Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly

[GeneChing]

Matt has working on this for a little while now.

For Matt's previous books see:
American Shaolin (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=26966)
Tapped Out (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61813)



American who idolised Bruce Lee and trained at Shaolin writing star's biography (http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1218619/american-who-idolised-bruce-lee-and-trained-shaolin-writing-stars)

He grew up wanting to be Bruce Lee, and later became a Shaolin disciple; now Matthew Polly is in Hong Kong to write story of kung fu star's life
Saturday, 20 April, 2013 [Updated: 03:37]

Shirley Zhao

http://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/486x302/public/2013/04/19/f633ebc2b242902301dc32ac5062e01b.jpg?itok=trixLQH7
Martial arts expert Matthew Polly in front of a statue of Bruce Lee in Tsim Sha Tsui. Polly, who dropped out of Princeton to become a Shaolin apprentice, is writing the late star's biography. Photo: Edward Wong

Matthew Polly knows about being an introvert and an extrovert. When it's suggested he must be an extrovert, he doesn't deny it but confesses he used to be a skinny, nerdy boy, always too shy and geeky to communicate. Back then, he found it was always the suave and outgoing people who tended to lead or become popular among girls in the US, and he wanted to be one of them.

He believed going to China, to the Shaolin Temple to learn kung fu, would make him different. He went. It did.

"I'm getting better at it [being an extrovert] now," said the 41-year-old American author.

He certainly looks a natural now, always keeping a keen smile, hearty laughs, cracking jokes from time to time and, every so often, giving you a friendly pat on the shoulder or gentle touch on the arm. Even though he stands 1.92 metres tall, he doesn't look intimidating. He is a friend, a pal, and he makes sure you are impressed through showing off his tongue-curling Beijing Putonghua during conversations.

After American Shaolin, a US bestseller on his two-year kung fu training in Shaolin, and Tapped Out, on his ultimate fighting experience in mixed martial arts (MMA), Polly has come to Hong Kong for his third book project, a biography of Bruce Lee.

"No one's written a biography [of Bruce Lee] in the last 20 years," he said. "He's such a huge star. It seemed a shame that no one had written a very good biography about him."

Polly says most books in English about Lee only cover his life in the US, so he came, four decades after the death of Lee, trying to find out what he was really like through interviewing people in Hong Kong who actually knew him and his family.

Among those he has interviewed are movie mogul Raymond Chow Man-wai, Robert Chua Wah-peng, who created the popular television show Enjoy Yourself Tonight, martial arts master Ip Man's son Ip Chun and Betty Ting Pei, Lee's mistress, who was with him when he died in her apartment.

The interview with Ting lasted seven hours, Polly said, during which she showed him her kung fu moves and did Buddhist chanting.

"That has to be the most unique interview I've ever been in," he said. "I think it's one of the very first times she's ever told to Western journalists about her relationship with Bruce. For many years Betty Ting was blamed for Bruce's death, so I think it's good that she's finally decided to open up and tell her side of the story."

Polly's first encounter with Bruce Lee is a typical story. A scrawny 13-year-old who was always bullied suddenly discovered this exotic Hong Kong movie, Enter the Dragon, where a small, lean Asian man beat a whole bunch of people taller and stronger than him. The boy was fascinated and started learning kung fu two years later. He wanted to be Bruce Lee.

The boy, Polly, later entered the Ivy League, majoring in religion and East Asian studies at Princeton University, focusing on Buddhist and Taoist philosophies. He was charmed by the philosopher Zhuangzi's sense of humour and irony and imagined one day, through meditation, he could achieve enlightenment.

Then, after three years of study, he found the perfect answer to his pursuit of martial arts and spirituality - Shaolin Temple, which offered both. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee played a Shaolin monk, so there was a definite plus side to it.

"I thought I could become a badass," he said. "And become an enlightened Buddhist, a master. It made perfect sense to me but everyone else thought I was crazy."

That was in 1992, when China was a mystery to many in the West. Polly's mother cried over his decision to leave university for Shaolin, and his father wouldn't talk to him for six months after he bought his plane ticket.

He left anyway, with a backpack and a sleeping bag, expecting to camp outside a quiet, peaceful Buddhist monastery in the middle of Henan province for days or even months until the monks let him in.

Instead, he wound up in a tourist attraction with souvenir stores and restaurants. A young monk led him to a martial arts school next to the temple, Shaolin Wushu Centre, where the school party chief agreed to let him be a Shaolin student for US$1,300 per month. He later discovered the chief overcharged him by almost US$800.

Polly, the first American Shaolin disciple, stayed in the school for two years, training with the Shaolin monks for seven hours a day and six days a week. There was no TV nor any other entertainment, and no one talked to him for the first two months, because the school leaders told them not to, fearing he might spread "impure thoughts".

Two sympathetic monks did break the order and talk to him, and they became close friends. But the big change didn't come until nine months into the training, when a kung fu master from the city of Tianjin requested a challenge match at a banquet thrown by a French photojournalist for Shaolin in the school's restaurant. Polly offered to take the challenge. The monks agreed. He won.

"That was the moment when I became sort of an official member of Shaolin Temple," he said. "And instead of Bao Mosi [his Chinese name], they started to call me laobao ['old Bao', an affectionate nickname]."

In 1995, seeing many monks emigrating overseas, Polly realised he had spent too much money being a foreign disciple in Shaolin and he wanted to finish university and get a job. He went back to the US, but his parents were not impressed by his kung fu achievements. "I don't know what we did wrong," his father said to him when seeing him practising his "iron forearm" against a tree, "but whatever we did wrong, I'm sorry".

His was an achievement-oriented family. He went to Princeton, later Oxford and became a Rhodes Scholar. His sister went to Yale. "At first [my parents] thought I'd fallen off the path of success by going over there," he said. "I think it was after I wrote the book and it became a national bestseller and a Hollywood option that they were like okay."

His two years in Henan being the only foreigner among all the monks and disciples also made him tougher, more confident and outgoing. "For me, whenever any problems come up, I'll think 'well, it can't be worse than Shaolin'," he laughed. "No matter how scared I am now, I can't be any more scared than I was at Shaolin. I think that's the great advantage of chiku [eat bitterness]. If you eat bitterness, then you'll know what sweetness is."

Having stayed in Hong Kong for more than two weeks, Polly will return in July, when the Heritage Museum has an exhibition about Bruce Lee and Betty Ting Pei may be doing a television show on the 40th anniversary of his death. He also hopes to interview more people who knew Lee, such as singer-songwriter Sam Hui Koon-kit and his wife Rebu, as well as Jackie Chan.

Polly says Hong Kong people have been talking more about Bruce Lee recently. He suspects this is related to the huge success of the three films in the recent Ip Man series about Lee's martial arts mentor.

"There's an old saying that a prophet has no honour in his hometown," he said. "Now people are remembering that it really was Bruce Lee who put Hong Kong on the map. He was the one who brought Hong Kong and Hollywood together. Without Bruce there wouldn't have been a Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I'm glad he's getting the attention I think he deserves it because, for a while, I think people thought he wasn't cool any more."

[GeneChing]

Chasing The Dragon (http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/untold-story-enter-the-dragon) by Matthew Polly

NOTE: This hyperlink goes to the PLAYBOY site, which might be NSFW, depending where you work.

[sanjuro_ronin]

Sexual escapades continued off-screen too. “Jim Kelly screwed everything that moved in Hong Kong,” says Heller. “He ended up in the hospital. We had a harness for him to hang over the acid pit for his death scene, but he couldn’t wear it, because he was so sore. We had to specially make a cargo net for him.

Awesome !:D

[GeneChing]

...now *you* want a specially-made cargo net. ;)

From Matt's hometown paper...

Playboy features Topeka-born author's writing, not body (http://cjonline.com/news/2013-06-27/playboy-features-topeka-born-authors-writing-not-body#.Ucy5AexO7pc.twitter)
Magazine publishes preview of Matthew Polly's Bruce Lee biography
Posted: June 27, 2013 - 1:06pm

http://cjo-cdn.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/story_slideshow_thumb/12376311.jpg
Topeka-born author Matthew Polly, who is working on a biography of Bruce Lee to be published by Penguin Books, has written a teaser for the book which appears in the July issue of Playboy.

By Bill Blankenship
bill.blankenship@cjonline.com

Topeka-born author Matthew Polly appears in the current issue of Playboy, but he assures his hometown friends and family in an email there is "no need to fear any revealing photo of yours truly."

Instead, the July edition of the men's magazine includes Polly’s article "Chasing the Dragon," a teaser for the biography he is writing about Bruce Lee, the late Chinese martial arts artist and action film star.

Polly said the manuscript for the book, to be published by Penguin Books, isn't due until July 2014, but Playboy wanted the advance article because July 20 is the 40th anniversary of Lee's death and Aug. 17 marks 40 years since the release of his final film, the mega-hit "Enter the Dragon."

Polly said his article provides "a plausible excuse to buy a copy" of the magazine.

"Or if you truly only want to read the articles, you can find mine here: www.playboy.com/dragon," he wrote.

Martial arts isn’t new territory for Polly, a 1989 graduate of Topeka West High School and a Rhodes scholar. In 1992, the then-21-year-old Polly took a leave of absence from his studies at Princeton University to spend two years in China at the Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of Zen Buddhism and kung fu.

"American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China," published in 2007 by Gotham, resulted from his experience as the first American accepted as a Shaolin disciple.

Fifteen years later, he immersed himself in the world of mixed martial arts, including extensive training and getting into the ring to fight. He captured his experiences in "Tapped Out: Rear Naked Chokes, the Octagon, and the Last Emperor: An Odyssey in Mixed Martial Arts," published by Gotham in 2012.

[Fa Xing]

Can't wait for this one, I will actually buy this one instead of borrowing from the local library.

[Kevin73]

Can't wait for this one, I will actually buy this one instead of borrowing from the local library.

I'm looking forward to it too. I have read Mr. Polly's first two books and enjoyed his writing style immensely.

[GeneChing]

Bruce Lee: A Life Hardcover – June 5, 2018 (https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Lee-Life-Matthew-Polly/dp/1501187627)
by Matthew Polly

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81vD4pnOm0L.jpg

The first authoritative biography—featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs—of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.

Forty-five years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. It’s also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.

Polly explores Lee’s early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery.

Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts—not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.

Matt just sent me this link.

More to come, for sure! :cool:

[GeneChing]

Never mind Amazon above. Here's a link to the publisher's description, the illustrious Simon & Schuster (http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bruce-Lee/Matthew-Polly/9781501187629):


http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781501187629/bruce-lee-9781501187629_hr.jpg

Bruce Lee
A Life
By Matthew Polly

The most authoritative biography—featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs—of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.

Forty-five years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. It’s also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.

Polly explores Lee’s early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery.

Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts—not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.

http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/interior_spreads/9781501187629/bruce-lee-9781501187629.in17.jpg
http://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/interior_spreads/9781501187629/bruce-lee-9781501187629.in18.jpg

[GeneChing]

https://www.publishersweekly.com/images/cached/BEST_BOOKS/cover/000/000/002/2161-v1-500x.JPG

Bruce Lee: A Life (https://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/summer-reads-2018/top-10#book/book-4)
Matthew Polly (Simon & Schuster)
I must have been 12 years old when I first saw Enter the Dragon starring a lightning-quick actor and kung fu master named Bruce Lee, who made me feel that I, too, could be invincible. I watched his five movies and visited his gravesite overlooking Seattle but knew very little about him. Until now, that is, when this thick galley recently appeared on my desk. It’s the first full-length biography of Lee, in which author Polly promises to paint a portrait of Lee in all his complexities from his childhood movie stardom in 1950s Hong Kong to his mysterious death in 1973 at age 32. —Mark Rotella, senior editor

I've read the galley. This is a landmark biography, well worth your attention. And I'm not just saying that because I'm horribly biased, given that Matt is my Shaolin Shixiong. It's a fascinating read.

We'll have plenty more exclusive coverage on this to come. :cool:

[GeneChing]

https://booklife.com/image-factory/http/localhost/amazongetcover/9781501187629.jpg/w204.jpg
Bruce Lee: A Life (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-50118-762-9)
Matthew Polly. Simon & Schuster, $35 (672p) ISBN 978-1-50118-762-9

This thorough, well-sourced biography from Polly (Tapped Out) is an engrossing examination of the life of a martial arts movie star and his shocking, early death. Lee was born in San Francisco in 1940, but his family moved to Hong Kong shortly after his birth. He started acting there as a child, and at age 16 began studying under kung fu master Ip Man. In 1959, Lee moved to Seattle in pursuit of a career acting and teaching kung fu. He landed a few roles in American television series such as The Green Hornet, but, eager for better roles, he moved back to Hong Kong, where he starred in such action movies as Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon. Polly describes Lee as a patron of kung fu who “sought to straddle East and West” yet routinely faced racism (relatives of his wife, Linda, refused to attend their wedding in 1964). He possessed a volatile temper, a dangerously obsessive work ethic, and a propensity for extramarital affairs. In 1973, Lee collapsed and died while dubbing dialogue for Enter the Dragon, and Polly is especially strong as he sifts through the sensational aftermath of Lee’s death, rejecting tabloid rumors that he died in an actual fight and outdated medical opinions of death by “cannabis intoxication” in favor of the more logical cause—heatstroke, given Hong Kong’s heat wave that day. In what is certainly the definitive biography of Lee, Polly wonderfully profiles the man who constructed a new, masculine Asian archetype and ushered kung fu into pop culture. (June)


I had lunch with some of the WJM masters after our last TCJU meeting on Sunday (https://www.facebook.com/TigerClaw/photos/a.10152680840632715.1073741833.140138252714/10152680840772715/?type=3&theater). The topic of 'the fight (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?36573-Bruce-Lee-vs-Wong-Jack-Man-fight)' came up once again. They won't like Matt's version at all.

[GeneChing]

Enter to win KungFuMagazine.com's contest for Bruce Lee: A Life autographed by Matthew Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/sweepstakes-bruce-lee-a-life.php)! Contest ends 5:30 p.m. PST on 6/7/2018.

[GeneChing]

What's the MUST-READ book this summer? Find out in Matthew Polly on Bruce Lee – A Life (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=1426) by Gene Ching

http://www.kungfumagazine.com/admin/site_images/KungfuMagazine/upload/5707_20182419-BruceLeeAlife.jpg

[GeneChing]

June 8, 2018 2:00 pm
Every Bruce Lee Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best (http://www.vulture.com/article/every-bruce-lee-movie-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t)
By Matthew Polly

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Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Photo: Getty Images

Bruce Lee came from an entertainment family. His father, a famous Cantonese opera singer, and his mother, a seamstress and wardrobe woman, were touring America when Bruce was born in 1940; he faced his first movie camera before he was old enough to crawl. His acting career began in earnest at the age of 6 after his family returned to their native Hong Kong. By the time he was 18, he had made nearly 20 Cantonese films — none of which were kung fu flicks.

Upon returning to the U.S. for college, Lee took a look at the type of roles Asians were offered and abandoned any acting aspirations. “How many times in a [Hollywood] film is a Chinese required?” Lee later explained to Esquire. “And when it is required, it is always the typical houseboy or pigtailed coolie stuff. I said ‘To hell with it.’” Instead he decided to become the Ray Kroc of kung fu, franchising dojos along the West Coast. It wasn’t until a karate tournament in 1964 when he was discovered by a producer who cast him as sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet TV series. It set him on a path to become the world’s first martial-arts megastar — a dream that came to fruition, bittersweetly, with the 1973 release of Enter the Dragon, one month after his death at the age of 32.

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of Lee’s passing and Enter the Dragon’s release, Simon & Schuster has published Bruce Lee: A Life, the first comprehensive biography of the icon’s life and work. As this ranking of his 24 films demonstrates, Lee appeared in a far wider variety of films than his legend gives him credit for, from comedies to melodramas. But the one constant in almost all his performances was his ease in front of the camera. It’s as if he was born into it.

24. Game of Death (1978)
This is the flick Bruce Lee fans love to hate. In 1972 Lee filmed 30 minutes of fight scenes for a movie about a yellow-jumpsuited hero who battles his way up a five-story pagoda to retrieve a secret treasure. Lee died before he completed the project, but five years later, Golden Harvest studios unearthed the footage, cut it down to seven minutes, and stuck it on the end of a creaky plot about a Chinese stuntman who gets shot in the face, gets reconstructive surgery, and takes revenge from beyond the grave. The whole thing is a distasteful mess.

23. The Birth of Mankind (1946)
Lee’s father, Hoi-chuen, was cast in a number of movies, and he would often bring his son on set with him. “Bruce climbed the wooden ladders to reach the suspended studio lights,” actress Feng So Po remembers of the hyperactive boy. “He wanted to touch everything from the cameras to the sound equipment.” One of the directors saw his relentless energy and offered him a part in this Cantonese tearjerker about a runaway who becomes a pickpocket and, uh, gets run over by a truck. A forgettable flick that flopped at the box office, this one’s only notable for typecasting young Lee as a wily street urchin with a heart of gold, a kind of Artful Dodger.

22. Wealth Is Like a Dream (1948)
Once again, Lee was cast as a lost boy. His father co-starred in the film and the promoters, seeking to play off the family connection, gave Lee a new stage name: Little Hoi-chuen. The newspapers followed suit, calling him “Wonder Kid.” The son would spend the rest of his life determined to outshine his old man. Based on this performance, he had his work cut out for him.

21. Thunderstorm (1957)
Adolescence proved a tricky transition for Lee’s career. Too old for the scrappy orphan role, he attempted to play against type and broaden his range with mixed results. His character is proper, naïve, dutiful, and rich — and in love with his family’s housemaid. Critics panned the movie, singling out his performance as “rigid,” “artificial,” and “over-eager.” Mercifully, this was his only attempt to play the refined gentleman.

20. Golden Gate Girl (1941)
Esther Eng was a pioneering female film director who specialized in patriotic war movies. While filming Golden Gate Girl, she needed a newborn girl for several scenes and asked Lee’s father if she could borrow his son. In one brief appearance, two-month-old Lee is rocked to sleep in a wicker bassinet, wearing a lacy bonnet and girl’s blouse. His mother was flustered to see her delicate child so transfigured for the camera. In another close-up, a warmly wrapped baby Lee cries inconsolably, eyes squeezed shut, mouth agape, arms flapping, chubby cheeks and double chin reverberating as the sound echoes through San Francisco.

19. The Beginning of Mankind (1951)
In what amounts to a PSA against harsh Confucian parenting, Lee plays a poor kid who, yes, runs away to become a street urchin and petty thief. In real life, Lee and his classmates had formed an actual gang that would roam back alleys looking for fights. That lived experience led to a sharp performance in an otherwise tedious film.

18. We Owe It to Our Children (1955)
In 1953, Lee joined a socialist collective of filmmakers and actors called Union Films, leading him to appear in a string of socially conscious, message-driven movies. In this particularly earnest melodrama, a poor mother and father give away their infant daughter to a childless middle-class couple, only to regret their decision. (It was all too common an occurrence in postwar Hong Kong; Jackie Chan’s parents considered selling him to wealthy doctor.) In the movie, Lee shows up only briefly as the lazy landlord’s son, constantly slicking back his greased hair with a comb like Elvis.

17. A Mother’s Tears (1953)
This family drama was once considered one of Lee’s lost films until the Hong Kong Film Archives eventually located a scratchy print. But it probably would’ve been fine if they hadn’t, as it’s essentially only half a Bruce Lee movie: He plays the role of a thoughtful son before getting replaced halfway through the film by an older actor.

16. A Myriad Homes (1953)
This social-realist satire contrasts the family life of a rich businessman with a poor car mechanic who makes an honest living, finding comfort in his family. In a bit of a twist, Lee finally plays a happy, non-urchin child as the mechanic’s cheerful son. Blink and you’ll miss his grinning face in this largely decorative role.

15. Orphan’s Song (1955)
Lee, as the titular orphan, doesn’t show up until the last 20 minutes — a long slog through thick gruel for what amounts to a wan performance, too passive and diffident to care about.

14. Darling Girl (1957)
Fun fact: Lee was once the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong. Also fun: His real-life dance partner, Margaret Leung, co-stars as a spoiled rich girl in this lighthearted rom-com. Want to see Bruce Lee as a fashionable, sweater-vest-wearing toff as he cha-chas in a nightclub? This is the movie for you. The only bit of acting required on his part is when Leung’s love interest angrily confronts him — and instead of engaging, Lee’s character flees in terror. It may be the only known instance of Lee running away from a fight.

13. Too Late for Divorce (1956)
This is the third film in a romantic trilogy — beginning with She Says “No” to Marriage (1951) and followed by She Says “No” to Marriage But Now She Says “Yes!” (1952) — about a successful singer who is forced to retire and marry a man she despises. Lee plays her son — a dance tutor. (More Bruce Lee dance trivia: Later, as a college student in America, he taught dance classes to help pay the bills.) Smartly dressed in modern clothing, charming but a little smug, this performance gives the best glimpse into what Lee was actually like as a Westernized teenager in colonial Hong Kong.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

12. Sweet Time Together (1956)
A cutup in class, it seemed natural for Lee to try his hand at comedy at some point. He did just that in this age-reversal slapstick farce, playing a doltish teenager who finds himself caught in increasingly absurd romantic situations. Yet the real humor comes from watching the King of Kung Fu stammering and twitching like a fool. Lee’s comedic idol was Jerry Lewis, and he does a credible imitation, down to the white sailor-boy outfit and black horn-rim glasses.

11. In the Face of Demolition (1953)
After WWII, millions of refugees from China’s civil war flooded into the British colony of Hong Kong. This classic film weaves together the stories of the many impoverished families all living in one teeming, soon-to-be-demolished tenement building, with Lee playing the sincere son of one of the poorest tenants. In less than five minutes of screen time, he manages to deliver a standout, touching performance in a movie filled with them.

10. An Orphan’s Tragedy (1955)
Here Lee gets to play a happy orphan, albeit briefly: His idyllic country life gets disrupted by an escaped criminal who turns out to be his biological father. The scenes where Lee is trapped in a shack with this desperate, violent man are the best of the movie, mostly because it’s fun to watch a 15-year-old Bruce Lee try to play weak.

9. The Guiding Light (1953)
In yet another message-driven melodrama, a foster child gets adopted by a doctor and his wife, who run an orphanage for blind girls. When Lee’s character grows up, he discovers the cure for blindness. The movie ends with a direct-to-camera plea: “Every child can be just like him. Poor handicapped children are waiting for your love, for education and nurturing.” By this point in his career, Lee had mastered the orphan role, infusing his performance with a heavy dollop of pathos.

8. Love: Part 1 & 2 (1955)
Set onboard a steamship, this two-part melodrama unfolds in six episodes, dealing with six different aspects of love. In the fifth story line, Lee plays the youngest son in a family of struggling street performers. A flashback of father and son performing for a crowd allows Lee, a ham at heart, to display his talent for showmanship. It’s utterly charming — and one of the best scenes of Lee’s career.

7. Marlowe (1969)
Lee’s first Hollywood cameo was a gift from his Oscar-winning kung fu student, Stirling Silliphant, who came up with the character of mob enforcer Winslow Wong for his mentor to play. There are moments when Lee, who was self-conscious about his Chinese accent, comes off as stiff and nervous as he exchanges snappy dialogue with James Garner’s Marlowe. But he eventually loosens up during a scene in which he demolishes Marlowe’s office in one continuous ballet of directed violence. The movie flopped at the box office and was panned by critics. Roger Ebert reserved his only praise for that action sequence, although he didn’t deem Lee important enough to use his name or get his ethnicity right: “Somewhere about the time when the Japanese karate expert wrecks his office (in a very funny scene), we realize Marlowe has lost track of the plot, too.”

6. The Kid (1950)
Lee landed his first starring role with his fourth film, once again about a tough street urchin with a heart of gold. At just 10 years old, Lee shows off a range of emotions and raw charisma. In one scene, he humorously imitates his teacher; in another, he puffs himself up with cocky bravado by throwing his shoulders back and thumbing his nose at an opponent — one of his signature moves as an adult actor. The movie was a box-office hit and a sequel was planned that might have turned Lee into the Macaulay Culkin of Hong Kong, but his father refused to let him repeat the role. Lee was causing trouble in school and getting into fights on the streets, so his parents put him in show-business time-out until his behavior improved. (It didn’t, but they eventually let him continue acting anyway.)

5. Fist of Fury (1972)
Lee’s second contractual movie with Golden Harvest studios was his only period piece. He plays Chen Zhen, the student of a famous kung fu master in 1930s colonial Shanghai. When Chen Zhen discovers his master was killed by the Japanese, he unleashes his furious fists. The movie’s overt ethno-nationalism was like an adrenaline shot of pure patriotism; many Chinese fans ripped up their seat cushions and threw them around the theater when Lee’s character strutted into the Japanese dojo and declared, “The Chinese are not the sick men of Asia.” Interestingly, Lee was a fan of Japanese films, particularly Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, and he approached his role with the exaggerated emotional style of Japanese samurai movies (chambara). It doesn’t quite work, but Lee’s fight choreography is so riveting it doesn’t matter.

4. The Big Boss (1971)
For someone as worldly as Lee, he had a fondness for playing naïfs. In his first Golden Harvest movie, his character immigrates to Thailand to work in an ice factory, which is actually a front for a drug-smuggling operation. “He was a very simple, straightforward guy. Like if you told him something, he’d believe you,” Lee explained. “Then, when he finally figures out he’s been had, he goes animal.” His primal performance is the movie’s primary pleasure. He rips through his enemies with lustful glee. Hong Kong audiences were blown away. The Big Boss turned Lee into the biggest star in Southeast Asia.

3. Way of the Dragon (1972)
Lee hoped this Hong Kong movie, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, would be his ticket back to Hollywood as a leading man. Lee plays Tang Lung, a naïve bumpkin sent to Rome to protect a Chinese restaurant from the Mafia. “Well, it is really a simple plot of a country boy going to place where he cannot speak the language but somehow he comes out on top, because he honestly and simply expressed himself,” Lee laughingly told Esquire, “by beating the hell out of everybody who gets in his way.” In his directorial debut, Lee was unable to balance the humor of the early fish-out-water scenes with the violence at the end. The film’s appeal rests almost entirely on his fight scene with his student, Chuck Norris — arguably the best one ever captured on celluloid.

2. The Orphan (1960)
Lee was never fully comfortable onscreen unless he was the star, and he had been waiting ten years, since The Kid, for a leading role. Modeling his troubled teenage character on James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Lee give his most emotionally complex performance as an actor in this film. One moment he is snarling, the next laughing maniacally, and all the while spewing out a fetid stew of Cantonese street slang. Hong Kong boys were so taken with Lee’s swaggering hoodlum that they began to emulate how he smoked cigarettes and cha-cha danced, causing one concerned high-school principal to hang a banner across his school’s entrance reading: “No one is allowed to imitate Bruce Lee’s Ah Sum in The Orphan!”

1. Enter the Dragon (1973)
This cheaply-made James Bond ripoff was supposed to be Lee’s entrée into superstardom. Instead, his death a month before its release left it the high-water mark of his career. The multiracial cast, the cat-stroking villain, and the tournament structure launched the West’s kung fu craze — and a thousand imitators. Terrified that Warner Bros. would recut the movie to make John Saxon the star, Lee fought onscreen and off to stamp his personality onto every frame. The result was a performance so intense he seems to vibrate off the screen. Two hours of watching Lee punch, kick, and hack his way through dozens of bad guys inspired millions of Western kids to take up the martial arts. Enter the Dragon is the movie that cemented Lee’s legacy, in film and beyond.

Matthew Polly is the author of Bruce Lee: A Life and two other books about the martial arts, American Shaolin and Tapped Out.
I've only seen a few of his non-martial child actor flicks, and they are always interesting.

[GeneChing]

Yesterday’s Crimes: The Brawl That Almost Broke Bruce Lee (http://www.sfweekly.com/news/yesterdays-crimes-news/yesterdays-crimes-the-brawl-that-almost-broke-bruce-lee/)
American Shaolin author Matthew Polly sorts through the fact and fiction surrounding Bruce Lee's Bay Area grudge match in his new book, Bruce Lee: A Life.
Bob Calhoun Mon Jun 11th, 2018 10:01amYesterday's Crimes

http://1ryzas42x65e2oosia40bgli.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/lee.jpg
Bruce Lee punishing a young Jackie Chan in Enter the Dragon. (Courtesy Image)

Bruce Lee was born into a performing family; His mother gave birth to him in the year of the dragon on Nov. 27, 1940 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, while his parents were on tour with a Chinese opera company. His Chinese name, Li Jun Fan (李振藩), included the Chinese character for San Francisco (Fan), and can be translated roughly to “Shake Up and Excite San Francisco.” When Lee finally returned to the city of his birth in his early 20s, the future martial arts superstar did just what his name had prophesized.

Lee took the stage of the Sun Sing Theatre on Grant Avenue between Jackson and Pacific in August 1964. What started with Lee doing the cha-cha with Diana Chang Chung-Wen, “The Mandarin Marilyn Monroe,” soon became one of Chinatown’s most enduring controversies. It all began during a demonstration of the Wing Chun kung fu techniques Lee had honed on the streets of Hong Kong.

“In China, 80 percent of what they teach is nonsense,” Lee proclaimed during his show. “Here in America, it is 90 percent.

“These old tigers,” he continued, criticizing San Francisco’s traditional kung fu masters, “they have no teeth.”

“That’s not kung fu!” a man in the back of the theater shouted, while the Chinatown audience flung lit cigarettes onto the stage to show their disapproval of this young upstart.

Before Lee left the stage, he told the hostile crowd that if they wanted to research his Wing Chun, they could find him at his school in Oakland. To everyone at the Sun Sing that night, it sounded like the “Little Dragon” had just issued an open challenge to all of Chinatown.

“(Lee) was 24,” Matthew Polly, author of the hard-to-put-down new biography Bruce Lee: A Life, explains. “He was trying to make a name for himself, and he was going out there, poking people in the eye trying to get them to change their minds.”

Polly wrote about his experiences studying kung fu at the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China for his first book, American Shaolin (Penguin, 2007). He then trained in mixed martial arts for his follow-up, Tapped Out (Gotham, 2011).

“After writing Tapped Out, I was looking for a project that didn’t involve me getting punched in the face,” Polly says, but he couldn’t stay away from martial arts. When Polly realized the only Bruce Lee biography still in print was from 25 years ago, he was “personally offended.”

“The most important Asian American to ever live, and the most famous, couldn’t get his one biography when Steve McQueen has a half a dozen,” Polly says.

Polly spent seven years researching Bruce Lee: A Life, which had him untangling fact from the urban legends surrounding Lee’s rise to stardom, his mysterious death, and the challenge match that emerged from that appearance at the Sun Sing Theatre.

“Bruce lived a life that was a lot like his kung fu movies,” Polly says, pointing out that Lee accepted challenge matches well into his 30s. “And so whenever somebody wants to tell the story of Bruce, they want to tell it as if it was a kung fu movie, and of course they immediately go to the Wong Jack Man fight.”

Wong Jack Man was not at the Sun Sing on the night of Lee’s performance, but Lee’s critique of the high kicks of Northern Shaolin kung fu got back to him. Like Lee, Wong was a skilled martial artist in his early 20s who had come to America from Hong Kong. Unlike Lee, Wong venerated martial arts traditions.

“In the fight between Bruce and Wong Jack Man you have modernity versus tradition,” Polly says.

After weeks of negotiations, Wong arrived at Bruce Lee’s Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute at 4175 Broadway in Oakland’s auto row on a weeknight in early November 1964. Wong’s pal, David Chin, who had egged on this fight, attempted to negotiate some ground rules, but Lee wasn’t having it.

“You’ve already got your friend killed,” Lee spat in Cantonese.

James Lee, one of Lee’s students, locked the dojo door from the inside and took a seat close to where he kept a loaded revolver in case any more of Wong’s friends showed up. Bruce Lee’s pregnant wife Linda was the only other person there on his side, while Wong and Chin had brought four others with them.

When Wong reached out to shake hands, the tense Bruce Lee threw a powerful shot that crashed into Wong’s orbital bone.

“He really wanted to kill me,” Wong later recalled.

Lee followed up with a blistering series of Wing Chun chain punches. Wong backpedaled, blocking Lee’s shots. Lee kept coming. Wong struck Lee in the neck and drew blood with a studded wrist bracelet he concealed in his long sleeve.

“When Bruce felt the blood on his neck and realized the deception, he went berserk,” Polly writes.

Wong turned around and started to run. Wong stumbled on a raised platform in Lee’s studio leftover from when it was an upholstery shop. Lee got on top of Wong and pounded him. Chin and the others pulled Lee off of their fallen champion.

The fight in Oakland only enhanced the reputations of both men. Lee became a Hong Kong-to-Hollywood tragedy who died right before the release of Enter the Dragon (1973), his greatest triumph. Wong earned the title of grandmaster teaching Tai Chi Chuan and Northern Shaolin at Fort Mason Center until 2005. Wong’s subsequent students have claimed their beloved sifu vanquished the arrogant movie star.

The tiebreaker for Polly in determining just what happened that night in 1964 was that David Chin’s account jibed with Linda Lee’s.

“I took that as a pretty good guarantee of the truth if Wong Jack Man’s friend thought a certain thing happened,” Polly says.

“One advantage I have in writing this book over other biographers is that I was actually in a challenge match in China and fought another kung fu master,” Polly adds, recalling an incident he covered in American Shaolin.

“So certain things rang true to me just based on my own experience,” he says. “I’ve watched challenge matches where one guy freaks out and panics and starts running.”

Unsatisfied with how ugly the Wong Jack Man fight was, Lee committed to developing his own style, called Jeet Kune Do, and transformed martial arts in the process.

“What’s amazing with MMA is this is what it’s become,” Polly reflects. “The way (Lee) was teaching is the way a significant portion of the martial arts community now practices.”


THREADS
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)
Bruce Lee vs. Wong Jack Man fight (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?36573-Bruce-Lee-vs-Wong-Jack-Man-fight)
American Shaolin by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?26966-American-Shaolin-by-Matt-Polly)

[GeneChing]

See our WINNERS: Bruce Lee: A Life Autographed by Author Matthew Polly thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70818-WINNERS-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-Autographed-by-Author-Matthew-Polly).

[PalmStriker]

:) Just finished reading Polly's Bruce Lee. What a breath of fresh air to hear of the realities behind the Legend instead of the movie script glamorization and cover-ups by friends and family to keep the tarnish from surfacing into the limelighted public domain. This book emblazons his extraordinary accomplishments while providing the reader with a chronological account and input that serves well to illustrate time and circumstance in the life of the Master and his family lineage. FIVE STARS !

[GeneChing]

I've yet to hear anyone dislike it. Most say they can't put it down once they started it.

Here's our local SF coverage:

‘Bruce Lee: A Life,’ by Matthew Polly (https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matthew-Polly-13037742.php)
By Yunte Huang Published 10:41 am, Friday, June 29, 2018

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/74/21/41/15800432/3/920x920.jpg
“Bruce Lee” Photo: Simon & Schuster
Photo: Simon & Schuster

Did you know Bruce Lee was a circumcised Jew? Yes, that Bruce Lee, the man who introduced the word “kung fu” to the English language, the patron saint of martial arts. In fact, the man considered by many as the icon of Asian masculinity turned out to be five-eighths Chinese, one-quarter English, and one-eighth Dutch Jewish. But that’s not all the fascinating tidbits you can find in the illuminating, expansive and thoroughly enjoyable biography “Bruce Lee: A Life,” by Matthew Polly. In Polly, a Princeton graduate who spent two years studying kung fu at Shaolin Temple in China before writing the book “American Shaolin,” Lee cannot have found a better Boswell, a more kindred spirit.

As if anticipating the peripatetic life journey ahead of him, Bruce Lee was born on the road between curtain calls in San Francisco on Nov. 27, 1940 , when his parents came from Hong Kong as part of a touring theatrical troupe. His father, Hoi Chuen Li, hailing from humble roots in southern China, was an actor in Cantonese opera. Bruce’s mother, Grace Ho, was a member of a wealthy Eurasian family, the Hong Kong equivalent of the Rockefellers. Her maternal grandfather, Mozes Hartog Bosman, was a Dutch Jewish tycoon who had made his fortune in Chinese coolie trade.

Growing up in Hong Kong under British rule, young Bruce was a troubled kid. Hyperactive, severely nearsighted, an avid reader of comic books, he sported thick glasses, was a gang leader at school, and repeatedly failed to advance. A textbook juvenile delinquent, he was expelled from school in 1956 because of a trifecta of bad grades, constant fighting and increasingly violent schoolyard pranks.

Lost on the hard pavements of a swarming colonial city, Bruce would carry switchblades and brass knuckles, itching for a fight. It appeared that our future global icon was well on his way to jail, until one day Ip Man, a kung fu master, accepted the pugnacious 15-year-old as his disciple. Master Ip was known for Wing Chun, a style of martial arts that emphasizes close-quarters combat. More than the basics of Wing Chun — low kicks, lightning-quick punches, blocks and traps, Master Ip distilled in his young disciple a sense of self-discipline, akin to the Taoist notions of being one with nature, going with the flow and bending like a reed in the wind. It was a philosophical outlook best captured later by one of Bruce Lee’s signature onscreen lines, “Be water, my friend.”

Besides the daily training with the wooden dummy and sticky hands, Bruce also became a dance aficionado, following all the latest fads, anything from the Lindy hop to the boogie-woogie, jitterbug and jive, and acquiring the moniker of “the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong.” He also picked up acting gigs, playing comedic characters in films. Wary of the hazards of an acting career, Bruce’s father decided to send him to America to study medicine. On April 29, 1959, Bruce boarded the President Wilson at Victoria Harbor and sailed for his birth country.

After a brief sojourn in San Francisco, Bruce went to Seattle, where for three years he lived in a walk-in closet above a Chinese restaurant and washed dishes to support himself. He attended the University of Washington, where he met a brown-haired, blue-eyed fellow student, Linda Emery. When they married in 1964, anti-miscegenation laws were dying hard in the great USA, with 17 states still banning interracial marriages. But that’s not the only racial barrier Bruce broke. When he opened a martial arts studio in Seattle, he became the first kung fu teacher in America to accept students regardless of race or ethnicity.

In the period when karate was the hottest fad in America — Elvis Presley and Sean Connery were learning to kick and chop — Bruce’s impressive performances at karate championships and his rising reputation as a kung fu master stood him in good stead. Soon, Hollywood came calling, and Bruce landed the role of Kato in the television show “The Green Hornet.” The success of the black-masked Kato character gave Bruce a foothold in Hollywood, and he soon became sifu (teacher) to the likes of Steve McQueen, Roman Polanski, Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman.


MORE INFORMATION
Bruce Lee

A Life

By Matthew Polly

(Simon & Schuster; 640 pages; $35)

But the noisome racial mores in Hollywood made it impossible for Bruce to transition, as he had hoped, from teaching stars to being one. He was repeatedly snubbed for lead roles in action films, the most notorious case being the “Kung Fu” series, which features a Shaolin monk wandering the American West. That dream role, much to Bruce’s dismay, went to the white actor David Carradine.

Disheartened, Bruce returned to Hong Kong, hoping that success there would give him a bank shot back to Hollywood. The strategy worked. “The Big Boss,” produced by Raymond Chow and premiered in October 1971, smashed all box office records, followed by “Fist of Fury” (1972), which broke records again and swept across Asia. Almost singlehandedly, Bruce put Hong Kong cinema on the world map.

The next two films, “Way of the Dragon” (1972) and “Enter the Dragon” (1973), made Bruce the first Hong Kong and Hollywood crossover star, a feat not repeated until Jackie Chan starred in “Rush Hour” in 1998. On the eve of the release of “Enter the Dragon,” and days before his scheduled guest appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” Lee died suddenly in the flat of his lover in Hong Kong, a tragic event still shrouded in mystery. He was only 32.

Lee’s epic journey, his rise from a street thug to a global star, is certainly the stuff of legend. But Polly’s enthralling biography, which at times reads like a screenplay full of dialogue and mots justes, is a deeply humanizing portrait of a complicated character, a man who was at once a fitness freak and a junkie, a superhero and a superstud, someone who would flaunt his bell-bottom jeans, high-heeled Cuban boots and occasionally even a floor-length mink coat, and then would crack your skull with a nunchaku while letting out a feline yell. In the words of a Hollywood producer from that racially charged bygone era, Bruce Lee “might be too authentic.”

Yunte Huang is a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. His most recent book is “Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History,” published by Liveright in April.

[MatthewPolly]

:) Just finished reading Polly's Bruce Lee. What a breath of fresh air to hear of the realities behind the Legend instead of the movie script glamorization and cover-ups by friends and family to keep the tarnish from surfacing into the limelighted public domain. This book emblazons his extraordinary accomplishments while providing the reader with a chronological account and input that serves well to illustrate time and circumstance in the life of the Master and his family lineage. FIVE STARS !

So glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for the review.

[GeneChing]

Matt Polly's new book, Bruce Lee: A Life (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly) has been generating a lot of Bruce news lately. I've heard the bad feng shui (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?9565-Feng-Shui) thing about his Cumberland place (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70543-Bruce-Lee-Museums-and-Gallery-Exhibits). I prefer the 'assassinated by ninjas' theory.


Did bad feng shui kill Bruce Lee? Talk continues to this day that it played a part in actor’s death (https://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/2153615/did-bad-feng-shui-kill-bruce-lee-talk-continues-day-it-played-part)
Forty-five years after he died, there is still speculation that the martial arts superstar died because of a curse, with Lee’s home at 41 Cumberland Road, Kowloon Tong, long rumoured to have suffered from bad feng shui theory about his
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 04 July, 2018, 7:04am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 04 July, 2018, 7:03am
Staff Reporter

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980x551/public/images/methode/2018/07/03/084354f6-7ea1-11e8-8c40-58d9485981d4_1280x720_190948.JPG?itok=izvdQCfl

According to a new biography, the Chinese icon also had English and Dutch-Jewish blood, and as an action star admired the whole world over he would have felt at home today

There’s still speculation that Bruce Lee died because of a curse. But according to the Post publication Memoirs of an Asian Moviegoer, the word at the time was that he was a victim of bad feng shui.

Quoting an article published a week after Lee’s death on July 20, 1973, the book says: “Lee’s sudden and untimely death last Friday immediately led a neighbour to say that he knew something bad was in the offing because a tree in the star’s home at Kowloon Tong was blown down by Typhoon Dot. [Typhoon Dot struck Hong Kong in July 1973, causing storm force winds and killing one person]. This, the neighbour claimed was a bad omen resulting in the death of Lee.”

Feng shui is a supernatural belief that the spatial arrangement of objects can have favourable or unfavourable effects on nearby people, their wealth or poverty, health and death. When moving into a new apartment, a geomancer is hired to arrange furniture so that the feng shui is benign, and architects sometimes consult geomancers while designing buildings.

Location can also play a role, with some areas being deemed to have bad feng shui. Kowloon Tong, where Lee lived at 41 Cumberland Road, was rumoured to have bad feng shui. (Lee did not die in Cumberland Road, but in the flat of actress Betty Ting Pei, at nearby 67 Beacon Hill Road.)

https://cdn2.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/07/03/40d7dff8-7ea1-11e8-8c40-58d9485981d4_972x_190948.JPG
A neon sign shines outside the Romantic Hotel occupying the house where Lee lived in Kowloon Tong. Photo: Antony Dickson

“The Chinese press said that Bruce Lee knew about the bad feng shui prevailing in the area and he installed a feng shui deflector on the roof of his home in Cumberland Road,” the book says, quoting the same article. “This deflector, a pat kwe [bagua] – an octagon-shaped wooden frame with a mirror in the centre – was found missing after Typhoon Dot lashed Hong Kong. In the absence of it, Bruce Lee became vulnerable, some say. So the story goes that if he had lived elsewhere, Bruce Lee would have lived longer.”

Other reports suggest that Lee’s friends Unicorn Chan and Wu Ngan set up the deflector, as they had arranged for a geomancer to examine the property before Lee moved in. Lee himself was apparently not superstitious, but he didn’t object.

It was also rumoured that Lee’s choice of The Game of Death as the title of his next film was responsible for his death. “The Chinese press reported that film director Lo Wei [who directed Lee in The Big Boss and Fist of Fury] had warned him about the film’s name, which he said should be carefully chosen,” the book says, quoting the article.

https://cdn4.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/images/methode/2018/07/03/abd50d0e-7ea0-11e8-8c40-58d9485981d4_972x_190948.JPG
Lee’s picture in a funeral parlour after his death. Photo: SCMP

Lee died of a cerebral oedema, although what brought that on has never been confirmed, and speculation has run rife since. The coroner’s inquest said that it may have been an allergic reaction to aspirin, and recorded a verdict of death by misadventure. In his biography Bruce Lee: A Life, Matthew Polly speculates that the cause of death might have been heatstroke.

In a television interview, Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan, who worked as a stuntman on the set of Lee’s Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon, said that the notion of any supernatural causes behind Lee’s death was ridiculous. “Everyone in Hong Kong knows what happened,” he said. “I don’t want to say it, but just Google it.”

[Jimbo]

I don't care for the word 'supernatural'.

Coincidentally (or not), Shaw Brothers star Alexander Fu Sheng was living in Bruce Lee's house at the time he died as a result of a car accident, 10 years to the month later, on July 7, 1983.

[Oso]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/07/us/bruce-lee-myth-vs-reality/index.html

[Jimbo]

As far as BL being Jewish; I thought Jewish was a religion, not a race. There are Chinese Jews in China (in Henan Province, I believe). Funny, I'd always heard that BL's European blood was German. Whatever, it was supposedly enough for BL's Wing Chun classmates to get Ip Man to expel BL from his school for not being 'pure' Chinese. I've never heard of anybody describing BL as 'That Englishman,' or 'That Dutch Jew'. BL looked more like the Western image of 'purely Asian' than my dad's side of the family (all Japanese, BTW).

If the results I always hear about from people who use DNA services like '23 and me' and others are true and accurate, EVERYBODY is a mutt. No surprise there. There is no such thing as 'pure' anything.

I'll certainly be getting a copy of the book for myself. I'm still a fan of BL, but was never a BL worshiper. He was definitely a highly talented and fascinating person that many still either put on a pedestal or talk trash about. Some like to say that BL created a new Asian stereotype with his martial arts moves and 'cat cries'. That may be true, but it was certainly unintended on his part (his Hong Kong movies weren't even intended for Western audiences). Anybody who trashes him for that should look at the Asian stereotypes that preceded BL's superstardom (many of which amazingly still exist today).

[PalmStriker]

:) Interview : https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2018/07/08/matthew-polly-on-bruce-lee-and-the-art-of-writing-a-life/

[GeneChing]

READ Bruce Lee – A Life: A New Biography from Martial Author Matthew Polly By Gene Ching in our SUMMER 2018 issue (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/magazine/article.php?article=1420).

http://www.kungfumagazine.com/admin/site_images/KungfuMagazine/upload/2684_KFM2018-Summer-Cover.jpg

[Jimbo]

I've ordered my copy and am looking forward to it.

[GeneChing]

...our first meme for our current issue.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DijppXOV4AA_Qo5.jpg:large

THREADS:
Summer 2018 (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70789-Summer-2018)
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)
Bruce Lee Memorials (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?42950-Bruce-Lee-Memorials)

[SifuYui]

I finished this book within a week and I was sorry when I finished as I truly enjoyed Matt's bio on Bruce Lee. The book had lots of information I did not know about Bruce and lots I knew, the new information was well worth the price of the book. Matt presented the single mindedness of Bruce in an era where Hollywood did not know what to make of him and certainly did not appreciate him. What also stuck out for me was how Bruce kept asking Stirling Silliphant and James Coburn to help him get The Silent Flute made and tried as they may, could not not get Hollywood interested. When Bruce finally made it big and Stirling and James asked Bruce to revisit it, Bruce was being a hard-ass about it, telling his friends he was too big. To his friends, who tried to help him. Bruce was certainly obsessively driven from the get go, as though he knew he only had a limited amount of time to do what he wanted...

In his footnotes, Matt mentioned he did not know of any Chinese Gung Fu presented in any American TV or movie media before 1966 (?); in the 1963 movie, 55 Days at Peking with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, there is a scene where Hung Ga Gung Fu is demonstrated by someone from the LSW lineage, to the Chinese Imperial Court, if I'm not mistaken.

[Jimbo]

In his footnotes, Matt mentioned he did not know of any Chinese Gung Fu presented in any American TV or movie media before 1966 (?); in the 1963 movie, 55 Days at Peking with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, there is a scene where Hung Ga Gung Fu is demonstrated by someone from the LSW lineage, to the Chinese Imperial Court, if I'm not mistaken.

IIRC, there was a Bay Area Fut Ga master who was the first TCMAist to appear on American TV, doing demos; I think it was sometime in the 1950s(?). I forgot his name, but he was a big name in the San Francisco CMA scene back in that time period and into the '60s and maybe the '70s.

Interesting that 55 Days at Peking would have a Hung Ga demo in it. In the 1975 Shaw Brothers movie Boxer Rebellion, directed by Chang Cheh, there is a scene in which Chi Kuan-Chun performs (I believe) Sup Ying Kuen, and Alexander Fu Sheng performs another Hung Ga set in front of the Empress Dowager, played by Lily Hua.

[yeshe]

I finished this book within a week and I was sorry when I finished as I truly enjoyed Matt's bio on Bruce Lee. The book had lots of information I did not know about Bruce and lots I knew, the new information was well worth the price of the book. Matt presented the single mindedness of Bruce in an era where Hollywood did not know what to make of him and certainly did not appreciate him. What also stuck out for me was how Bruce kept asking Stirling Silliphant and James Coburn to help him get The Silent Flute made and tried as they may, could not not get Hollywood interested. When Bruce finally made it big and Stirling and James asked Bruce to revisit it, Bruce was being a hard-ass about it, telling his friends he was too big. To his friends, who tried to help him. Bruce was certainly obsessively driven from the get go, as though he knew he only had a limited amount of time to do what he wanted...

In his footnotes, Matt mentioned he did not know of any Chinese Gung Fu presented in any American TV or movie media before 1966 (?); in the 1963 movie, 55 Days at Peking with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, there is a scene where Hung Ga Gung Fu is demonstrated by someone from the LSW lineage, to the Chinese Imperial Court, if I'm not mistaken.


I found it ,not really Hung Ga far as I can see,but could be Hung Ga guys.
Starts at 8:00 mints
HIP WAH!

https://youtu.be/3acHUlH6OYQ

[Jimbo]

I found it ,not really Hung Ga far as I can see,but could be Hung Ga guys.
Starts at 8:00 mints
HIP WAH!

https://youtu.be/3acHUlH6OYQ

It looks more like some Beijing opera performers. Nevertheless, very interesting for a 1955 American movie. Although, LOL at the actors in yellowface.

Here is the part of the scene in 1975's Boxer Rebellion where Chi Kuan-Chum demos before the Empress Dowager:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAFvgg2TYE8

And supposedly, the first time kung fu was featured on American TV was in 1955 on NBC's The Home Show, with Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs. Students of T.Y. Wong performed. (Source: Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America, by Charles Russo).

[SifuYui]

Wow, talk about having a bad memory; that's nothing like HG, LOL! I haven't seen the movie in a long time, but remember hearing someone famous was in the clip; that's what I get for trying to do things from memory. The main performer's name is Yuen Siu Tin (the hermit who trains Jackie Chan in Snake in Eagle's Shadow and Yuen Wo Ping's father). The big guy Charlton Heston pokes the sword at is Milton Reid, a veteran of American movies.

Thanks Yeshe for finding the clip and setting me straight, LOL!

[GeneChing]

Enter The Legend: 'Dragon' Turns 45 (https://www.npr.org/2018/08/17/639343899/the-lasting-influence-of-bruce-lees-enter-the-dragon-which-turns-45)
Download Transcript (https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=639343899)
August 17, 2018 4:53 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
JUSTIN RICHMOND

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Bruce Lee on the set of Enter the Dragon.
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

When the seminal martial arts film Enter the Dragon premiered in August 1973 — 45 years ago this weekend — it was exactly what Bruce Lee had been waiting for: A starring role in a Hollywood production.

Kung fu meets blaxploitation, and all action, Enter the Dragon was a hit at the box office. It grossed over $20 million in the United States, even beating out a Steve McQueen film, and was Warner Brothers' top grossing film internationally that year.

It sparked an explosion of martial arts movies — which until then had largely only existed in Hong Kong. It was supposed to make Bruce Lee a star.

"Enter the Dragon was really a very precious project for him," says Shannon Lee, Bruce's daughter. "And the one that he had been waiting for."


What Bruce Lee wanted to do was to create a heroic Asian male character, but it simply didn't exist.

Matthew Polly

But a month before the film's premiere, he died. Instead of becoming a star, he became a legend.

Before martial arts films, Lee was a child actor in Hong Kong.

He played mostly dramatic roles. One film, The Orphan, actually made him a bit of a celebrity there — his performance was compared to James Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause.

But any fame he had quickly disappeared when he left Hong Kong for the U.S., where he moved when his family felt he was getting in too much trouble at home. Lee, who had been a martial arts student since his early teens, decided to make a living as an instructor.

He didn't plan on acting but was discovered by a TV producer. William Dozier, who produced the popular Batman TV series, cast Bruce Lee as sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFBxFrq7byk
YouTube

The Green Hornet debuted on ABC on Sept. 9, 1966. Oddly enough, the original Star Trek series, featuring George Takei as Sulu, premiered the same week. Both shows were significant for casting Asian-American males in prominent roles on TV.

That was far from the norm.

"Up until The Green Hornet, it really was pretty much a wasteland as far as Asian-American continuous representation on television," says Jeff Yang, a writer and host of the podcast They Call Us Bruce.

The Green Hornet didn't catch on like the Batman series and was canceled after only a year. After a few more guest spots on TV and a movie, Lee was ready to play a new type of character — one that didn't yet exist for Asian males in Hollywood.

https://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/b/bruce-lee/9781501187629_custom-1d04f3f182e50cddf5239330287a575e1da00bf7-s400-c85.jpg
Bruce Lee
A Life
by Matthew Polly
Hardcover, 640 pages purchase

"What Bruce Lee wanted to do was to create a heroic Asian male character," says Matthew Polly, author of the new biography Bruce Lee: A Life. "But it simply didn't exist. There were only two types of roles — Fu Manchu, the villain, and Charlie Chan, the model minority. And both of these characters were played by white actors in multiple films during the '50s and '60s."

It was about this time Lee caught a lucky break.

He went back to Hong Kong to visit family and was greeted at the airport by producers eager to cast him. It had been over a decade since his last role in Hong Kong, but The Green Hornet had been playing there — except there it was called The Kato Show. Lee was again a star.

He decided to make martial arts films for Hong Kong audiences. He made three: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon. All were hits in Hong Kong. So Lee reached out to a producer he knew at Warner Brothers.

Which is where Enter the Dragon, well, enters. A co-production between Lee's Hong Kong studio, Golden Harvest, and Warner Brothers, it was the first martial arts film produced by an American studio. Lee was finally the heroic Asian star of a Hollywood movie. And he kicked butt.

Lee died a month before the film's release in the U.S. and didn't get to see the lasting influence it would have.


Without 'Enter the Dragon' most of the video games that we associate now with martial arts — certainly all of the television shows and films that have come afterwards ... would not be the same.

Jeff Yang

"Without Enter the Dragon most of the video games that we associate now with martial arts — certainly all of the television shows and films that have come afterwards ... would not be the same," Yang says.

"You know, we take for granted now that Hollywood action movies, they have martial arts, they have fight choreography, they do all this amazing stuff," says Phil Yu, the writer behind the site Angry Asian Man. "Before then we hadn't really seen martial arts in that context in a Hollywood film."

Lee's influence stretched beyond the screen. The Wu-Tang Clan's first album, one of the landmarks of hip-hop, was called Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in honor of Lee's last film.

"Man, I used to bang my hands on the wall trying to get iron palms, scrape my hands with beans," says the RZA. "I got stretch marks on my shoulders because of kung fu things I was trying to do."

Forty-five years after his death, Lee still turns up all over popular culture — just this week, Quentin Tarantino announced a new actor in his upcoming 1969 period piece, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The role? Bruce Lee.

THREADS:
Enter the Dragon (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?26150-Enter-the-Dragon)
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70864-Once-Upon-a-Time-in-Hollywood)

[GeneChing]

From Matt Polly's facebook:

Matthew Polly (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156044484907869&set=a.10150393432852869&type=3&theater)
1 hr ·

BOOK TOUR UPDATE:
Thanks to my good friend Alan Canvan, I will be in Irvington, New York on Saturday, September 29 and Seattle, Washington on Friday, October 12 for a book signing, panel discussion, and special screening of Bruce Lee's 'The Orphan' (1960). It is the last movie Bruce ever made as a child actor in Hong Kong and represents one of his most intriguing performances.

The film, unavailable in America, has been loaned to us by the Hong Kong Film Archives. So this is a unique opportunity. If you are nearby, I hope you will come. The event is free.

https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/42694084_10156044484917869_2624292358648233984_n.j pg?_nc_cat=108&oh=7e2ecf541785c1d2f4a50ca6c4b00b6a&oe=5C2AA882


I'm hoping this comes through the SF Bay Area. I've never seen The Orphan. I have seen The Kid (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49216-Bruce-Lee-quot-The-Kid-quot).

THREADS:
Bruce Lee filmography (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49504-Bruce-Lee-filmography)
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)

[GeneChing]

Now in paperback
New in Paperback: ‘Bruce Lee,’ ‘Fruit of the Drunken Tree’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/books/review/new-paperbacks.html)

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/31/books/review/31paperrow0/31paperrow0-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

By Joumana Khatib
May 30, 2019

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

BRUCE LEE: A Life (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/books/review/summer-reading-movies-tv.html?module=inline), by Matthew Polly. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) Among the first serious treatments of the martial arts star, this definitive biography follows Lee’s move from America to Hong Kong and back again, his time as a child star in Asia, the reverse racism he experienced and his rise to prominence in the United States. Above all, Polly explores how Lee’s fame helped reshape perceptions of Asian-Americans in the United States.

THE OPTIMISTIC DECADE, by Heather Abel. (Algonquin, $15.95.) A back-to-the-land summer camp attracts a charismatic leader and a bevy of followers, who encounter the limits of their ideals in the Colorado desert. Our reviewer, Zoe Greenberg, called Abel “a perceptive writer whose astute observations keep the book funny and light even under the weight of its Big Ideas.”

INDIANAPOLIS: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man, by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Nearly 900 people died when the U.S.S. Indianapolis, a Navy cruiser, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1945, but the story has long been incomplete. Vincent, a Navy veteran, and Vladic, a filmmaker, offer a fuller view of the episode.

FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. (Anchor, $16.) Drawing on the author’s own experiences, this debut novel describes life in Escobar-era Colombia. Narrated by a young girl, Chula, and her family’s maid from a nearby slum, the story captures the despair, confusion and chaos as the country’s conflict raged. Our reviewer, Julianne Pachico, praised the book, writing, “You don’t need to have grown up in Bogotá to be taken in by Contreras’s simple but memorable prose and absorbing story line.”

DON’T MAKE ME PULL OVER! An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, by Richard Ratay. (Scribner, $17.) This playful account conjures up the era before air travel was within reach for many American families, and explores how the Interstate transformed people’s relationship to the country. Part history, part memoir (Ratay recalls with fondness trips from his own childhood), the book is a love letter to the 1970s.

A LUCKY MAN: Stories, by Jamel Brinkley. (Public Space/Graywolf, $16.) A finalist for the National Book Award, this collection explores race, class and intimacy in the lives of black men. In the title story, a man whose wife seems to have left him examines his expectations of what the world owes him, what he feels he can take from others and what it would mean if his good fortune ran out.

[GeneChing]

Bruce is exceptional but I'm posting this in Training for Movies (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71306-Training-for-Movies) anyway (and also in Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly))


Bruce Lee’s fitness regime and diet made him a pioneer among athletes and martial artists alike (https://www.scmp.com/sport/martial-arts/kung-fu/article/3015409/bruce-lees-fitness-regime-and-diet-made-him-pioneer)
Enter The Dragon star was ahead of his time, reaping benefits of strength and conditioning training 50 years ago
Lee also drank protein shakes – including a blend of entire raw hamburgers – long before they became commonplace for modern athletes
Nicolas Atkin
Published: 7:33pm, 20 Jun, 2019

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2019/06/20/7469cd44-932d-11e9-a6c8-8445313d8ede_image_hires_193332.JPG?itok=WnqKU3wo&v=1561030430
Bruce Lee in 1971 film The Big Boss. Photo: Handout

Bruce Lee is known as the “Godfather of MMA” but he was also a pioneer when it came to his training regime and diet – which included drinking a blend of raw hamburger meat.
Biographer Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life, which was released on paperback last month, details how Lee was the first martial artist to train like a modern athlete.
The Enter The Dragon star reaped the benefits of strength and conditioning training 50 years ago, long before it became a habit of professional sports stars to hit the gym to improve their game.
As with his jeet kune do fighting style, which consisted of taking bits and pieces from multiple styles and blending them into one, Lee took training methods from other athletic spheres and forged them all into his own unique regime.
Polly writes that Bruce Lee recognised that strength and conditioning training was crucial to becoming the ultimate fighter. Whereas athletes to that point would simply practise their own sport, Lee was the first to integrate outside gym work to his routine.
Accordingly, Lee employed training methods from boxing such as skipping and road running to improve his endurance. He would run four to five miles each morning and lifted weights three nights a week, installing a squat rack, bench press, dumbbells, grip machine and an isometric machine in his garage.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hSzyjPfoRY

To alleviate the increased muscle aches, soreness and exhaustion brought on by such rigorous training, Lee used an idea he got from a fitness coach with NFL team the LA Rams, buying an electric muscle stimulator from James Garvey, founder of FlexTone, in 1972.
And 21 years later in 1993, the company sold muscle stimulators to Valencia Studios in California for the production of the Bruce Lee movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
“Three minutes is like doing 200 push-ups,” said Lee, who discovered a unique way to use the technology to enhance muscle tone and definition, in tandem with his workouts.

Lee was also an early pioneer of using protein shakes, drinking a high protein blend several times a day which contained protein powder, iced water, powdered milk, eggs, eggshells, bananas, vegetable oil, peanut flour and chocolate ice cream.
He also used supplements long before they were commonplace for athletes, and even drank a blend of entire raw hamburgers.
This approach to diet and fitness helped Lee with his martial arts but just importantly it helped him maintain his film star physique and good looks.

https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/06/20/f9bd3a3a-932d-11e9-a6c8-8445313d8ede_1320x770_193332.JPG
Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury. Photo: Golden Harvest

Lee went with lighter weights and higher repetitions to maintain a lean and ripped look, instead of getting big like a bodybuilder.
According to Polly, Lee knew he needed to train hard to land leading roles in Hollywood, which was dominated by taller, muscle-bound white men.
“His passion may have been the martial arts but his profession was acting,” writes Polly.

Bruce is also on the cover of the latest Muscle and Fitness (July 2019). He's been dead for 46 years now. So bad ass.


GET THE JULY 2019 ISSUE OF 'MUSCLE & FITNESS' NOW! (https://www.muscleandfitness.com/features/newsstand/get-july-2019-issue-muscle-fitness-now)
Learn how to keep that beach bod all summer long.

https://cdn-ami-drupal.heartyhosting.com/sites/muscleandfitness.com/files/styles/desktop_responsivecustom_user_desktop_1x/public/media/july-muscle1109_0.jpg?itok=Lw44t_Z5&timestamp=1560450733
Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC

The July 2019 issue of Muscle & Fitness has all the workout Opens a New Window. and nutrition Opens a New Window. tips you need to keep that shredded beach bod all summer long. Plus, in our sprawling cover story, we explore the enduring pop culture legacy of Bruce Lee, one of the fitness Opens a New Window. industry's most influential figures.

Lee’s physique impressed millions in the 1960s and '70s—now his secrets to killer strength and overall fitness are finally revealed. Lee, who died of a cerebral edema 46 years ago, took workouts Opens a New Window. found in magazines like M&F and modified them to his needs. We dive deep into both Lee's real-life fitness program, as well as Cinemax's must-see action spectacle Warrior, which is based on Lee's own ideas.

The July issue stays hot with training advice from CrossFit star and former Fittest Woman on Earth Camille Leblanc-Bazinet, TEST Football Opens a New Window. Academy graduate Tuzar Skipper, and WWE superstar Natalya Neidhart.

Todd Abrams and IFBB Pro League competitor Brandan Fokken are trying to keep fathers everywhere fit with their new venture, DadBod Inc. And MusclePharm athlete Davey Fisher will walk you through his summer shred program with his workout and nutrition tips.

Now that you’ve got that beach bod, you’ll want to keep it while also have fun during the summer. To that end, we review beers that are high on flavor, but low on calories and carbs—so drink up. We've also got plenty of grilling tips for your next backyard bash.

And since Muscle & Fitness includes FLEX, you'll also get the latest bodybuilding news, as well as even more workouts and nutrition tips. As Mr. Olympia rapidly approaches (have you bought your tickets Opens a New Window. yet?), four-time Sandow winner Jay Cutler discusses his role as the show’s honorary ambassador. You'll also get the true story behind the controversial Arnold Classic 1990, where Shawn Ray had his title revoked following a failed drug test.

Whether you’re continuing the cut or beginning to bulk, we’ve got all the tips and tricks you need right here in Muscle & Fitness Opens a New Window. and FLEX.

[GeneChing]

Why the Bruce Lee Fight in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Has Become the Movie's Most Controversial Scene (https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a28607548/mike-moh-bruce-lee-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-controversy/)
The martial arts master's biographer weighs in on the divisive fight scene with Brad Pitt.
BY GABRIELLE BRUNEY
AUG 7, 2019

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/bruce-lee-once-upon-a-time-1565181996.jpg
SONY

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood earned Quentin Tarantino his best opening weekend box office ever—exceeding forecasts despite being a nearly three-hour long R-rated film that opened while the Lion King remake was still holding strong. But despite also being well received by critics, the film has provoked debate. Its treatment of women has been scrutinized; female characters receive brutal beatings but little dialogue. And one single scene has also been the subject of heated controversy. Here’s a guide to the debate over the movie’s fight scene between real-life actor and martial arts legend Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh, and Brad Pitt’s character, fictional stuntman Cliff Booth.

What happens in the movie?

In the film, Pitt’s character, Booth, has a flashback while repairing a TV antenna for his boss and best friend, Leonardo DiCaprio’s also-fictional western star Rick Dalton. While on Dalton’s roof, Booth remembers an encounter with Bruce Lee on the Green Hornet set. In the memory, Moh’s Lee holds court among stuntmen and crew members, giving a pompous speech and saying that if he fought Cassius Clay, as legendary fighter Muhammad Ali was still often called in the ‘60s, he’d “make him a cripple.” This elicits chuckles from Pitt’s Booth, who calls Lee “a little man with a big mouth and a big chip,” who "should be embarrassed to suggest [he’d] be anything more than a stain on the seat of Cassius Clay’s trunks.”

Lee proposes a three-round fight to see which man can put the other “on his butt.” In the first round, Lee kicks Booth squarely in the chest, flooring him. He then attacks with a second flying kick, but Booth catches him and hurls him into a car. Before the match can be settled in the third and final round, the two men are interrupted, and Booth is fired for the fight. Flashing back to the present, a Booth still on Dalton’s roof declares his dismissal “fair enough.”

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/bruce-lee-brad-pitt-fight-1565182579.jpg
Sony

Was the scene accurate?

Lee did star in The Green Hornet, as the crime fighter’s sidekick and valet, Kato. But according to Lee biographer Matthew Polly, the scene was inaccurate in many ways. Lee “revered” Muhammad Ali, Polly told Esquire. "So the part in the movie where the Lee character says he would ‘cripple’ [the boxer] and Brad Pitt’s character comes to Ali’s defense is not only completely inaccurate, it turns Lee into a disrespectful blowhard and jerk.”

And while Lee was known to have fought stuntmen on some of his sets once he returned to Hong Kong, "he never started the fights, they always came up to him and challenged him,” Polly says. He also always defeated these challengers handily, with their fights ending within 20 seconds.

Lee also had a reputation for being kind to lower-ranking members of the cast and crews of the projects on which he worked. "Bruce was very famous for being very considerate of the people below him on film sets, particularly the stuntmen. He would often like buy them meals, or once he got famous, take them out to eat, or hand them a little extra cash, or look after their careers,” says Polly. "So in this scene, Bruce Lee is essentially calling out a stuntman and getting him fired because he’s the big star. And that’s just not who Bruce Lee was as a person."

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/real-bruce-lee-1565182645.jpg
Bruce Lee on the set of Enter the Dragon, directed by Robert Clouse.
Warner Bros. Pictures

Why do some people have a problem with it?

Despite having some basis in reality, Once Upon a Time is a fictional work—its ending proves that much. But Lee, who died in 1973, was a real-life person, and is still beloved worldwide as the most influential martial artist ever, and as one of the most iconic Asian American movie stars. He braved Hollywood’s racism and became a global superstar, decades before the American film industry would begin to improve upon its historically bigoted and emasculating depiction of Asian men.

In short, his legacy is worthy of the respectful good taste with which Tarantino treats the other real-life figures that appear in the film, including Manson victims Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, and Lee’s fellow Hollywood legend Steve McQueen. But Moh’s Lee is written as a bloviating ass whose presence was played for laughs and to give Booth’s character credibility as a skilled fighter. And while the fight is technically a draw, Booth loses his round with a pretty dignified fall on his butt—while Lee is thrown into a car by an anonymous, middle-aged stuntman.

"There’s nothing else to call him but the butt of the joke, because everything that makes him powerful is the very thing that makes him laughable in the film,” film scholar Nancy Wang Yuen told the LA Times. “His kung fu becomes a joke, and his philosophizing becomes a fortune cookie, and the sounds that he makes as he does kung fu are literally made fun of by Cliff. They made his arrogance look like he was a fraud.”

While Sharon Tate’s family signed off on her portrayal in the film, Shannon Lee wasn’t consulted on her late father’s depiction. "It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at my father,” she told The Wrap. "What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life,” said. “All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”

On Monday, it emerged that an early version of the scene would have seen Moh’s Lee even more decisively humiliated. In an interview with HuffPost, Once Upon a Time’s stunt coordinator revealed that the original script saw Booth’s fight with Lee going a full three rounds—with Lee losing in the end. "I know that Brad had expressed his concerns, and we all had concerns about Bruce losing,” said Alonzo.


Being an Asian American myself, I definitely related to how Bruce was a symbol of how Asians should be portrayed in movies, instead of the old Breakfast at Tiffany’s model that was really prevalent back in the day. … I had a difficult time choreographing a fight where he lost. Everyone involved was like, "How is this going to go over?" Brad was very much against it. He was like, "It’s Bruce Lee, man!”
"I love Quentin Tarantino. I absolutely adore his films, and I think every filmmaker has the right to do whatever they want with history,” said Polly. "What bothered me was that he was very reverential and sympathetic with Steve McQueen, Sharon Tate, and Jay Sebring, but Bruce’s portrayal was more mocking. And given that Bruce was the only non white historical figure in the whole film, I thought that was problematic."

continued next post

[GeneChing]

What do the Tarantino’s defenders say?

Defenders of the portrayal point out that Tarantino is an avowed Bruce Lee fan, who even based Uma Tarantino’s Kill Bill jumpsuit on an outfit Lee wore in his last film.

And critic Walter Chaw, who counts Lee as his hero, found that Moh’s Lee felt humanized. "I would argue Tarantino’s decision to have Booth fight Lee to a draw doesn’t doesn’t take the air out of Lee; it takes the air out of the constructed mystique that Lee was forced to maintain,” he wrote for Vulture. "That by allowing Lee to regain a portion of his humanity, Tarantino is offering a different, more generous kind of Asian-American representation onscreen.”

He was concerned, however, by hearing audience members in the theater laughing at Moh’s portrayal of the Chinese-accented Lee. "If you watch the new Tarantino, and there's any kind of audience, take note of how the audience reacts to the Bruce Lee impersonation,” Chaw tweeted. "This is what systemic racism looks like. Not the performance which is perfect, the reaction which is hard-wired into members of this culture."

Sony Pictures' "Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood" Los Angeles Premiere - Arrivalshttps://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/mike-moh-1565182869.jpg
Mike Moh arrives at the Sony Pictures’ "Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood" Los Angeles Premiere on July 22, 2019 in Hollywood, California.
Steve Granitz

Mike Moh also spoke about the scene. In an interview with Birth. Movies. Death, he also expressed feeling torn about the sequence. “When I first read it, I was like, wow,” he told the website. "I’m not going to tell you what the original script had exactly, but when I read it, I was so conflicted because he’s my hero—Bruce in my mind was literally a God.”

But like Chaw, he described the scene as humanizing Lee:


I can see how people might think Bruce got beat because of the impact with the car, but you give me five more seconds and Bruce would have won. So I know people are going to be up in arms about it, but when I went into my deep dive of studying Bruce, he more than anybody wanted people to know he's human. And I think I respect him more knowing that he had these challenges, these obstacles, just like everybody.

Why did Tarantino write the scene like that?

The Bruce Lee fight had a clear purpose. Booth is an underemployed stuntman who spends his day-to-day running errands for his boss, which doesn’t provide a lot of opportunity for the character to showcase his fighting skill before the film’s bloody finale. Depicting him as being at least as good, and potentially even a better fighter than Bruce Lee makes it a bit more credible when—spoiler—he takes on murderous Manson cultists in the film’s finale. But again, that boils down to tearing down an Asian-American icon in order to build up a fictional white guy.

It also fits in with the film’s allegiances, which lie with the fading Western stars of the late 1960s. "I suspect the reason Tarantino felt the need to take Bruce down a notch is because Lee’s introduction of Eastern martial arts to Hollywood fight choreography represented a threat to the livelihood of old Western stuntmen like Cliff Booth, who were often incapable of adapting to a new era,” Polly told The Wrap, " and the film’s nostalgic, revisionist sympathies are entirely with the cowboys.”

But as the end of the film serves as a rather sweet revisionist history, a portrait of a world in which the Manson Family never made it to 10050 Cielo Drive, the movie itself has an altogether more troubling eye for the past. In the world of Once Upon a Time, beautiful women like Sharon Tate dance often and speak little, and the old guard of white men squash all challenges to their dominance.

"In a movie where Tarantino changes history to fit his violent wish fulfillment,” wrote filmmaker Joseph Kahn on Twitter, "it's odd that his revisionist fantasy of Bruce Lee is that he is a fraud who can easily be overpowered and smacked around by his cowboy avatar."

GABRIELLE BRUNEY
Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

THREADS
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70864-Once-Upon-a-Time-in-Hollywood)
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)[/QUOTE]

[GeneChing]

Bruce Lee: 10 more things you probably didn’t know about the Hong Kong martial arts superstar (https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3039222/bruce-lee-10-more-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-hong)
To celebrate Hong Kong kung fu legend Bruce Lee’s birthday, here are 10 lesser-known facts about the cultural icon
Find out why he was called ‘Chicken Legs’ at school, why he took up kung fu and what car he bought when he first came into some money
SCMP Reporter
Published: 10:00pm, 26 Nov, 2019

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Hong Kong martial arts superstar Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973). Photo: Alamy

Hong Kong martial arts superstar Bruce Lee was born on November 27, 1940. Here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about him.

1. According to Matthew Polly’s in-depth biography Bruce Lee: A Life, Lee’s nickname at school was “Gorilla”. He acquired this slightly derogatory moniker because, as Hawkins Cheung, his school friend at St Francis Xavier’s School, remembered, “he was muscular and walked around with his arms at his sides”.
Most of the schoolkids were scared of Lee, but as Cheung was one of his closest friends, he made up his own nickname for him: he called him “Chicken Legs”, because of Lee’s muscular torso and apparently scrawny legs. Hawkins said that Lee used to get mad at him when he used this name and would chase him around the schoolyard.

2. Although he came from a middle-class home, the young Lee was a tearaway who loved street-fighting.
“As a kid in Hong Kong, I was a punk and went looking for fights,” he told Black Belt magazine. “We used chains and pens with knives hidden inside. Then, one day, I began to wonder what would happen if I didn’t have my gang behind me when I got into a fight.”

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Lee was called both “Gorilla” and “Chicken Legs” at school. Photo: Alamy

This revelation was to change the course of his life, as he started thinking about learning martial arts. “I only took up kung fu when I began to feel insecure,” he said.

3. One of Lee’s early girlfriends was a Japanese-American student named Amy Sanbo. She initially rebuffed his romantic overtures, but he was persistent.
The turning point came when she stepped on a nail in her ballet class and had to walk around on crutches. When Lee noticed Sanbo struggling to ascend a tall flight of concrete stairs, he picked her up and carried her to the top. The two had an on-off relationship for two years after that.
4. Bruce Lee and I is a 1976 feature film that purports to tell the story of Betty Ting Pei, the woman Lee was with the night he died. Bizarrely, Ting starred in the film as herself, and is seen cavorting in bed with Danny Lee Sau-yin, who plays Bruce.
“Betty Ting Pei nearly got the chance to act out her real-life drama in Bruce Lee and I, but the director had other ideas … the director [Lo Mar] decided to make what happened in her bedroom that night look all part of her imagination,” a critic wrote at the time.

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Lee in 1960s TV series The Green Hornet. Photo: Alamy

5. Lee’s on-screen martial arts career didn’t get off to a good start on The Green Hornet, the American TV show which gave him his first taste of fame in the West.
It wasn’t that he performed badly – he just moved too fast for the cameras. After shooting a scene in which he was so fast no one could see the moves he was making, resulting in laughter from the show’s cast and crew, Lee stormed into his dressing room in a bad mood.
After that he modified his approach. “By god, did he slow it down,” said The Green Hornet’s star Van Williams. Lee played the Hornet’s assistant Kato in the series.

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Lee in The Green Hornet. Photo: Alamy

6. Lee really loved cars, but while he was teaching martial arts in the US, he could only afford an unglamorous Chevrolet “Chevy” Nova (the car had a sticker in the back window that read “This car is protected by the Green Hornet”).
A friend sometimes let him drive a supercool Shelby Cobra (called the AC Cobra in Britain), but what he really wanted was the sports car his best buddy Steve McQueen owned: a Porsche Targa.
When Lee’s mother sent him his share of the proceeds from an apartment she’d sold in Hong Kong, he went straight out to buy the Porsche, even though he couldn’t really afford it.

7. Veteran film director Lo Wei, who directed Lee in The Big Boss, made the mistake of telling a newspaper that he taught Bruce how to fight in front of the cameras. Even worse, he dared to call himself “The Dragon’s Mentor”. When he found out, an enraged Lee rushed over to where Lo was filming and threatened to beat him up. Lee only calmed down when Lo’s wife Gladys intervened.

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The Bruce Lee statue along Hong Kong’s Avenue of Stars. Photo: Alamy

8. Bruce’s younger brother Robert Lee Jun-fai was a famous pop musician in Hong Kong. He was lead singer of the Thunderbirds, a successful group of the mid-1960s, and sang in English. He released a posthumous tribute to his brother called The Ballad of Bruce Lee in 1974.
9. When Lee’s first martial arts film The Big Boss was released in Hong Kong in 1971, it beat the city’s box-office record set by a very different kind of film – the musical The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews, which had been released in 1965. The Big Boss was a surprise box-office hit.

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Lee in Enter the Dragon. Photo: Alamy

10. The 1976 “biopic” Bruce Lee: True Story – one of many shoddy films about the star made after his death – depicted a few completely different versions of how he died. One of these endings featured the unusual idea that Lee was not actually dead at all, and was planning to re-emerge in the 1980s.
“[The film] means well and is a briskly paced and slickly conceived effort,” film trade newspaper Variety said in a review at the time, but noted: “there is very little said about the man and his personal life”.

THREADS
HBD Bruce (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?59180-Happy-Birthday-Bruce)
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)

[GeneChing]

Sundance documentary ‘Be Water’ aims to show the man underneath the legend of Bruce Lee (https://www.parkrecord.com/entertainment/sundance-documentary-be-water-aims-to-show-the-man-underneath-the-legend-of-bruce-lee/)
Entertainment | January 23, 2020
Ryan Kostecka
sports@parkrecord.com

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The Sundance documentary “Be Water” aims to give audiences a more intimate look at Bruce Lee than what they saw on screen in his martial arts films.
Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

“Be Water,” an entry in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition, is set to screen at the following times and locations:

Saturday, Jan. 25, 2:30 p.m., The MARC Theatre

Sunday, Jan. 26, 9:30 p.m., Rose Wagner Center, Salt Lake City

Monday, Jan. 27 at 9:45 p.m., The Ray Theatre

Thursday, Jan. 30, noon, Redstone Cinemas 7

Friday, Jan. 31, 6 p.m., Sundance Mountain Resort Screening Room, Sundance Resort

Saturday, Feb. 1, 8:30 a.m., Prospector Square Theatre

Make no doubt about it — this was personal for director Bao Nguyen.

Nguyen, the child of Vietnamese war refugees, gave up a career in law to pursue his passion for film — a decision that he doesn’t regret.

Everything Nguyen has worked for culminated in his latest film, “Be Water,” a documentary about martial artist and actor Bruce Lee returning to Hong Kong in 1971 to achieve the stardom that eluded him in America before his death in 1973. “Be Water” is an entry in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition and marks Nguyen’s first appearance at the festival.

“I’m Asian American, so to me, Bruce Lee is one of those heroes that I connected with immediately on how he looks and appears on screen,” Nguyen said. “There aren’t many Asian American heroes, so watching him on TV as I grew up was brand new to me. His story was one I didn’t know, so I wanted to explore how he broke through Hollywood following his death.”

Nguyen said that, through his research, he learned how difficult it was to be Asian American during the 1960s and 1970s, especially as someone trying to break into acting. So telling Lee’s story in a different way from others who’ve attempted to tell it was important to him. He said it was important to acknowledge what Lee overcame to achieve greatness and a continuing place in the culture decades after his early death.


“I’ve always wanted to explore stories that were personal and could speak to a larger audience. … And lately there’s been a lot of talk about diversity on screen, so I felt that this movie about him would be right,” Nguyen said. “There are so many people out in the world who have different affections for him, so making a personal film about him that’s also not related to him, it just connects with me and hopefully others.”

If he were still alive, Lee would turn 80 this year, so the timing of the movie couldn’t have been better for Nguyen. The people who knew Lee personally are getting older, which made it imperative for Nguyen to make the film as soon as possible.

He credits his team for going through old footage to tell the story. He wanted to build an immersive world that would make viewers feel as if they’re living in a story, one in which they’re seeing Lee in the present tense, brought back to life, rather than the legendary figure audiences have come to know.

“There are so many intimate stories about him as a person that people don’t know compared to the legend, the mythical martial artist,” Nguyen said. “That’s the story my team and I wanted to show. It was difficult because back then, people didn’t have iPhones shooting everything. Finding the archival films and bringing those to new life with the relative interviews. … Building that story from the past was the goal.”

Nguyen said he found success with the film because of the questions he asked to those who knew Lee. For decades, the same people have been asked the same questions about Lee — but Nguyen wanted to dig deeper. His questions were more personal in nature and enticed the interviewees to open up and help show off a different side of Lee that has never been portrayed before.

I heard about Be Water (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71694-Be-Water) from Matthew Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly). I understand he is involved in this project. That's what he tweeted:

Matthew Polly
@MatthewEPoll (https://twitter.com/MatthewEPolly/status/1220759355177435136)y
I'm proud to announce that the new ESPN Bruce Lee documentary, 'Be Water,' which is based on my book and on which I served as Executive Producer, has been accepted to the Sundance Film Festival.

[GeneChing]

Lifestyle / Entertainment
Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits – Criterion Collection producer on preserving the martial arts icon’s legacy with new box set (https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3092599/bruce-lee-his-greatest-hits-criterion-collection-producer)
Box set collects together all of Bruce Lee’s films, along with commentaries and special features, and producer Curtis Tsui says Lee still has cultural relevance
‘He left a small body of work, but behind it was a way of addressing life … that we could implement,’ Tsui says of the actor, who died in Hong Kong in 1973
Richard James Havis
Published: 5:00am, 12 Jul, 2020

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Bruce Lee in a still from Fist of Fury (1972), one of the films featured in a Criterion Collection box set being released this week with introductions that put the martial arts icon’s films in context, and mini-documentaries. Photo: Criterion Collection

Fans of Bruce Lee are in for a bonanza this week when esteemed home-video distribution company Criterion Collection release a seven-disc Blu-ray box set called Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits.
For release on July 14, the box set, put together by New York-based producer Curtis Tsui for Criterion, collects together all of Lee’s martial arts films, along with a plethora of special features and commentaries, to provide a comprehensive overview of the actor’s life and career.
Lee is still popular enough in the United States to warrant such an extensive release, says Tsui, noting that the martial artist’s philosophy of life fits the mood of the times.
“People are still hungry for Bruce Lee, and he has a cultural relevance,” he says. “Symbolically speaking, Lee has always spoken for a kind of oneness in humanity, about looking beyond our differences and finding what is similar in all of us and finding solidarity there.
“You can look at that in relation to the way he lived his own life as a teacher who went against the strict doctrine of traditional martial arts instructors by opening his school up to everyone. He showed us that everyone could use martial arts to better ourselves and to strengthen ourselves. That has a lot of meaning for people here, and it’s a key element of his continued popularity,” Tsui tells the Post.
“There was an entire philosophy behind Lee’s on-screen presence. He left a small body of work, but behind it was a way of addressing life, of addressing ourselves, that we could implement. That’s why people are still interested in him today,” Tsui says.

The films in the box set include The Big Boss, Fist of Fury , The Way of the Dragon, the shorter US theatrical version and the special edition of Enter the Dragon , and Game of Death. The movies are introduced by Lee biographer Matthew Polly, author of Bruce Lee: A Life, and feature commentaries by Enter the Dragon producer Paul Heller and Bruce Lee expert Mike Leeder.
The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Way of the Dragon feature Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and English dialogue tracks.
The special features are a combination of already existing licensed content, and new mini-documentaries and introductions produced by Tsui. These include an enthralling examination of the “Bruceploitation” genre – exploitation movies that were made after Lee’s death which feature lookalikes and old footage of the star – and an enlightening documentary about the English-language voice artists who dubbed Lee’s films in Hong Kong for their international release in the 1970s.
Tsui licensed Lee’s first three martial arts films, which had already been restored in 4K, and Game of Death, from Hong Kong company Fortune Star. Acquiring rights can be tricky, and Tsui was thrilled to obtain permission from Warner Brothers to include Enter the Dragon, so that North American fans could have the films together in one collection.
“Enter the Dragon really makes this box set special,” says Tsui. “We are including the shorter 99-minute original US theatrical version of the film, as well as the longer ‘special edition’ release. The theatrical cut has not been available since the days of the laser disc in the 1990s, and fans have been clamouring to see it for some time.” Both versions are presented in new 2K restorations.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckk7f8x4xR8&feature=emb_logo

The films feature lengthy introductions by Polly, which set the films in context and provide some film history and biographical notes. His introduction to Fist of Fury, for instance, features an opinion about how Lee’s style of acting was influenced by watching Japanese samurai films, and he also talks about Huo Yuanjia, the real-life martial arts master whose death provides the premise for the story.

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Bruce Lee in a still from The Way of the Dragon (1972). Photo: Criterion Collection

“I wanted to have someone reflect on the films in relation to Lee’s life, rather than vice versa,” says Tsui. “There’s usually a big focus on his life, and the people that he knew and met. I wanted someone who could succinctly focus on the movies and talk about them as films, and what they mean to the genre,” Tsui says. “That’s what Matthew brings to the discs.”
Tsui also made a short film about the dubbing artists who dubbed Lee’s films into English in the 1970s, Michael Kaye and Vaughan Savidge. This provides some fascinating insights. Although the dubbing in martial arts films is usually disparaged, both voice artists say they were committed to the work, and enjoyed it.
Most dubbing in Hong Kong in the early 1970s was done by expatriate radio and television announcers who wanted to earn some extra money. Films were dubbed into English primarily for a release in the Philippines, they say, and the voice artists had to fit a translation of the script to a voice soundtrack in Mandarin and the lip movements of the actors – so a lot of improvisation was necessary. The voice artists even supplied Lee’s trademark whoops and screeches in the dubbed versions, they say.

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Bruce Lee in a still from The Big Boss (1971). Photo: Criterion Collection

“The experience of watching the films with the dubbed soundtracks can’t be buried, and it’s something that we have to talk about,” says Tsui, who notes that one of Lee’s voice artists now works for Criterion. “They might even have added to our enjoyment of the movies. When you see the way they had to work, you see how impossible a task it was. They were not being slipshod, they were trying hard to make it work.”
Another short film Tsui produced features author and film historian Grady Hendrix, who scripted Netflix’s recent Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks documentary, talking about the Bruceploitation genre. Those films were an attempt to fill the gap left by Lee when he died in 1973.
“I don’t think there has been anything like it in the history of cinema,” says Tsui of the genre. “It’s both amazing and horrifying at the same time.”

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Bruce Lee in a still from Enter the Dragon (1973). Photo: Criterion Collection

THREADS
Bruce-Lee-filmography (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?49504-Bruce-Lee-filmography)
Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65795-Bruce-Lee-A-Life-by-Matt-Polly)

[GeneChing]

7 Reasons Bruce Lee Continues to Kick Butt
(https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/bruce-lee.htm)
BY DAVE ROOS NOV 2, 2020

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A publicity portrait of Bruce Lee from the 1972 film "The Way of the Dragon." WARNER BROTHERS/GETTY IMAGES
When the kung fu legend Bruce Lee is on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him. Consider Lee's cocky swagger as he swipes at his nose and beckons his opponent — or sometimes a roomful of opponents — to give it their best shot. You know how this is going to end, with a punishing flurry of kicks and punches, and Lee standing over his vanquished foes flexing his taut torso.

The Bruce Lee made famous in films like 1973's "Enter the Dragon" is the ultimate badass, an unbeatable kung fu warrior, and for most Westerners that's the only Bruce Lee they ever knew. Lee died under mysterious circumstances at only 32 years old, just as his Hollywood star was beginning to shine.

But who was the real Bruce Lee? And how did his childhood and upbringing in Hong Kong and America help shape the man who would become an actor and dancer years before he became a kung fu master? For answers, we spoke with Matthew Polly, author of the eye-opening biography, "Bruce Lee: A Life." Here are seven essential things to know about this iconic star.

1. Lee Was Born in the U.S.A. and Had Jewish Ancestry
In America, we think of Bruce Lee as a Chinese actor who made it big in Hollywood, but Bruce was actually born in America and comes from an ethnically diverse family tree.

In his biography, Polly reveals that Lee's maternal great grandfather was a Dutch-Jewish merchant named Mozes Hartog Bosman, who sailed to Hong Kong in the 1850s with the Dutch East India Company. Bosman eventually became the Dutch ambassador to Hong Kong and had six children with his Chinese concubine. One of those children, Ho Kom-tong, grew fabulously wealthy and had a British mistress in addition to his wife and 13 concubines. Bruce Lee's mother was the 30th child of Ho, who was half Jewish, and his British girlfriend.

Bruce's father, on the other hand, was 100-percent Han Chinese and born into poverty. He escaped through his singing voice, becoming a famous Cantonese opera star and actor. He was touring in the United States when Bruce was born in San Francisco in 1940. Bruce's parents named him Li Jun Fan, and a nurse at the hospital suggested Bruce as his English name. The Lee family moved back to Hong Kong when Bruce was still a baby, and Lee grew up attending English-language private schools.

Throughout his life, Lee bounced back and forth between two worlds, Chinese and American, but never felt like he fit fully into either one. In China, he was a Eurasian with an American passport. In America, he was a Chinese guy with a funny accent. Polly thinks this is key to understanding Lee's persona.

"He didn't quite fit in anywhere and I think it's why he has this wide appeal to various groups," says Polly. "He has this outsider status — he's not of any one tribe."

2. He Was a Small, Sickly Kid Who Became a Street Fighter
Bruce's early years in Hong Kong coincided with a brutal three-year occupation by Imperial Japan. Lee was small to begin with, but was further weakened by strict food rations and a cholera epidemic. He grew into a frail and skinny boy with one leg shorter than the other, an undescended testicle and bad acne.

But Lee was also a whirlwind of energy and a natural-born troublemaker. He constantly picked fights to prove his manhood, and Polly says he earned a reputation in the Hong Kong streets not as a gangster, exactly, but a "middle-class tough guy."

"Bruce Lee fits into the pattern of a young boy who felt weaker and had a bit of a chip on his shoulder," says Polly. "He got very interested in physical dominance in order to project himself out in a world in which he felt threatened."

When Lee was a teenager, he got trounced by another kid who was studying Wing Chun, a school of kung fu or Chinese-style martial arts. Unwilling to accept defeat, Lee decided to up his game and began studying kung fu at the age of 15 or 16.


3. He Was an Actor (and Dancer) First
Lee's opera singer father also acted in Cantonese movies and musicals, and Bruce grew up on movie sets. He first appeared on film as an infant stand-in at just 3 months old, but his first starring role as a child actor was in a popular 1950 Hong Kong movie called "The Kid" filmed when Lee was 10. Polly says that he even debuted some of his classic moves in "The Kid," like swiping at his nose before a fight and ripping open his shirt.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rswoB0jJU&feature=emb_logo

"The Kid" was a huge success, and Bruce was signed on to do sequels that would have made him the Cantonese MaCaulay Culkin, but his father stepped in. The elder Lee wanted his kids to be doctors and lawyers, not actors, and Bruce was constantly getting in trouble at school anyway. His father squashed his chance at child stardom, but Bruce acted on and off in small Hong Kong movies throughout the 1950s.

"By the time Bruce was 18, he had appeared in 20 Cantonese movies and none of them were kung fu flicks," says Polly. "Watching those 20 movies, you see that Bruce was an actor first who later becomes a martial artist."

Lee was also a talented dancer, once winning a Hong Kong "cha-cha" contest.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

4. Lee's First Hollywood Break Was as Kung Fu Instructor to the Stars
Bruce's parents sent him off to America for college, where the spoiled kid from Hong Kong got his first taste of supporting himself. In Seattle, between classes at the University of Washington, Lee worked as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and slept there in a glorified closet. Word of his martial arts skills got around and soon Bruce was teaching some kung fu classes on the side.

It wasn't long before Bruce's side gig overshadowed his studies. Lee dropped out of school and hatched a plan to open a franchise of martial arts schools along the West Coast. "It was going to be the McDonald's of kung fu," jokes Polly. To drum up business, Lee traveled to Los Angeles to give a demonstration at a karate tournament where he caught the attention of a TV producer. This led to Bruce's first and only role on American television as the fast-fisted sidekick Kato on the forgettable 1966 series "The Green Hornet."

The show was canceled after just one season, but Bruce hung around in Hollywood hoping for his next big break. He scored a few bit parts over the next four years, but Polly says Bruce mostly made his living as a kung fu instructor to the Hollywood elite.

"Steve McQueen was one of his students, so was James Coburn and Roman Polanski," says Polly. "Bruce was charging the equivalent of $1,000 an hour."

5. Back in Hong Kong, a Kung Fu Legend Was Born
Even with his high-profile clients, Bruce got himself into some financial trouble and needed some fast cash to dig out of debt. He decided to fly back to Hong Kong for a few months, take some roles in "cheapo" kung fu movies and earn enough money to come back to Los Angeles.

The first of these Hong Kong movies was called "The Big Boss," and Lee wasn't even supposed to be the lead. It was already in production when he arrived, Polly says, but Lee was "so charismatic they killed off the lead actor and made him the star."

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Bruce Lee on the set of 1971's "The Big Boss," written and directed by Wei Lo.
GOLDEN HARVEST COMPANY/SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
The movie was the first to feature his unique style of fight choreography. At the time, fight scenes in most kung fu movies looked like dance routines, but Bruce's fight choreography, informed by years of martial arts mastery, packed a wallop.

"What he was doing was a kind of heightened realism," says Polly. "When he hit somebody, it felt like a real hit, like there's real violence occurring. What Bruce created is still the dominant form of fight choreography in Hollywood movies to this day."

"The Big Boss" was a breakout hit and propelled Lee into a new stratosphere of fame, at least in Asia.

"'The movie blew the box office record out of the water and suddenly Bruce was like the Beatles in Hong Kong and all of Southeast Asia," says Polly.

Bruce followed up with two more wildly popular kung fu movies filmed in Hong Kong, "Fists of Fury" and "The Way of the Dragon," that caught the attention of American producers. It was time to parlay Bruce's Asian stardom into the Hollywood career of his dreams.

6. His Death Launched a Thousand Conspiracy Theories
1973's "Enter the Dragon" was supposed to be the film that made Bruce Lee a household name. And it was, but Lee didn't live to see it.

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Bruce Lee practices martial arts with a group of students in a scene from the 1973 film "Enter The Dragon."
WARNER BROTHERS/GETTY IMAGES
A month before the film premiered in the United States, Lee was at his mistress' apartment in Hong Kong when he complained of a headache, took a prescription pain reliever and lay down for a nap. He never woke up. He was only 32 years old, leaving his young wife Linda to care for their two children, Brandon and Shannon.

The odd circumstances and mysterious nature of his death became fodder for conspiracy theories — that he was killed by ninjas or given the "touch of death" by a rival kung fu master — but the official cause of death was listed as a brain edema caused by an allergic reaction to the pain reliever, which he had been taking for months for a back injury.

Polly thinks that a better explanation is heat stroke. Ten days before his death, Lee collapsed while dubbing a film in an un-air-conditioned room in Hong Kong's sweltering heat. The day he died was also exceptionally hot, and Lee spent part of the afternoon practicing moves for an upcoming role. His body may simply have given out.

"Enter the Dragon" became a touchstone of popular culture, introducing Western audiences to the archetype of the kung fu hero, and earning Bruce the posthumous fame that had eluded him in life.

"Before 'Enter the Dragon,' Bruce was basically a no-name actor from an obscure TV show," says Polly, "and then the movie came out and he became an international sensation a month after his death."

7. He's the Reason Martial Arts Are So Popular in the West
"Bruce Lee is perhaps the only iconic figure from the 20th century who died before he became famous," says Polly, "and that's why he became a mythological figure."

Lee didn't live long enough to give endless press interviews, to attend glitzy award shows or to get drunk and wreck his sports car on Sunset Boulevard. One of the advantages of dying young, says Polly, is that people can project their own image onto you. This is how Bruce Lee becomes the legendary kung fu hero and the ultimate warrior.

And on a cultural level, Polly says that it's hard to overestimate the influence that Bruce Lee's films had on popularizing the martial arts in the West.

"Before 'Enter the Dragon,' there were about 10,000 people who studied the martial arts in America," says Polly, himself an enthusiast, "and now it's like 40 million. He introduced more westerners to Asian culture than any other figure in modern history."

Surprised this article didn't reference his 80th (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71923-Bruce-Lee-s-80th-Birthday-celebration).

[GeneChing]

‘Holy stuff’ - Bruce Lee’s letters document shipments and orders of cocaine, acid, other drugs (https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2021/7/6/22564733/holy-stuff-bruce-lee-letters-document-shipments-and-orders-of-cocaine-acid-hash-marijuana)
Recently revealed letters from Bruce Lee allegedly detail international drug shipments to Hong Kong.

By Anton Tabuena@antontabuena Jul 6, 2021, 12:59pm EDT
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Bruce Lee on the poster of Fist of Fury Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images

BruceBruce Lee’s marijuana use has been recently well documented, mostly thanks to Matthew Polly’s 2018 biography on the martial arts icon that had him interview at least a hundred of his friends, family, and colleagues. Lee was said to have enjoyed smoking weed and ingesting hashish because “it raises the consciousness level,” but did the actor have a more serious drug habit?

Enter Robert Baker, who started out as a volunteer for the iconic “one inch punch” demonstration in 1964, and would eventually become Lee’s close friend and confidant.

Baker would be known for his role in Lee’s 1972 film Fists of Fury, but according to Polly, he was also “long rumored to be Bruce’s dealer.” The author of Bruce Lee: A Life stated that it was “assumed by many” that Bob, as he was called, simply supplied the actor with marijuana.

Recently released private letters between the two seem to suggest that it was much more than that.

Heritage Auctions has since authenticated and put up various memorabilia from Bob Baker’s Bruce Lee collection on sale, which includes over 50 letters that Bruce and his wife, Linda sent him through the years. Most of them were handwritten, and many used Lee’s personal Jeet Kune Do letterhead stationeries.

These personal correspondence discussed various topics such as their developing friendship, plans for their film careers, and Lee’s back injuries. Perhaps more striking, it also contains numerous references to drugs, including marijuana as well as cocaine.

The handwritten letters allegedly document different instances of Lee trying Baker’s “holy stuff,” recovering from their get togethers, and having nights out with “little recollection of what had happened.”

There was also a letter with a short-lived attempt at quitting.

“I told Linda to call you to forget about the ‘stuff’ because I really don’t need them in my training,” a letter from 1970 read. “I feel that I have ‘gained’ in trying them, but excessive indulgence of them just isn’t in my road in Jeet Kune Do.”

By 1972, as Lee left the US and moved to Hong Kong, the letters included requests to Baker for “advice on the possibility of shipping some coke to me.”

Hong Kong had very strict drug laws, but he supposedly proposed a plan on shipping drugs to an address under the name “Wu Ngan,” and hiding the contraband inside books and clothes. Wu Ngan was one of Lee’s friends, who had a role in his 1972 movie, The Way of the Dragon.

In one letter authenticated by Heritage Auctions to be from Lee, the writer ordered “COKE (in large amount),” “ACID (in fair amount)” and “HASH OR GRASS,” before also inquiring about procuring “psilocybin” — commonly known as magic mushrooms — after supposedly reading about it in a book.

In the same note, the writer also asked for “more goodies ready for shipping” including a “very classy derringer” firearm and a “cowboy holster.”

Later in the year, a supposedly “stoned as hell” Lee wrote a less legible letter to Baker about needing “some coke” to “help in the formation” of a character he was working on.

In various other letters, there were repeated orders of “C,” “coke” and “Coca-Cola.” There were also references to other substances, which he called the “holy stuff,” “super duper,” “M pills”, “H oil” and others.

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One of the dozens of letters in auction, with Bruce Lee asking Bob Baker to “air-mail me some coca-cola”
Other letters signed by Linda appear to discuss follow ups on drug shipments and money orders. It was also stated that she bought a scale and would be inspecting the cocaine that would be sent.

“Enclosed you will find the $500 for the amount of C you quote that Bruce can get. I’ll measure it but the quality (that goes without saying) plus the quantity Bruce himself will have to judge,” the letter from 1973 read. “I hope you will send him the mostest along with the one oz of H. oil and/or whatever.”

“The goodies list can be (1) COKE (in large amount) (2) ACID (in fair amount) (3) HASH OR GRASS”
Two letters also appear to have Linda thanking Bob’s wife, Bev for “past favors” and for “taking the risk and sending the last shipment to Bruce.”

In another note following up a new shipment of “C,” Baker was assured that Bruce had things under control.

“Don’t worry about Bruce using the C — he is not going overboard,” a letter signed by Linda in 1973 read.

Apart from details on drugs, one correspondence also revealed what Polly calls “a previously unknown mistress named Teresa,” as Lee seemingly tried to plan a secret meet up without their family knowing.

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Hong Kong, 1971: Bruce Lee and Maria Yi in a scene from Fists of Fury Photo by Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
They discussed various topics through the years, but below are a few of the more notable snippets from the letters addressed to Baker.

Bruce’s only typewritten letter to Baker from this collection. Sent from Los Angeles, December 15, 1969:

A personal letter to thank you for bringing me the stuffs, especially the pipe and the painting.

February 2, 1970:

It was a brief but definitely enjoyable get together. Thank you again for that “holy stuff”

March 6, 1970:

... By the way, wouldn’t mind going in with you for some of those “holy stuff” before leaving for H.K.

March 11, 1970:

I’m planning to leave for H.K. on April 1st, and definitely would like to store up on some “Holy stuff” to bring over there. See if you can come up with something good.

...

The paper that I had “taste” kind of sweet and that definitely adds to it. So see if you can get some “good tasting” paper.

March 17, 1970:

Though I have little recollection of what had happened - - - - - - - - - - anyway I know that I enjoyed your stay and am looking forward for another visit from you. Thank you for that stuffs and do take care and have fun.

Love, Peace, Brotherhood,

Bruce

P.S. I can’t think of the six items, but I think you have a better memory - - - - -

Ordering and planning on sharing “M” pills with friend and actor James Coburn, who would eventually win an Academy Award in 1997. From April 22, 1970:

A quick letter to thank you personally for the “wonderful gifts.” I enjoyed them very much. By the way, when and if you should come down again, do get more 1-inch boards plus the same “M” pills. They do give me tremendous experience. Coburn likes some of them. I’ll give some to him when I get them.

Cancelling an order and trying to quit, June 17, 1970:

I told Linda to call you to forget about the “stuff” because I really don’t need them in my training. I feel that I have “gained” in trying them, but excessive indulgence of them just isn’t in my road in Jeet Kune Do.

June 30, 1970:

“Again thank you for your generous supply of paper that would seem to last a life time!”

October 8, 1970:

...Anyway, when you go back to work, I need more paper! Plus I can’t remember what - - - - - - anyway, you will remember.

December 16, 1970:

It takes me a day to get back to myself to write this letter to “thank you” once more for everything, particularly “those super duper!” We had some wonderful moments.

February 25, 1971:

“Thank you” Bob

Organizing a secret meet up, June 22, 1971:

I plan to come up — depending when I finished shooting — from July 2 (friday nite) to probably Tues or Wed (7). One thought here: I “might” come up (fly) with Teresa and she probably stays Friday nite (July 2), Sat nite (July 3) and leave Sunday (July 4) afternoon or so. The question is, is it convenient for Beth Bev and the kids to spend two Friday nite, Sat. and Sunday morning at her mother or somewhere and make up some convenient jazz for I don’t want Bev to know about this. Of course it has to be convenient or else forget it. My mother and everybody is at my house now. Let me know, and remember if only it is convenient and flow and everything is cool.

From Thailand, while filming “The Big Boss,” August 3, 1971:

Thailand is full of G but I have very little time for it though. I have to say it is “extremely” good.

From Thailand, August 23, 1971:

...By the way the “G” in Bangkok is holy indeed. I understand Hong Kong is super lousy.

That same later also included a passage stating Baker would be “coming” to Hong Kong and has been cast to star in his next film, Fist of Fury. The movie was shot in Hong Kong late in 1971. Prior to this, Lee dealt with serious back injuries, and previous letters showed that Baker also gave him a loan when he was struggling financially at the time. continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_AJTgxBqpg

After Lee moved to Hong Kong, February 28, 1972:

...Still am in the process of adapting to life here. By the way, what is the advice on the possibility of shipping some coke to me? Drop me a line on that.

Planning the orders and shipment of various drugs, along with a firearm, from late 1972:

(A) Regarding the goods — you can send them in a package addressed to Mr. Wu Ngan c/o Golden Harvest Studio, 1412 Tung Ying Building 100 Nathan Rd.

The goodies list can be (1) COKE (in large amount) (2) ACID (in fair amount) (3) HASH OR GRASS (the former can be more while the latter, even cleaned, has to be carefully packed. As to what you put the above with you know better — inside books? Clothings? —

(B) Also, when I come I would like to have more goodies ready for shipping including finding me a really classy derringer — from shops, collection, or what not. Also, find me a cowboy holster for my 45 fast draw — all these when I come but not for your sending me right away.

So send (A) request right away ... they might open for brief inspection or they might not — but play it safe. As for the total cost, let me know and I’ll send you the money order by air mail right away.

...

P.S. Do you have access to any PSILOCYBIN. If so send a little together with info on how to take it. Read about it in a book.

From Linda Lee, October 5, 1972:

I just want to check with you about the second shipment. We thought you probably would have sent it already, but it has not arrived. Hope nothing has happened to it in the mail. Please confirm if you have sent it or not. In regards to the money, I’ll send as soon as I can get to the bank to buy a money order.

November 22, 1972:

...One thing you have to do is to air-mail me some fine “C” if you can swing it.

December 11, 1972:

Air-mail me some Coca-Cola — do it the way you and I sincerely feel — in other word, whatever. Be cool about the package. Same procedure, Wu Ngan — “quality! man”

Date illegible, late 1972:

“Cooly” send some Coke — How’s everything? Stoned as hell, but am working on the upcoming character. Some coke would help in the formation and [illegible] I want to create.

Another order after Baker’s “friend” supposedly got “busted” in 1973:

Deep regret for your friend being busted

...

RUSH the sparkle “quality” LOTS!”

...

By now you should have received my money order, though I feel that it might be a slight delay because of your friend’s situation. I hope you will send me the “quality” stuff you said you will send (“it has never been from the street”). In the mean time I’m getting a “quality” spoon and [illegible] scale. Do send it “air-mail” like yesterday (ha! ha!)

March 21, 1973:

Just want you to know that Linda had yesterday send the ADDITIONAL money you have requested. I had a hard day, a REAL HARD day. You take good care of yourself and your family. By the way, I’ll be waiting for the 1 oz of H. oil I have ordered from you — send it as soon as you can.

From Linda Lee, March 29, 1973:

Dear Bob and Bev, For past favors and for being a good friend. Hope this small amount helps a little.

From Linda Lee, March 30, 1973:

Received your four letters. Bruce is in the midst of shooting — working very hard.

Well, forget about your making some money out of the last orders. I’ve bought a gram measurer and enclosed you will find the $500 for the amount of C you quote that Bruce can get. I’ll measure it but the quality (that goes without saying) plus the quantity Bruce himself will have to judge. I hope you will send him the mostest along with the one oz of H. oil and/or whatever.

From Linda Lee, April 16, 1973:

Dear Bob, Its been quite a while since you’ve written. I assume you have received the money order for $500 and I am wondering if you have sent the C yet. Please let me know right away because if you did not receive the money order, then I will have to talk to the bank to put a tracer on it.

How are you all doing? We hope things are straightening out for you. Say thanks to Bev for taking the risk and sending the last shipment to Bruce. Don’t worry about Bruce using the C — he is not going overboard.

...

Write very soon and let us know about the $500 money order and/or when the C is coming.


“Don’t worry about Bruce using the C — he is not going overboard”
On May 10, 1973, less than a month after that letter signed by Linda, Bruce Lee collapsed. He suffered seizures and headaches, and was diagnosed with cerebral edema. While the reports and circumstances leading to his death were conflicting, more headaches and brain swelling happened again two months later. Lee passed away on July 20, 1973, at just 32-years-old.

In the years following his death, letters show that Linda still tried to keep in touch with Bev and Bob Baker. The latest from this collection being sold is from January 16, 1975.

“After living with Bruce for so long, I certainly have the strength and determination to keep going, as well as the ability to take life as it comes,” Linda wrote. “Like Bruce used to say — turn those stumbling blocks into stepping stones!”

Baker reportedly died by heart attack in 1993, at age 52.

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