by Meyers, Ric
And like any icon, he would not stay down. Decades after his death, he has remained a constant, with books, magazines, posters, re-releases of his films, statues, countless collectibles, and more. At the time of this writing, there is both an amusement park and a Broadway musical being planned. So, naturally, a big budget Hollywood bio-pic was green-lit. The production started promisingly. Rob Cohen, an eclectic and enthusiastic director, and the producer of such popular projects as The Running Man (1987) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, set about adapting Linda Lee’s biography Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, with the Lee family’s cooperation. He even hired several top jeet kune do teachers to choreograph the film’s many real and imagined fight scenes. Then the problems started.
Ironically, most of the people who created Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) probably wouldn’t think of them as problems. As far as they may have been concerned, Dragon was a critical and financial success, so what could possibly be the problem? There were really only two: finding the bite-size bits of truth amid the total fabrications and wild flights of fantasy, then, perhaps more importantly, honoring Lee’s non-cinematic life’s work: the creation of jeet kune do.
Dilemma one: how to communicate the anger Lee reportedly felt throughout his life — the anger that made him win any confrontation at all costs. In the case of Dragon, the anger was visually manifested as a demon — a demon dressed in what appears to be Japanese, not Chinese, armor. Was this a clever nod to the Japanese villains who helped make The Chinese Connection so successful, or Hollywood standard operating racism? You decide.
Dilemma two: the direct power of jeet kune do (like Chinese armor, apparently) is not visual enough. Lee himself always did an exaggerated version of it for the cameras — but not so exaggerated that it would ever be mistaken for the acrobatics of the Power Rangers. Complicating matters further was that a non-martial artist was cast as Bruce. And while Jason Scott Lee (no relation) is an excellent actor, it was somewhat akin to hiring a nondancer to star in a Fred Astaire biopic.
So, while they had such jeet kune do notables as Jerry Poteet on the set, the decision was made: bring in the acrobats. Instead of showing the true power of jeet kune do in an informed, imaginative way, Lee was pictured flipping and cart-wheeling all over the place like some sort of demented pinwheel. That way, the leading actor wouldn’t be required to communicate the true artistry of Bruce Lee’s kung fu. Not that many American audiences knew the difference. One critic even went so far as to review the movie’s martial arts by saying, “Fittingly, fight coordinator John Cheung previously worked with Hong Kong martial arts star Jackie Chan.” No, not fittingly. For Chan, as you will read later, purposely patterned himself as an anti-Bruce Lee.
Screenwriters Cohen, Edward Khmara, and John Raffo worked hard to honor Bruce, and there are things to like in the result, but it remains an inaccurate portrayal, and ends with an equally tragic dedication: to the memory of, not Bruce, but Brandon Lee.
The first call came at about four o’clock in the morning. “Brandon Lee is dead,” a crew member whispered to me. “He was shot.” I couldn’t comprehend it. I had only recently met Brandon during the promotional campaign for Rapid Fire (1992) — the movie in which he had finally stopped trying to get out of his father’s shadow. Instead, he had embraced it, and come out, whole and happy, on the other side.
My colleagues and I had agreed: energetic, goodhearted, and talented, Brandon Lee was the next great hope for the American martial arts action film. But now he was dead — killed in an implausible accident on the set of his breakthrough film, The Crow (1994). A crew member quickly and quietly gave me the particulars: they had been working all day and all night for weeks to get the movie done. The production’s official “gun wrangler” had already left the production for another job when the film went overschedule. A prop gun, supposedly loaded with blank cartridges, had fired.
In the days to come, a more complete picture was supplied by the local police, who had reportedly taken over the gun-wrangling responsibilities. According to press reports, a hunk of bullet padding — usually used as a wall between the gunpowder and the shell of a regulation cartridge — had lodged in the barrel of the on-set weapon. It was the wadding that was allegedly propelled by the powder of a newly loaded blank.
Some time later, I commiserated with a friend: “If only the actor playing his killer had been off by just a few inches.” My friend said he knew the actor who had used that gun. “He was a method actor,” my friend said with awful irony. “He had been practicing how to shoot to kill for days.”
Brandon had died three months shy of the twentieth anniversary of his father’s death, and just weeks before the release of Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story — a role he was supposedly offered, and which might have saved his life had he not turned it down. But his career had been fashioned to skirt his father’s shadow. Brandon was eight when his father died, but he had already appeared with him on Hong Kong TV, successfully breaking a board at the tender age of six.
“Could you imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t broken the board?” he asked later. But he had, and despite his best efforts, it set the tone for his entire career. For years he was adamant in his refusal to mirror his father’s moves and attitude, wanting to be accepted and applauded for himself, not for a happenstance of birth. Finally, however, Brandon’s need for cinematic exposure took precedence over his hopes. Brandon went the way of his father, taking the leading role in a cunningly designed Hong Kong action film Legacy of Rage (1986), arguably the best movie of his truncated career. Here, Brandon played a kindhearted, though supremely athletic, construction worker who is forced to slaughter his family’s oppressors — but only after he is brutally pushed way beyond endurance.
The true sign of Brandon’s acceptance of his destiny came with his next casting choice: to co-star opposite the man whom executives had chosen instead of his father to star in the television series that had been created to showcase Bruce Lee. Brandon played a Shaolin assassin in Kung Fu: The Movie (1986) … which should have been called Kung Fu: The TV Movie, since it played on network television. Wherever it played, it remained a fairly pedestrian vehicle, but one well-suited to show Brandon’s talent and dedication.
His next starring role was in the cheap and tacky Laser Mission (1989), a U.S./South African/German co-production whose writing and direction reflected its fractured origins. Brandon plays an espionage operative who teams with a tough and resourceful female agent (Debi Monahan) to rescue a laser expert, amusingly played by the always game Ernest Borgnine. It did little more than pay the bills, as did Brandon’s next starring vehicle, Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), which blows by in seventy-six minutes. Here Brandon is a wisecracking supporting player to brooding beefcake Dolph Lund-gren, as a cop who runs afoul of Japanese-American mobsters.
Once again, it showed anyone who cared to look that Brandon had charisma to spare and was only getting better with each scene. That performance seemed to do the trick, because Brandon wouldn’t have to wait as long before his next big break. It came with Rapid Fire (1992), the younger Lee’s first major studio release, and a canny combination of the star’s strengths. Here, for the first time, Brandon doesn’t begrudgingly agree that he is Bruce Lee’s son, he proudly proclaims it, happily acknowledging his father’s influence but letting his own engaging personality carry the day. As before, it was the force of Brandon’s charisma, not his fists, that carried this otherwise predictable, unimaginative, and often occasionally dreary movie.
This set the stage for The Crow — based on James Barr’s bleak black-and-white comic book. The story couldn’t be simpler. A rock star is murdered and, a year later, with a crow as harbinger, comes back to wreak vengeance on his killers. Ambitious director Alex Proyas, however, used this story as a clothesline to hang elegant visuals upon, which stayed in the memory long after the rudimentary dialogue and muddled action faded. Basically, Brandon’s character lived in a fictional, futuristic, and seemingly post-apocalypti
c city of self-conscious sleazeballs, where the only character who doesn’t painfully posture and spout film noir clichés is a nice-guy cop played by ex-Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson.
But the excitement (and exhaustion) was palpable on The Crow’s North Carolina set, where everyone was inspired by Proyas’s vision and Lee’s appeal. They knew they had something special and exciting, but they also knew they had to slave to get it done in time for a pressing release date. The mocking “I survived The Crow” T-shirts, which were supposedly being planned, turned bitterly portentous on the night of March 31, 1993, when Brandon was shot — just days before his marriage.
The allusions to his father’s death continued in the tragedy’s aftermath, but rather than being resurrected by stand-ins and tacky camera tricks ala Game of Death, Brandon’s visage and power were reborn through multi-million-dollar computer special effects, which grafted his face to the body of a stunt double. The final mirthless mockery was that The Crow, unlike Game of Death, was arguably improved by the rewriting and refilming needed to complete the movie.
Brandon lies beside his father in a Seattle cemetery. In life, they created memorable entertainment. In death, they have forged a tragic dynasty that will never be forgotten. There is little doubt that, had both lived, they would have added much more to the world’s knowledge and entertainment. Kung fu, and kung fu films, would have only grown in respect and appreciation. Bruce would have set, then raised, the bar with each production. With age and experience, he would have matured, and then would have communicated that sense of balance and wisdom through his art.
But with his death, taking with it his unique martial art and moviemaking skills, the world outside Asia was left to snigger at clones, bad dubbing, and lost-in-translation ignorance. Even the best of subsequent kung fu films were relegated to critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskels’ “turkey” or “stinker of the week” status on their syndicated movie review TV series through sheer, stubborn unwillingness to learn more.
Why did Bruce Lee die? The truth will never be known for certain, but I have a theory. He pushed himself too hard. Deep in the desire to become the Chinese Superman, he lost sight of himself. As Dirty Harry said, “A man’s gotta know his limitations,” and Bruce Lee punished his mind and body to the point that it gave in. And, in that light, he represents kung fu’s core truth: that a kung fu student’s only true enemy is his or herself. Sadly, that was the one fight Bruce Lee didn’t get the chance to win.
Picture identifications (clockwise from upper left):
Liu Chia-liang vs. Liu Chia-yung in Legendary Weapons of China; Liu Chia-hui vs. Wang Lung-wei in Dirty Ho; Lo Lieh in King Boxer; Jimmy Wang Yu in The Chinese Boxer; Meng Fei, Alexander Fu Sheng, Ti Lung, David Chiang, and Chi Kuan-chun in 5 Masters of Death; Kuo Chui, Lo Mang, Lu Feng, Sun Chien, and Wei Pai in The 5 Deadly Venoms.
It’s a pleasure to present this chapter. For years there’s been the impression that, following Bruce Lee’s death, kung fu films lay fallow until the ascension of Jackie Chan. To a great degree that is true ... outside Hong Kong.
But inside Hong Kong, kings of kung fu still reigned, bringing excited audiences some of the best — if not the absolute best — kung fu films ever made. So how did this oversight happen? Because the producers and distributors of those cathartic kung fu movies kept them, for the most part, to themselves, for decades on end.
At the time of Bruce Lee’s death, Hong Kong cinema was booming, and the main boomers were The Shaw Brothers Studio. Having emerged victorious some years prior from a cinematic death struggle with main competitor Cathay (aka Motion Picture and General Investments Limited) — following the death of Cathay boss Loke Wan Tho in a plane crash — Shaw Studios made great use of their advantage.
The Shaw Brothers Studio is considered the most venerable in South China, if for no other reason than being in continuous operation for more than eighty years. Starting out as Unique Film Productions in 1925, the company has always been controlled by the Shaw brothers — four siblings who also shared the name Run: Runje, Runde, Runme, and Run Run. While it has long been believed that the latter two monikers were somewhat condescending nicknames given to the youngest brothers by peers impressed with their errand boy skills at another Hong Kong studio, their handles were actually bestowed on them by their father, Shaw Yuh-hsuen, because the name meant “benevolence.” In fact, the Runs carried on the family tradition by naming their own sons with variations of “Vee,” which means “virtues.”
By 1934, the Shaws had already established a full-fledged studio consisting of sound stages, film processing facilities, editing bays, screening rooms, and office space — while also managing an extensive circuit of cinemas throughout Southeast Asia. In the long term scheme of things, World War II was a minor blip as the brothers protected their investment by diversifying in banking, real estate, and amusement parks.
It was in 1949 that Runde finally renamed the operation Shaw Studios, but it wasn’t until 1957, when the then-fifty-year-old Run Run Shaw decided to take the reins — that the company entered its golden era. Buying forty-six acres of land in the scenic Clearwater Bay area (for a mere forty-five cents per square foot!), Run Run announced the creation of Shaw Brothers (HK) Limited, and the internationally influential studio we know today was off and running.
It didn’t reach full flower, however, until a full decade later when there were editing, dubbing, special effects, and film processing facilities, a dozen sound stages, and more than five hundred full-time writers, technicians, and staff members who worked in three eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. In addition, Run Run instituted the Shaw Actors Training School, complete with on-lot dorms for the graduates. At their best, the Shaw Brothers Studio could produce forty films a year, or a completed movie, from start to finish, every ten days.
For the next eighteen years, the Studio produced more than seven hundred films (dramas, comedies, musicals, etc.), of which approximately three hundred and fifty were martial art movies (both kung fu and wuxia) — cementing the subgenres, traditions, and stereotypes that the rest of the industry would exemplify, develop or elaborate upon. But no one could match the unmistakable Shaw Brothers “look.” It was a lush, hyper-artificial look that bordered on its own sort of “Shaw Reality” — thanks to the studio’s huge soundstages and expert technicians who ran the gamut from lighting to set decoration.
By the early seventies, their fame was international. U.S. studio interest led to a testing of American box office waters with the theatrical release of select, retitled, and dubbed studio fare just prior to the ascension of Bruce Lee (who worked for the Shaw competitor, Golden Harvest Studios, created by ex-Shaw Studio exec Raymond Chow). First, director Chang Ho-cheng’s King Boxer (1972) became the cleverly renamed Five Fingers of Death (1973) in America, making veteran screen villain Lo Lieh the first international kung fu star.
Born in Indonesia on June 29, 1939, with the name Wang Lida, Lo Lieh moved to Hong Kong as a teenager, and miraculously avoided the standard operating racism that favored Hong Kong-born Chinese actors. Despite Lieh’s exotic looks, his talent led to him securing both heroic and villainous roles shortly after his Shaw Acting School training. He became such a valued contributor that the studio allowed him the rare freedom to move between their productions and movies made for his own company, as well as independent producers. Lo worked until the end, supplementing his movie career with an extensive Hong Kong television resume. He died November 2, 2002, in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, China, having played a vital part in the golden age, new wave, and beyond.
Following the relative success of Five Fingers of Death, Chang Cheh’s The Water Margin (1972) was hacked into Seven Blows of the Dragon (1973), giving U.S. audiences just a whiff of stars David Chiang and Ti Lung’s charisma. There was even a fitful co-production with Hammer Films, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (aka Seven Brothers Versus Dracula) in 1974, also starring Chiang.
All were washed away in America by the Bruce Lee phenomenon, who
se 1973 death led to decades of shoddy exploitation, with but one gleaming U.S. exception. By the early 1980s, several years into Jackie Chan’s HK reign, when competition between South Chinese movie studios was at its height, Shaw agreed to edit, pan-and-scan, and dub some of its kung fu films for a small New York company called World Northal, who hoped to sell the broadcast rights to independent television stations as part of the “Black Belt Theater” package (aka Drive In Movie).
Much to the Studio’s reported surprise, these films became a big success in America, leading to five more seasons of the program, encompassing more than one hundred of the studio’s best kung fu adventures. The acceptance of the films in the U.S. could not have come at a worse time for the studio. Much of its film unit earnings were reaped from keeping production costs down, which became increasingly difficult as the casts and crews discovered how popular they were in the rest of the world. There was even a rumor that Run Run threatened to fire any actor who gave themselves an English name.
The combination of employees’ demands for profit participation, government pressure to break up their production-exhibition connection, and the overwhelming success of Golden Harvest’s Jackie Chan led to Run Run’s decision to shut his Studio’s film units in the mid-1980s. Although the Shaws continued to benefit from its domestic television production and other businesses, Run Run flatly refused to allow a Black Belt Theater VI to be compiled, or to release his Studio’s films to the burgeoning home entertainment market — despite the extra money it could reap the participants … although many grumble it was because of that (allegedly the Studio didn’t like to share the wealth and was excellent at holding a grudge).
For whatever reason, regardless of national and international demand, the Shaw Brothers Studio library of innovative and important films remained legally unseen for fifteen years. But finally, at the dawn of the new century, the vault doors were cracked open, and remastered digital versions of their influential motion pictures were slowly made available on DVD. Over the next eighty-four months, the films trickled throughout the world, finally making it to America, which still longed for a revisit to its dormant Black Belt Theater/Drive In Movie. And, with those films, came information — information that was also entombed in the Shaw Studio vaults until recently. They revealed a vital, integral part of kung fu film history.
