extraordinary range of directors. He worked with Shaws legend Chang Cheh on Marco Polo, shot on location in Taiwan, and on an early John Woo actioner, The Dragon Tamers, which was filmed in a frozen Korea. Carter also worked with actor-director-producer Karl Maka on the kung fu Spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Loser (Carter was The Good…). He achieved further cult status when he starred in the Taiwanese kung fu epic 18 Bronzemen.

In recent years, Carter has become involved in various businesses away from the movie arena. He was one of the first promoters to stage Thai Boxing events in China. He still made occasional film appearances, in projects as diverse as the wonderfully named and weirdly executed Transmigration Romance, and the little-seen Canadian martial arts actioner Tiger Claws 3 (produced by another old friend, Jalal Merhi). Today, Carter’s energies are focussed on spreading the good word on his new training system, but he has agreed to look back (without anger!) at his early days of gung fu glory when we interview him for the Hapkido DVD.