It was quite understandable, as apart from these films being treated as a bit of joke or outright despised by some and not worth looking in to, the filmmakers didn't make things any easier by making a huge mess out of the film credits of both cast and crew. With: pseudonyms; fake names; misspelled names; missing names; credits for people not in the film; alternate names; and with so many cast/crew suffering from all of the above, it's no wonder researchers weren't keen on attempting this task.
Unfortunately for me, I just can't seem to help myself and am a gluten for punishment when it comes to researching an area of martial arts cinema that doesn't get as much attention as perhaps it should.
So of course, I tried to track down copies (as best quality as I could) of as many of the IFD and Filmark catalogue as I could and methodically went through them trying to work out as many ID's as possible. This involved, noting down the credits of each film while also taking screenshots of every face that showed up in the film and then trying to find those that were consistent with each other. A task that was made much more frustrating due to the naming issues mentioned earlier.
It became clear at this point, after names for actors that were definitely the same person were just not matching up on films for both companies, that the IFD credits were a lot more reliable than those of Filmark, and that Filmark credits tended to be complete rubbish 90-95% of the time. I had read that people working for both companies had to use fake names on one or the other, and my researched showed that it was Filmark that got the short end of the stick, sometimes having over 10 identifiable people with not a single correct name in the credits.
Even on other Filmark films the credits didn't match up, the same actors showing up many times, but each time a new name. There were a few exceptions where a name would appear in more than one film, but these too were usually BS with very few actually lining up with a certain actor, and even in the few cases they did, there were credits missing, or credits on the wrong film. Dealing with this was a nightmare. The unreliability of the Filmark credits is also the reason I didn't bother to screenshot them, as I have with the ones for IFD.
Even though much better than Filmark for giving real credits, IFD had issues too, with names being missing or on the wrong films, but much less frequently than Filmark. But it could be quite tricky to keep track of people when the names would vary a bit between films, often down to spelling errors. Things were just made so much harder than they needed to be. There was even one or two cases where actors I was working on IDing were ID'd by someone else in the meantime, which is fine, but because it hadn't been announced I ended up wasting some time on stuff that had already been done, which just added to my woes.
I don't think words can properly convey how much of a struggle this has been, I have had to take several breaks from this project, not only due to the size of it (must be over 100 films
), but also how frustrating it was having to deal with all the issues.
But my struggles haven't been for nothing, I've had some great success, not only spotting some familiar faces in new roles, but I've managed to add to ID maybe about 50 (I've not actually counted) people NEW to HKMDB and have also created a new category of “Unknown Foreign Actor --- 姓名不詳的外國人演員” for over 30 actors who showed up in more than one film, but just couldn't be sure on a name of, hopefully having these on the HKMDB may lead to the names being revealed at some point. I hope this is the case, as I believe in credit where it is due, and though some might scoff at these films, I think those that brought joy to so many should have their contribution noted.
Though I didn't have any direct input from any of the cast and crew of these films, I did manage to have some of my work checked by one or two, and have a few of my educated guesses confirmed (one actually gave me a couple of titbits on some of the actors too), so I'm quite happy I got as much done as I did.
At first this project was only meant to be about the foreign actors appearing in these films, I wasn't going to bother with the Hong Kong actors, as the foreigners were going to take up enough of my time and concentration, also there's other people that are probably better at ID HK guys from this era than me. But as always I just couldn't help myself, and after a few films I started noting editions to the HK local cast as I came across them.
On top of that, I also checked over as many films I could think of from the late 80s to early 90s that featured several foreign actors to see if I could find any more films with these new guys in them. I had a decent amount of success with these too, so have included some none IFD/Filmark, the most notable probably being Armour Of God, where I've managed to ID a whole bunch of the monks, and also spotted a bunch of doubling done by the JCST too. I also tried to get as much basic info on these guys as possible, so I've got a bunch of DOB, places of birth, aliases etc. to add to many of these people and even a few that weren't involved in these films that I added while I was at it
There were a few HK guys that I just couldn't name, that kept on popping up in films, so I created new “unknown actor” categories for them similar to the “unknown foreign actors”. But if anyone can positively identify them, or any of those unknown foreigners, please feel free to share your thoughts on them, I'm sure the fans can help improve the amount of ID's for this project. I've only added the people I could ID and the unknowns that I could confirm in more than one film, there's still plenty of people there who sadly may never be identified, but I did what I could.
The only thing I didn't do (in terms of research) in the end, as I was so burnt out and was unconvinced that I'd have useful results, was watching through the foreign actors' scenes to see if their character names give away their real names. There are a couple of cases where this happens, but not too often, and after trying this with a certain trio and coming up with nothing of use, I decided it probably wouldn't be worth the time. But if someone else wants to take up the challenge, feel free to do so.
Another thing attributed to burnout (or at least trying to avoid it) is that I've only uploaded one pic for each film appearance (with very few exceptions) rather than trying to get one of each outfit and the quality of some is not up to my usual standard. It was going to take forever (as if it hasn't already) and a lot of these films are supposedly (I've heard more, but still not seen anything in this regard) getting a HD release, so there was no point exhausting myself when an upgrade might be not too far off in the future.
I am sorry to write so much, but this was a mammoth project, the biggest by far that I'm ever likely to do. If you can believe it, I actually had more I'd written about the doing the project, but maybe writing it down was just me needing to vent about the experience and the struggle to finish it, so I've cut quite a bit
But the real reason for so much detail is to show what my process was and how meticulous I was about the IDs I managed to find, so people can see the method and know that it wasn't just wild guesses etc.As with my other big project, this has taken a toll on me, but in the end it's worth it, for keeping these films and their cast and crew alive forever. Giving them their credit where it's due and providing info to all the fans that are thirsty for knowledge on the HK film industry.
I still have a couple of “big” projects on my to do list, but not to the same scale as the last few, especially this one! These will not be done for quite a while as I really do need to take a break, like I was supposed to before this one, but I was “in the zone” so just had to go with it. I'm sure I'll be posting bits and pieces now and then. But for now it really is time for a proper break.
Cheers
