(Lee’s Hong Kong cinematic classic “Fist of Fury” was initally released in the US in 1973 as “The Chinese Connection” - as if to suggest it was a sequel to the popular “French Connection” movie; notice also how Lee is billed as as master of karate/kung fu. Karate was much better known in the US at the time)
WE HAVE PASSED THE POINT OF NO RETURN when it comes to the grandiose absurdity of Lee Jun-fan, the American-born, Hong Kong raised martial artist and actor remembered and beloved as Bruce Lee.
Those of us who care for truth, appreciate nuance and prefer history to mythography should mark June 7, 2020 on our calendars and wear black armbands on its anniversary; for that is the day when even ESPN’s usually intrepid 30 For 30 docu-series became a full throated choirboy at the Church of Bruce Lee.
It is especially disappointing because ESPN had optioned the gold standard of Lee biographies, Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life, only to deliver a film which, while it has some fine points, ultimately takes its place among ‘print the legend’ Bruce Lee fan fiction.
Make no mistake, Bruce Lee is worthy of genuine examination. In every major city in the world and for 50-years and counting, Lee posters have hung on bedroom walls and t-shirts proudly worn. The US Library of Congress has recognized Lee’s final film, Enter the Dragon (1973), as “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” and Time magazine acknowledged Lee as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.
There are a handful of other pop culture icons - Marilyn, Elvis, Ali - who retained their fame in death but, as Polly pointed out, Bruce Lee is the only one whose epoch-level celebrity is entirely posthumous. That alone is invites myth making and in the decades since his death Lee has steadily acquired the powers of a demi-god.
Those Chuck Norris memes are supposed to be funny but Bruce Almighty parishioners are serious when they insist he kicked so hard he destroyed normal heavybags, possessed a vertical leap of 8ft (a mere 3ft more than current official world record), that he holds the push-ups world record (he doesn’t) and all the other nonsense echoed in the pages of martial arts magazines.
Around a decade ago, the Bruce Lee mythos crept across the news rack from the hero worship fan-fiction like Black Belt Magazine into mainstream publications. Even serious sports publications began listing Lee as no less than one of the greatest athletes of all time. One had him at number fifteen – higher than every pro-fighter not named Muhammad Ali.
This is so reckless as to barely warrant a response.
Lee’s lone competitive accomplishment was outpointing another teenager named Gary Elms in an amateur boxing match in Hong Kong on March 29, 1958. His own detailed workout diary reveals - in his own handwriting – a man focused on looking good on camera rather training for elite athletic performance. Y’know, as you’d expect of a man who was so single-mindedly pursuing movie stardom.
That Bruce Lee never made a single one of these outlandish claims for himself doesn’t seem to matter to the cult that has grown up in his shadow. “They need to believe in kung fu Jesus,” is how The Tao of Bruce Lee author David Miller put it.
And few will risk becoming a Bruce Lee blasphemer.
IT WASN’T JUST THE MAKERS OF “BRUCEPLOITATION” copycat movies who saw an easy buck in the dead superstar. Bruce’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell and their daughter, Shannon, spent decades wrestling back rights to his name and likeness and rightly police a Wild West of companies exploiting the Bruce Lee brand without permission.
Shannon’s stewardship of the Bruce Lee intellectual property has been a masterclass of brand management, taking the company to over $20million annually since 2018. Bruce never got to enjoy his success, but his daughter has ensured that fame created generational wealth for his descendants.
Yet neither managing a brand nor honoring the memory of one’s father are good precepts for unbiased biography. The Lee family cannot be the first, last and only voice on Bruce Lee the historical figure.
For ninety-four minutes of proof, see How Bruce Lee Changed The World, a 2009 documentary produced by Bruce Lee Entertainment, one of the companies Shannon Lee oversees. In the first few minutes we hear Lee lionized as the inspiration for parkour, rap music and the study of Eastern philosophy as well as a Prophet not so very unlike Jesus or Mohammad.
Then my old boss Dana White – who can sling a soundbite as well as anyone alive – echos what was already a growing sentiment by the mid-2000s: “Bruce Lee is the father of mixed martial arts.”
The basis for this specific Lee legend (beyond a smart promoter wishing to associate his brand with Bruce Lee) is Lee’s development of Jeet Kune Do, a fighting system which borrows the most effective aspects of other martial arts.
“He took the best parts of all these styles and make something that worked for him,” Dana said.
And – sure - that sounds a lot like modern MMA. But… it also sounds similar to what the Gracies were doing in Brazil - in real fights - from the 1920s onwards. It echoes how taekwondo was developed in the 1950s from Korean, Chinese and Japanese styles. And also how, in 1900 in London, the well-traveled Edward Barton-Wright opened a gym where Victorian gentlemen could learn a combination of Swedish wrestling, Japanese ju-jitsu, British boxing and French Savate.
And, truth be told, combining striking and wrestling for joint locks and chokes is the very definition of the Ancient Olympic sport of Pankration - which debuted a mere 2588 years before Bruce Lee was born.
Thanks to Lee’s profound influence, there are schools of teaching that specifically mix various martial art forms together, pulling the most effective elements of each, to create superior martial artists - Muscle and Fitness
The two decades between Lee’s death and the birth of MMA were a boom time not for realistic fighting systems but the very one-inch-punching, flying kicking and dim mok believing martial artist that were so brutally exposed in the UFC octagon.
“Bruce Lee inspired MMA” isn’t merely fanboy nonsense to be eye-rolled away by those of us who know better. It pickpockets the achievements of Art Davie, Rorion Gracie, Campbell McLaren and those who genuinely deserve credit for the UFC, not to mention Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzu, who founded Pancrase in Japan in September 1993.
But I am afraid stealing credit is what Bruce Lee has been up to since he died. There’s something more contrived and sinsister than harmless hero-worship at work here. Content like How Bruce Lee Changed the World is a brand equity commercial pretending to be a documentary. The intention is to foment credulity for commercial exploitation.
For example, Nokia paid to use the Bruce Lee IP for a 2008 commercial depicting Lee playing table tennis using nunchaku as a paddle. The Bruce branded cell phone sold great but, moreover, the Lee mythology was enhanced yet again.
Over 14 years later the phone is obsolete but the doctored footage is still getting viewed by millions of people - and so many of them believe it is legit articles debunking it have been written going over the ad like it is the Zapruder film.
It has all become so ridiculous even some self-professed Bruce Lee fans have had enough.
In his movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, filmmaker Quintin Tarantino had Brad Pitt’s character get into it with a fictional version (obviously) of Lee on the set of The Green Hornet and hold his own.
Tarantino’s portrayal of Lee is an unflattering caricature. Every aspect of the myth is roughed up. The fighting skills are less than unbeatable, his confidence/arrogance has its pants pulled down and the very idea he could have beaten Muhammad Ali is literally laughed at. (There’s no record of Lee claiming he could ‘cripple’ Ali, who he greatly admired, but his fans have done so on his behalf.)
Social media blood feuds didn’t erupt when Chris Evans’s Captain America KO’d three-time UFC champion Georges St-Pierre’s character in Winter Solider (2014) but, of course, the Bruce Lee parishioners went ballistic.
They bellyached about the absurdity of suggesting Brad Pitt could beat Bruce Lee in a fight. Again we see the double standard: it is perfectly legit to postulate Lee could beat a UFC champion or Ali, but deeply offensive to have a fictional character lay a hand on a fictional version of Bruce Lee.
The indignation that Lee would never behave so boorishly as to publicly goad a man into a fight is also unconvincing. 30 For 30 referenced Lee’s street fighting days but ignored evidence he never fully subdued his temper; just weeks before his death Lee chased a rival filmmaker who’d badmouthed him around a Hong Kong office so wildly the police were called.
Not surprisingly, Shannon Lee was central to the counter PR campaign against Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.
She called the film another Tarantino “rage fantasy” and said: “I understand this is a Tarantino film, that the movie characters are ‘antiheroes’ and (….) the mechanism in the story is to make Brad Pitt’s character out to be such a badass that he can beat up Bruce Lee (but) the treatment of my father as this arrogant, egotistical punching bag was really disheartening and unnecessary.”
She added without irony that audiences should forget the portrayal in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and instead “engage with the real Bruce Lee.”
Going after Tarantino or anyone else in the free press of America is fair enough, but Mrs Lee went too far by using her influence in Beijing (she produced a 50-episode series The Story of Bruce Lee for China’s state television in 2007) to get Once Upon a Time in Hollywood banned throughout China.
Any critique of Shannon Lee should be tempered by the thought that this is, after all, her dad we are talking about. One of the most heartfelt moments in 30 For 30 was her saying she has only non-specific memories of her dad, who died when she was four, and that she recalls “just the feeling of his presence… of being loved”.
But nothing justifies the call she made. Explaining her actions Lee said: “You know, I just complained there in China… through China channels. But it was their decision to do whatever they wanted to do with that movie. I was just asked what did I think and I submitted my thoughts about it… I think it’s important for me to speak and be heard ... at least have my opinion be known.”
It is quite something for the producer of How Bruce Lee Changed the World to decry a portrayal of Bruce Lee as unrealistic. It is something more for her to use her direct line to a totalitarian foreign governmental to ban that portrayal for 1.7billion people who are already sick of censorship. And it is something else entirely to do all of this while pretending to be the real victim.
Forbes magazine wrote Shannon Lee, who it noted has a financial interest as well as a familial one, was “having a sad because a fictionalized version of a real-life person wasn’t unflinchingly reverential.”
Which brings us back to 30 For 30: Be Water.
Director Bao Mguyen was reliant on access to the Lee family and the archives they own. Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year Nguyen said that he offered Shannon Lee editorial input over the final product, but she declined.
One half of that statement is more believable than the other.
BE WATER COVERS THE ENTIRETY OF LEE’S LIFE but focuses on his struggle as a Hong Kong American trying to make it in racist Hollywood. It is here where the film works best.
Yet 30 For 30 ducks and dodges around anything that would be countermine to its subject’s saintly image. The way it avoids even hinting Lee died in the bed of one of his mistresses is as choreographed as any of Bruce’s signature 10-on-1 fight scenes.
Unfortunately, this is simulacrum of the film’s deference to the Bruce Lee IP and sensitivities of the Lee family.
I wrote above that Be Water works best when focusing on the struggles of Lee as an Asian-American in Hollywood, and it does, but even in reaching its full height the film plants both feet in mythography.
Exhibit A in Be Water’s case against Hollywood’s institutional racism is that Bruce conceived of the popular 1970s show Kung Fu, only to be cheated out of both the lead role and creative credit.
“Bruce had conceived of the idea which became, eventually, the Kung Fu TV series,” Cadwell said. “He was very excited about this idea.”
“There’s bias, in the (TV) industry against people who weren’t white and so Kung Fu, which was written for Bruce, they gave the part to… I forget the guy’s name,” added NBA hall of famer and ex-Lee student Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The two recollections not only slightly contradict each other, they are false.
In the 1960s Ed Spielman, a Chinese language graduate, kung fu student and Asian movie obsessive, wrote a treatment with creative partner Howard Friedlander about a half-American Shaolin monk wandering the Old West using martial arts to right wrongs. They pitched it to Peter Lampack at the William Morris agency and, after movie studios passed on the project, their script became a TV movie that served as a back-door pilot to Kung Fu the TV show.
All of this was laid out by Hollywood historian Herbie J Pilato, author of the 1994 book The Kung Fu Book of Caine. He stated: “Ed Spielman is the creator of the Kung Fu series... any claims to the contrary are incorrect and an injustice.”
Cadwell first made her claim to the contrary in her 1976 book Bruce Lee: The Only Man I Knew but it became Church of Bruce Lee scripture in 1993, when Universal Picture’s used it as a major plot point in the movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Now, 29-years later, Be Water has done the same for similar reasons of storytelling expediency.
Nuance is interesting as well as important. Polly’s research revealed the role was initially “Bruce Lee’s to lose” but in addition to the second-guessing on racial lines, Warner Brothers boss Ted Ashley felt Bruce’s energy was too explosive for the monosyllabic, brooding Caine character. (Eventual star David Carradine had a much calmer screen presence – and with good reason. He was always stoned.)
Nevertheless, Ashley was wowed by Bruce. Before Carradine was ever auditioned, Lee was told he was wrong for the Caine part but offered a deal to develop his own TV show. That ultimately didn’t happen, but the success of his Hong Kong films like The Big Boss (1971) gave Lee the leverage not only to get Warner to make Enter the Dragon but make it in the way he wanted.
The parable here is not quite that he was denied and ignored by the studio machinery but something slightly more complicated and worse: while Hollywood lavishes opportunities on white actors of no obvious talent, it took an Asian as galacticly charismatic and physically enthralling as Bruce to get similar opportunities.
Meanwhile, Kung Fu became the first US pop culture entity to show Asian martial arts as superior to western fist-fighting. It was a huge hit, especially with students who enjoyed a show positively portraying Asian culture, philosophy and wisdom almost as an antitoxin to the pro-Vietnam war groupthink.
Further complicating Be Water’s use of Kung Fu as the ultimate example of white-washing is that when the show was revived in the mid-eighties Bruce’s son, Brandon, made his acting debut in Kung Fu: The Movie (1986). Brandon also shot a 1987 pilot as the star of a planned Kung-Fu: The Next Generation series.
In fact, it was Brandon’s tragic death in 1993 that gave Speilman second thoughts about suing Cadwell and Universal Pictures. After getting smeared as a plagiarist he’d assembled the same documentation that won him the Writers Guild of America West acknowledgement as the show’s sole creator, but never filed a lawsuit.
“The poor woman had just lost her son,” he told an acquaintance he shares with me. “I couldn’t bring myself to sue her.”
And so the saga of Bruce getting swindled out of a TV show he created became a fanboy Chakra, repeated over and over down the decades. As we’ve seen with everything from world push-up records to inventing MMA, once a story becomes part of Bruce Lee lore it never escapes the greedy gravitational pull.
Entreaties not to nit-pick and for us to focus on the wider message of Be Water – racial inequality and Hollywood’s Asian stereotyping - shouldn’t be dismissed. Simultaneously, no documentary baring ESPN’s flagship brand should be caught weaving parables made out of demonstrable falsehoods for storytelling expediency.
It is possible – even likely - that Linda Lee Cadwell honestly believes Bruce’s concept for Warrior – which Shannon Lee used to create the Cinemax series fifty years later – is one and the same as Kung Fu. She’s also the man’s widow and mother of his children, not a historian or a journalist. Mrs Cadwell is blameless here.
But unless he didn’t bother to read the book published by his own historical consultant, Bao Nguyen does know better. He put it in Be Water anyway.
{Note: I asked ESPN if they had a comment the 30 For 30 claims re: Kung Fu. After emailing they’d get back to me, they did not.}
(The most famous of the three statues erected in Bruce Lee’s honor; keeping watch in Hong Kong)
LIKE MANY ARTISTS, BRUCE LEE SAW HIS CRAFT first and foremost as a pursuit of truth. He demonstrated the courage of that conviction when he jettisoned much of the wung chun style he’d spent years mastering and started his journey anew. It is hard to imagine that man being comfortable with the false claims piling up in his name.
And here’s the rub: the Legendary Bruce Lee, the superhuman oracle of wisdom and patron-saint of martial arts, is secured in all his grandiose absurdity. That Bruce Lee was frozen mid-performance in 1973. There he will remain forever young and always on-brand, doomed to howl and fly-kick his way through pop culture for who knows how many decades to come.
Yet while the legend looms ever larger, the real Bruce Lee continues to recede further into the past. If it is even still possible, that situation should be reversed.
A life as well-lived as Bruce Lee’s doesn’t need embellishing; nor does his legacy need to traffic in stolen accolades.
Be Water illustrated how much Lee’s success and on screen physicality meant and still means to Asian Americans - but they are far from the only group he inspires.
Three generations and counting first looked up the address of a local martial arts club because they saw Enter the Dragon or a YouTube clip of Bruce Lee. Some of them went on to become great mixed martial artists - Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, Stephen Thompson, Kenny Florian among them - while untold hundreds of thousands around the world – millions, perhaps – had their lives enriched by the discipline, exercise and friendships they found there.
That is the true magnitude of Bruce Lee’s impact. As his widow said on 30 For 30, he remains a guiding light for people all over the world.
That is his legacy and unlike the plunder of decades of lazy hero-worship every bit of it belongs to Bruce Lee.
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