Late Script Kept Chan from Tragedy

September 19 -- Action star Jackie Chan reveals he was due at the World Trade Center last Tuesday to shoot scenes for an upcoming film, but that filming was canceled at the last minute because of a late script. "I would probably have died if the shooting had gone ahead as planned," Chan tells the Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily News about filming the action-comedy Nosebleed, in which he was to star as a window washer who foils a terrorist scheme to blow up the Statue of Liberty. "Filming was scheduled to have taken place at 7:00 a.m. last Tuesday morning. … I had to be at the top of one of the towers for one of the scenes," Chan tells the paper, adding "Well, I guess my time is not up yet.

Nosebleed, along with several other films with terrorist plots or scenes involving the World Trade Center, is being reworked to avoid any resemblance to last week's tragedy. A spokeswoman for MGM said last week that it was "premature" to discuss how the script might be changed.

Close Calls for Family Guy Cartoonist, Real World Cast MemberOther people reporting close shaves include Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who is alive thanks to an error in his flight itinerary, and an MTV Real World cast member, who changed her flight plans after fighting with her boyfriend.Both were due to fly from Boston to Los Angeles on the doomed American Airlines Flight 11, which left at 7:45 a.m. last Tuesday.

MacFarlane, whose itinerary said his flight would leave at 8:15 a.m., got to the gate just as boarding was finished. Trying to persuade gate agents to let him on "is something I would have pressed them on in the past, but for some reason I didn't this time — and thank God," he told USA Today. While waiting in a lounge for the next flight, he learned Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center. "I just sort of stared at the screen and said, 'Oh, my God.'" he said. "I've thought about it a lot, but it really hasn't sunk in yet. I saved the itinerary. I figure it's a piece of history. It was much too close of a shave for me," he tells the newspaper.