MARK STORY It may have been a fleeting professional relationship, yet Bay View's Tom Burstyn has fond memories of recently deceased actor David Carradine. "It was fantastic for a film buff like myself to be able to work with him," Mr Burstyn said. Carradine, a cult star best known for the 1970s TVseries, Kung Fu, was found hanging by the neck in the closet of his room at the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel, in Bangkok, on June 3. "The thing that sticks in my mind is what a great storyteller he was," Mr Burstyn said. "You'd wind him up and he'd be gone. He was at his peak in the late '60s so you can imagine the stories of the Hollywood social life back then - they were priceless." Mr Burstyn, a cinematographer and director for Cloud South Film, worked with the four-time Golden Globe nominee on two projects, including a film in 1997 titled Lost Treasure of Dos Santos, and more recently in 2008 in Son of the Dragon, in which he took a candid, yet haunting, portrait of Carradine on set in Hengdian, China. Thai police authorities had said "unusual circumstances" surrounded Carradine's death. They suspected suicide, although many who knew the actor questioned that. He had been in Thailand to work on a movie called Stretch. "I don't know any details about his death. It's just so sad, such a horrible way to go," Mr Burstyn said. Carradine appeared in more than 100 feature films. He returned to the top in recent years as the title villain in Quentin Tarantino's two-part saga, Kill Bill.
