Original subtitles

He was a brilliant teacher, a loving father,

a legendary fighter, and a global superstar.

Bruce Lee, the master Bruce Lee.

He was a man ahead of his time.

He was the first cultural icon, the first cultural

ambassador between the Western world and the Chinese world.

Bruce Lee broke barriers of race and genre and paid a

price for it, and a life that ended shockingly early.

To me, he's still alive, his spirit's still there, and we still train his heart.

His unique philosophy of martial arts lives after him, as do his unforgettable films.

Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself.

But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself.

And to express myself honestly not that.

My friend is very hard to do.

Nearly four decades after his death, Bruce Lee's martial arts technique,

known as Jeet Kune Do, is still taught all over

the world, including a Miss Jim in Rome, Italy.

Bruce Lee devoted all of his life to searching for

the real essence of fighting, the truth of fighting.

After he died, Jeet Kune Do was carried on by other teachers of merit.

Jeet Kune Do, the art of the intercepting fist.

Lee's fighting style is based on practices with

roots in Asia that tradition demanded be kept secret.

Bruce Lee broke that barrier, and many others, on his way to becoming a movie

star and a global icon in his brief, action-packed life.

On November 27, 1940, at both the hour and the year of the dragon, the child who had

come to be known as Bruce Lee, was born in San Francisco, California.

The dragon in the Chinese zodiac is a mythical creature.

It has a fierce temper, it has tremendous power, it is quick, it is elusive,

it is everything that is exotic.

And that's fit Bruce Lee to a tee.

Someone said he was a kind of reincarnation of an ancient conformist

from the centuries ago, and he was not aware about that.

His father, Li Hui Chuan, was a well-known film and stage

actor who had toured with the Cantonese opera company.

He was a comedy actor, and he was quite famous in Hong Kong, working in theater,

working in movies.

His mother, Grace, was a traditional Chinese woman whose superstitious nature

caused her to fear for the safety of her infant son.

Because his mother had lost a male child

previously, it was believed that that was an omen.

For that reason, she called him Saifang, which is like Little Phoenix, which is a

feminine name in the hopes that the spirits would think it

was a female child and therefore bypass him and let him live.

But it was the name given to him by a hospital nurse that stuck, Bruce.

In 1941, as the war in Europe threatened to engulf the South

Pacific, Lee moved Bruce and his family back to Hong Kong.

As Hong Kong felt the hardships of World War II and the Japanese invasion,

Lee continued to find work as an actor.

Enjoying a thriving movie career, Bruce's father

often brought his son to film sets with him.

And by the age of six, the fledgling performer was cast in his first speaking

role, seen here in this dubbed excerpt from Kid Chung.

I guess that's why it's all started.

The director, my father, even my father being

an actor, they all said that he was a natural.

Even in these early films, the boy was showing the kind of charm, charisma,

and body language that would mark his later screen appearances.

If you look at some of his childhood roles, there's the thumbing of the nose,

and there's that sort of grimace that he did when he

got mad, and all of these carried over into adult roles.

But that was really Bruce.

I mean, later he would say that was on a self-expression.

Despite being nearsighted and somewhat frail as a child, the young actor was

growing up to be a handsome, confident, and even cocky.

In addition to acting, Bruce also developed a love for dancing.

Actually, Bruce Lee won a dancing championship in Hong Kong in 1985,

he was a very good cha-cha dancer.

But for a handsome young actor and dancer,

post-war Hong Kong was a tough place to grow up.

Gangs ruled the city streets, and Lee was often forced to fight them.

But Bruce liked the challenge, and faced his adversaries head on.

I remember when Bruce was about 14 years old, he always did like to fight.

So there was a group of students, classmates that didn't quite like him.

So one day when he walked out of school, they

just jumped him and beat the heck out of him.

I guess he felt that he had to defend himself.

You know, street games in Hong Kong were deserves for the future triads,

you know, Chinese market triads.

Even if they were young, really young.

Among them, there were some very dangerous kind

of person that, hey, Bruce Lee really much.

In one such fight, Bruce took on the son of a feared triad gang member.

Afraid of retaliation, his parents enrolled their son in his first martial arts class.

Now training under Yip Mann, a martial arts master and philosopher.

Bruce was instructed in the ways of discipline and self-control.

In his early teens, he became involved with Wing

Chun Kung Fu, which was a form of martial arts.

And this was a philosophy that was very much about finding

your power and delivering it in a very efficient way.

To his parents dismay, Bruce's street fighting continued

and the violent nature of his confrontations was escalating.

In one of his last encounters while he was removing his jacket, the fellow he was

squaring off against Sucker Punchdom and Black in design.

Bruce flew into a rage and went after him and knocked

the fellow out, broke his tooth, broke his arm.

And the police were involved.

Police detective came up, and he said, excuse me, Mr. Lee.

He said, your son's been really fighting bad in school.

He said, if he gets into one more fight, I might have to put him in jail.

To rescue their son from Hong Kong's mean streets, Lee's parents made the difficult

decision to send their 18-year-old son to live with friends in the United States.

My father was a very old-fashioned man.

He never hugs anybody.

Nobody.

My father actually went over and hugged him.

And that really took us all by surprise.

Now back at the place of his birth, Bruce settled in Seattle and soon found

work at a restaurant owned by a family friend named Ruby Chow.

But the rebellious young teenager was certain he was

destined for more than waiting tables in Chinatown.

So he went to study philosophy to Washington University, but he never graduated.

His dream, even when he was a young man and not a star, is to find the right

balance between martial arts and ancient philosophy.

And Bruce Lee worked for his final thesis about

the meeting between Kung Fu and philosophy.

While gracefully blending his studies with martial arts, Bruce

developed a reputation on campus for being something of a master.

Soon friends and classmates began flocking to him for instruction.

When we first started out, he didn't charge anybody.

And he never probably would have, but Bruce used to get frustrated.

And so we finally said, look, Bruce, why don't you start a school and charge

this money and then you can go out on your own.

In 1963, while still in college, Bruce opened the Jun Fan Gong Fu Institute.

But before long, the instructors' attentions began focusing on one special

student, a former cheerleader named Linda Emery.

One day we were on the campus of the University of Washington, and he said,

okay, Linda, now I want you to throw me, and he showed me how to do it.

So I threw him over on the grass, and he landed on the grass, and we were

kind of laughing, and he said, let's go to the space needle for dinner.

I said, you mean all of us?

And he said, no, just you.

And I was like, that was our first date, October 25th, 1963.

The relationship quickly became serious, but Linda's mother

was not happy with her daughter's choice of a boyfriend.

Interracial couples were not widely accepted in the 1960s, and Mrs.

Emery doubted that the young philosophy student

could provide a stable life for her daughter.

Determined to prove her wrong, Bruce worked harder than

ever to build his budding franchise of martial arts schools.

And on August 17th, 1964, Bruce and his former student, Linda, were married.

That was one time in my life, I knew that I was doing the absolutely right thing.

That this man was a man of quality and integrity and great love and warmth,

and that we were going to be okay.

The couple moved to Oakland, California, where

Bruce had already opened a second Kung Fu school.

There, Bruce continued his practice of teaching any and all willing to learn.

He didn't have any barriers of color or anything like that.

He said, if you're hard as right, he said, I'm going to teach you.

Chinese Kung Fu was considered a secret treasure, teaching

it from Chinese to Chinese, not stranger, not foreigner.

Bruce Lee was the first one to teach his kind of Kung Fu to black men, white men,

Mexican men, and any kind of men.

Because he said martial arts are a human

expression, nothing strange inside martial arts.

Within months of opening his new school, Lee was confronted

by a hostile group of Asian martial arts masters.

And they issued an ultimatum to Bruce Lee saying, stop teaching Caucasians,

or you're going to have to fight our top man.

That, of course, was the wrong thing to say to Bruce Lee because he loved the

challenge and also wasn't going to be told what to do by anybody.

I think the fight lasted three minutes.

Bruce had subdued him, put him to the floor and made the man say in Chinese,

I give up, I give up.

But winning the fight wasn't enough.

Feeling that he should have won in seconds, not minutes.

Bruce began developing a strict regimen to revolutionize martial arts.

Bruce Lee took a hard and objective look at the art of combat, and he came away

with some very profound truths, such as it is constantly changing.

You cannot expect to fight in a one-dimensional

aspect when fighting is multi-dimensional.

Back in the 60s, he was the only one in the first one who had this kind of approach.

He was the one who put the Kung Fu in the 20th century.

Be formless, shameless, like water.

Now you put water into a cup.

It becomes the cup.

You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.

You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.

Now water can flow, or it can crash.

Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee inspires me exactly for the same reason why Jit Kunzhou exists.

He was a man ahead of his time.

He had the intuition to create something that was beyond

himself, an actual philosophy, not just a martial art.

I know that it was Chinese and that he chose to

teach to all kind of people the way of martial arts.

He was not just a fighter.

Bruce was a philosopher and a teacher.

Daring to break with tradition was one thing Lee taught by example.

In the early 1960s, Lee hoped that bringing exposure to martial arts would

combat racism by bridging the gap between Eastern and Western.

One way to do this was to give frequent demonstrations of his skill.

When he was invited to perform at Ed Parker's Karate Championship in Long

Beach, California, he astonished the crowd with his famous one-inch punch.

He would tighten his fist and just deliver that one-inch shot of impact.

But during that short distance in time, he would

generate all of his body weight into the point of impact.

And he said, let me show you something.

Turned to Tom to my teacher who was then one of Parker's black belts.

And he gave him his little kicking bag.

He kicked Tom the length of a swimming pool and into a flower bed.

I was impressed to say the least.

But despite his growing reputation in the

martial arts field, Bruce Lee was frustrated.

He had this idea in his mind how he became the first Chinese superstar in the history.

Still struggling to make ends meet, his schools were not

bringing in enough money, and the future seemed uncertain.

On February 1, 1965, Bruce and Linda celebrated the birth of their first child,

Brandon Bruce Lee.

Bruce's greatest joy in his whole life was his children.

He wanted to have a boy because it's a very Chinese thing to have a boy to carry on.

He had a very, very keen sense of love for his son, and he used to always brag and

say, he's the only blonde-haired blue-eyed child in the world.

But just one week after Brandon's birth, tragedy struck when Bruce received word

that his father, Lee Hui Chuan, had died in Hong Kong.

After flying home to attend the funeral, Lee returned to America

more determined than ever to make his family proud of him.

He focused all of his attentions on perfecting a distinctive style of martial

arts, eventually called Jeet Kundo, or the way of the intercepting fist.

He told us Jeet Kundo is a bunch of concepts and philosophies and strategies,

and you take out and make it fit into you.

He believed that he could take the best of many different kinds of fighting.

A piece here and a piece there from boxing, wrestling, martial arts,

all sorts of different physical activity, and incorporated into a single philosophy.

Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself.

It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky,

so I can show you some really fancy movement.

But to express oneself honestly, not lying to

oneself, and to express myself honestly, not that.

My friend is very hard to do.

While Bruce was busy pouring all of his energy into martial arts, veteran TV

producer William Dozier was searching for an Asian actor, one who could star in a

new TV series he was developing based on the classic Charlie Chan Mysteries.

A friend of Dozier's Hollywood hairstylist, Jay Sebring, had recently

seen Lee perform at the Ed Parker Tournament and

enthusiastically recommended him to the producer.

Test X-1, take one, Steve.

Now Bruce, just look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name,

your age, and where you were born.

My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee.

I was born in San Francisco in 1940.

I am 24 right now.

And you worked in motion pictures in Hong Kong?

Yes, since I was around 60 years old.

And when did you leave Hong Kong?

1959, when I was 18.

I see.

Now look over to me, Bruce, as we talk.

I understand you just had a baby boy.

And you'll sleep over it, have you?

Oh, three nights.

In 1965, Dozier ordered a screen test for Bruce at 20th Century Fox Studios.

There is the finger jab, there is the punch, there is the back fist, and then low.

Of course, then they use leg straight at the groin, or come up.

Or, if I can back up a little bit, they start back to him and then come back.

All right, it's kind of work.

And it was a very effective screen test because Bruce Lee gave a demonstration,

not only about martial arts, but only about the way of playing in Chinese theater.

So he showed it to the camera how the Chinese actor on the stage walked,

how the Chinese actor moved their hands.

And so he was very, very impressive.

Unfortunately for Bruce, Dozier was now busy preparing his upcoming Batman series.

Charlie Chan's number one son was scrapped.

Although Dozier promised Bruce that he would keep him in mind for his next

project, one based on a classic radio drama from the 1930s, The Green Hornet.

They wanted to offer Bruce the part of Cato, but that wasn't going to happen

until the following year because they wanted to make sure the Batman worked.

So there we were now having moved to Los Angeles and Bruce didn't have a job.

Bruce Lee didn't have to wait very long.

So the bat came.

Batman became a national phenomenon, and within

weeks Dozier began prepping The Green Hornet.

After all, we're both on the same side of the law.

Just cut us in on your racket.

That's all we are after.

Racket?

It's getting late, boss.

If we're going to be partners, Mr. Smith, we mustn't keep secrets from one another.

Everything on a table where we can all see it.

Impressed with Bruce's screen presence, if not his acting, ABC Network executives

accepted Dozier's choice of Lee as Cato, the crime-fighting chauffeur.

And now, to protect the rights and lives of decent citizens, rides The Green Hornet.

When the show premiered on Friday, September

9th, 1966, Bruce Lee leapt onto the screen.

And into stardom.

He went from being a martial arts instructor to someone

that everybody watched in prime time in North America.

No one had ever seen anything like that.

Soon the fan mail Bruce was receiving was out pulling that of the star.

Starring in the role of millionaire newspaper publisher Britt Reid,

alias The Green Hornet, was a dashing all-American heartthrob named Van William.

No more tricks, Carly.

I'm here to talk business.

The thing that impressed me about him then is, as always, was his intensity,

you know.

He was very, very intense.

You know, if we ever meet up with that mass Kung Fu man again, I want him.

But a very nice gentleman.

Take it easy, miss.

We won't hurt you.

From that moment on, Bruce and I kind of started

working on a friendship all through the series.

After years of financial insecurity, Bruce was now a regular in a network TV series.

And although his role was secondary to that of Van Williams,

he was determined not to play Cato as a subordinate.

He didn't want any chop-socky or pigtail or

bowing and scraping and that kind of thing.

The way that Chinese had been portrayed.

So that was his rule that he would not do any roles demeaning.

To the Chinese culture.

Everybody just loved him around the set because of his enthusiasm.

He kept it pretty interesting.

A perfectionist, Bruce worked hard to make his fight scenes as authentic as possible.

Kung Fu is going full.

It's not child's play.

But he soon learned the compromises required when filming for television.

We had to slow up his action because we found in the test that

he was moving too fast for the speed of the motion pictures.

A film.

A people may not realize he could have been faster than he was.

Never as colorful as their caped counterparts.

Holy uncanny photographic mental processes.

The Green Hornet and Cato failed to catch on with primetime audiences.

In the opinion of Bruce Lee, this was the

main reason the serial failed with the public.

Because the audience loved the campy humor of Batman.

But Cato, Green Hornet, was too much serious.

And Bruce Lee said this can't be for real because they are comic book characters.

In a desperate effort to save the show, Dogere and ABC concocted a face-off

between Batman and Robin and the Green Hornet and Cato.

No bad mobile, let's do it.

We can get some work done first and fast.

And the original script was that he gets into a fight with Robin and loses.

Split seconds, let's go!

Well, he just went right through the roof.

And he said there is no way I'm going to get into a fight with Robin and lose.

Bert had told everybody, you know, his big black belt and a big tough guy.

And Bruce had heard all about this.

So he was going to play his Chinese water torture game on him.

He let out little words.

He was going to get this guy.

And Bruce comes in and he gives him the silent

treatment, you know, and he's grumbling around.

You know, it's Bert's heart.

He's just going to lose his temper and just destroy him.

Adam said that Bert Ford was just shaking in his shorts.

He was so scared that Bruce was going to take after him.

Ultimately, the producers ended the battle in

a draw to avoid upsetting fans of either show.

None too smart for a smart crime fighter.

Are we just letting them go that bad?

But it didn't matter.

The Green Hornet was canceled after just one season.

That was unquestionably a big blow to Bruce Lee.

He had hoped to use that as a springboard and it didn't work out.

With the cancellation of the Green Hornet, the future was once again uncertain.

Now 27, Bruce had hoped the Green Hornet would open doors for him.

Instead, he found work only sporadically, making a few

guest appearances in shows like, here come the brides.

I did not meet the ship because I refused to marry a woman I've never seen.

Then soon, decision not yours.

The society arranges all marriages.

I am no longer a part of the society.

I reside.

Perhaps you wish to speak to Chief Pei.

You could explain your reasoning to him.

I will explain nothing to Chief Pei.

Now I am no longer a member of the society.

Is that understood?

Unable to find work as an actor, he hired himself out as a fight

coordinator on films like The Wrecking Crew, starring Dean Martin.

But he wanted to be an actor, not only a divisor on the set.

Those years were very difficult to break into Hollywood.

There became a racial barrier that prevented him

from crossing over into the Hollywood establishment.

Frustrated and with a family to support, Bruce turned to his

friend Green Hornet producer Charles Fitzsimons for advice.

And I said, well, wait a minute, Bruce, I have an idea.

I said, how about teaching people in their own

homes where you don't have to have a studio?

And I explained to him all of the middle-aged would-be macho individuals in

the motion picture industry and in business.

These are your potential clients.

The business took off.

Now attracting celebrity students such as James Coburn and Steve McQueen,

Bruce became the hottest martial arts coach in Hollywood.

But he's still yearned to be in front of the cameras, not behind them.

Bruce Lee's jicundo isn't a martial art as many think it is.

It's actually a concept and a philosophy where everything

goes and whatever works for you is actually the best thing.

It's the essence of freedom because it doesn't

compel you to follow certain schemes or styles.

On the contrary, it gives you freedom of

expression and adaptability in every situation.

In the 1960s, Bruce Lee's intriguing new fighting style was becoming all the rage

with the celebrity set, including basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabar.

He was not like most of the other people in the martial

arts who had the tendency to be very formal and stiff.

He's very done Earth, very American.

When you're working out and he always wanted to

make the most use of your time together with him.

He had to have done your homework and be ready to go.

But of all Bruce's pupils, his favorite was his son Brandon.

Brandon was a multi-tone, couldn't sit still a little kid.

And as soon as he could walk, Bruce was having him

learn kicks and punches and all that kind of thing.

And Brandon had endless amounts of energy just like his dad.

As proud as Bruce was of his son, he was equally proud of his second child,

daughter Shannon, born April 19th, 1969.

She was as much a girl as Brandon was a boy.

Shannon just had Bruce around her little finger.

Daddy's little girl.

It was like an angel had come to live at our house when Shannon was born.

It's funny, but I guess when Bruce Lee is your dad, he's your dad.

We weren't the sort of kids that went around saying, well,

my dad's Bruce Lee and he, you know, beat up your dad.

Even though I'm sure that's true for the most part.

Despite what his children thought, Bruce was not invincible.

One morning in 1970, while working out with weights, he injured a major nerve in

his back, which left him unable to train for six months.

Frustrated, he poured his energy into refining his philosophy of Jit Kundo and

began writing extensively on every aspect of martial arts combat.

Doctors came to Bruce with devastating news.

They told him that he would never be able to perform martial arts again.

Fowing to prove them wrong.

Lee, once healthy enough to train, set up an exhaustive daily fitness regimen.

What he did, again, turning a stumbling block into a stepping stone, he wanted to

see just what the limitations and capabilities of the human body were.

He would do 2,000 punches a day, you know, 1,000 kicks a day.

He would run three miles and get on a bike and bike 15 miles.

All of it was pushing to see what the human body was truly capable of.

On track, Bruce worked closely with screenwriter Sterling Siliphant and actor

James Coburn on a film idea entitled The Silent Flute.

And the orientation was to make martial arts movies

with a meaning, with a mind behind it, with philosophy.

Warner Brothers was interested in doing it.

It was the picture that was going to break Bruce into Hollywood.

And we lived on that hope for several years there in the difficult years.

So that was a crushing disappointment to Bruce when that film was never made.

Still teaching martial arts, Bruce felt

Hollywood had turned its back on him as an actor.

Looking for work, he traveled to Hong Kong to

promote himself and meet with Asian filmmakers.

Run Run Shaw was the biggest Asian filmmaker.

Unfortunately, the bid was a standard offer that he offered his contract

players, which was like $200 a week for about seven years.

Well, that wasn't what Bruce was looking for, so he politely declined.

Back in Hollywood in 1971, Bruce collaborated with Sterling Siliphant on a

script for TV's popular Long Street series.

Guest appearing as a martial arts master, Bruce was in fact so well received by the

show's producers that he was offered a recurring role.

But by now, Lee's status in Asia had changed.

He came back to Hong Kong and he finds out that thanks to Kato, thanks to Gwen

Hornet, he was very famous in the Chinese market.

He was both astonished and pleased to learn that

Asian fans now referred to it as the Kato Show.

He arrived there, thousands of people had come to the airport.

He couldn't walk down the street without being mobbed the way that Tom Cruise,

I guess today, might be mobbed if he walked out on the street.

As a result of his newfound fame, Bruce was asked to

star in a film for top Asian producer, Raymond Chow.

Bruce expressed that he would like very much

to come back to Hong Kong to make pictures.

And I call him on the phone and we start a conversation.

I don't think clicks.

Then we sign a three-picture deal and he came back and the rest is history.

Bruce's first assignment for Raymond Chow was as the star of

a modestly budgeted martial arts film entitled The Big Boss.

Introducing Bruce Lee.

Every limb in his body is a lethal weapon against man.

With rich beasts.

Hong Kong moviegoers are renowned for being very vocal.

And they have even been known to cut the seats with

a knife or something if they didn't like the movie.

And so we're sitting there.

The crowd is hushed.

And he thinks for a second he thinks, oh my god they hate it.

The audience was sort of dumb-found at the end of the thing.

Until everybody broke out into a thunderous applause.

The Big Boss broke all previous box office records in Asia and

Bruce Lee was on his way to becoming an international star.

But instead of taking his newfound celebrity

status for granted, he pushed himself even harder.

In his next film for Raymond Chow, Fist of Fury, Lee introduced the Nunchaku,

a weapon never before seen in a martial arts film.

Once again, the film broke all box office records.

Most people love him because he was the ranger of the poor people, of the underdogs.

Producer Run Run Shaw wanted to cash in on this popularity.

Hoping to steal Bruce away from Raymond Chow, he

tempted the actor with a blank check for his services.

Instead, Bruce remained loyal to Raymond Chow.

He proposed an equal partnership for a series of films.

It was an offer Chow couldn't and didn't refuse.

Professionally confident and financially secure, Bruce Lee had conquered Asia.

But his real goal had eluded him.

Bruce Lee wanted to take on the world.

And that meant taking on the entrenched prejudices of Hollywood.

Bruce Lee was the first Chinese actor who became famous all over the world.

The first martial artist who became famous all over the world.

But in Hollywood, old habits die hard.

And despite international fame as a martial arts superstar,

Bruce Lee seemed no match for domestic prejudices.

It's very difficult to convince people who could give a green light to a project that

an Asian hero would work as a marquee draw.

They think that business-wide, it's a risk.

And I don't blame them in the same way as in Hong Kong.

If a foreigner come and became a star, if I were the man with the money,

I probably would have my own worry of whether or not the acceptance would be there.

But that's all right.

Because if you honestly express yourself, it doesn't matter.

Bruce Lee, before he left for Hong Kong, was working with Warner Brothers with Fred

Winetrop in developing a concept for a television show set in the Old West.

It was going to be called the Warrior at that point.

It was later changed to Kung Fu.

They never, apparently, considered him at all for the

lead because in their words he was too Chinese-looking.

And what happened was they ended up giving the role to a Caucasian actor,

David Karateen, who they tried to make up to look half Chinese.

And so he said, I know I can be a star also in the United States.

Why?

They don't give me my chance.

Very hurt, very humiliated.

And that's why I come back again in Hong Kong and

make a so violent movie like Chinese connection.

Because the range of Bruce Lee in that movie was in part

the range of Bruce Lee, the artist in his real life.

Bitter at what he considered Hollywood's racism, Bruce now turned all of his

attention to his partnership with Raymond Chow, and the

opportunity to make his own movies and control his own image.

Let's say that after getting to know Bruce Lee in the cinema, I wanted to know more.

They do occasionally watch Bruce Lee movies when they put them on television.

The way of the dragon would be Bruce Lee's directorial debut in 1972, having

developed a keen interest in film-making while starring in the Green Hornet,

Lee now oversaw all aspects of his new film.

He directed it, he wrote it, he played the star in it,

he co-produced it together along with Raymond Chow.

Bruce was given the creative control he desired and made sure that his performance

and the film would live up to his audience's growing expectations.

The exteriors were filmed in Rome, including one flirtatious

scene with a beautiful Italian actress, Melissa Longo.

In his movies, when he became Bruce Lee, the

king of Kung Fu, he turned into another person.

He was usually shy, he didn't speak much.

Instead, when he became Bruce Lee, he could show all his strength.

Both on camera and off, Lee was known for his

sense of humor, often playing practical jokes.

Many friends call him the Chinese Budi Allen,

because he loved it to play jokes all the time.

But when it came to staging fights, Lee would strive for perfection.

One of the film's highlights was this grueling fight

scene between Lee and his former student, Chuck Norris.

At the beginning of that fight scene, Bruce Lee's character

is losing because he's in a very rigid martial arts way.

Chuck Norris's character is also rigid and he's a more powerful, bigger individual.

Bruce, at that point, changes tactics and starts bouncing around like Muhammad Ali

or Sugar Ray Robinson and being non-telegraphic

as a result, Bruce Lee emerges victorious.

Bruce stressed the need to show the ability to adapt

instantly to whatever the situation was in front of you.

Way of the Dragon smashed all previous box office records, and within weeks of its

release, Bruce was busy prepping fight scenes for his next film, Game of Death.

co-starring would be his friend and former pupil, Kareem Abdul Jabar.

I was flabbergasted, you know, this is something that we had dreamed

about, but you know, you've never really gotten a green light from anybody.

It was a great experience.

Before Game of Death was completed, Bruce finally got

the call from Hollywood he had waited for all his life.

He was offered his first starring role in an American film, Enter the Dragon.

It would be a big-budget martial arts blockbuster and

a validation of Bruce's years of dedication to his art.

Now more than ever, Bruce Lee was considered the number one martial arts

practitioner in the world, on and off the set.

Some kid was sitting on a wall questioning whether he was just an actor.

Well, could he really do any of the things that he had been doing?

And Bruce walked close to him, and then it was just snap, and he hit him.

And the kid had a bloody nose and raised his hands, and that was it.

To their eyes, he was like building the kid.

People would try and take pokes at him when he was walking down the street.

But Bruce would just, you know, use all the savvy that he'd developed and

just play with these guys and in fact would

make a move on them and then correct their form.

Though Bruce was physically fit and at the top

of his game, something was seriously wrong.

He was training for something that would never come, a fight that would never happen.

Bruce seemed to be on a seven-day-a-week schedule.

He was just working hard, and he knew it.

But with the success of Enter the Dragon, he would have achieved that place where he

could pick and choose a little bit, take his time

to find the right properties and develop them.

So he was on the cusp of realizing his dreams.

On May 10, 1973, while editing Enter the Dragon in the Hong Kong studio,

Bruce Lee became dizzy and collapsed.

Rush to the hospital, the actor appeared very close to

death, although doctors couldn't determine the cause.

Undergoing a battery of tests, he recovered sufficiently to return to

work, and after completing Enter the Dragon,

resumed work on the unfinished game of death.

He was working with a Chinese actress who he

thought might be involved in the film as well.

So he was at her house, and he complained that he had a headache, and she gave him a

prescription tablet that she had called Equijisic.

And he went into another room and lay down.

But when she couldn't wake him a few hours later,

actress Betty Ting Pei called Raymond Chow.

The phone rang, and he said, I don't know what happens, but I couldn't wake up Bruce.

So why don't you come?

So in the hurry, I went to Betty's place, and Bruce looked very pale.

So the mystery in that moment was why Betty Ting didn't call soon the ambulance,

but she lost much time calling the producer, his doctor, his special doctor.

And only in the end of the evening they call the ambulance.

Raymond Chow called me and told me I should go to the hospital.

And so I took a taxi to the hospital, and I just

remember that I couldn't ask if he had died.

And I said, is he alive?

And they said, no.

On July 20th, 1973, at the age of 32, Bruce Lee, martial arts master, was dead.

You were shocked.

I definitely was shocked.

My mom was, of course, you know, she was torn apart really bad.

Because she, I mean, she was so proud of Bruce.

And here was a man in the peak of health.

And one day he just expired.

No car accident, no external source, no great illness.

And so people needed to find a reason.

As news of his death spread throughout the world,

so did rumors that his death was no accident.

Nobody in the world can believe it, that the strongest men alive can be killed

by an addict, by a painkiller, by an aspirin.

So they say that he received a punch, some kind of secret kung fu strike on the

set, making him sick hours later, or days later.

So they said he was poisoned, because in China, you

know, there are some very special secret herbalists.

Some even speculated that Lee had been killed by a curse imposed by Asian martial

arts masters, still angry that he had revealed their secrets to non-Asians.

Others, that he had run afoul of the Chinese mafia.

I suppose when someone passes away, you can say whatever you want.

You know, you could say he was done in by gremlins, but

there's equal evidence for gremlins as there is for a curse.

An autopsy revealed the cause of Lee's death to be cerebral edema, or swelling of

the brain, an allergic reaction to the pill he had taken to alleviate his headache.

The scientific medical evidence was extremely clear, so you may call it a

freak accident, but absolutely nothing else.

The rumors surrounding his death continue to swirl to this

day, but no theory could turn back the clock on the tragedy.

The world's most famous martial arts movie star was gone.

It

was a total lifetime dedication to his art.

He could take your business, but he had a very active sense of humor.

He was a braggard in a way, but he never bragged

about anything that he wasn't capable of.

There's nobody I quite remember enjoying being a celebrity as he did.

He was the catalyst that set that whole martial arts wall in motion, and it's a

shame that he didn't live to see the impact that he had.

Within days of Bruce Lee's death in 1973, more than 20,000 mourners crowded the

streets of Hong Kong to pay their respects to the police.

He had fallen superstar.

Following a memorial service, his body was taken to Seattle,

where Bruce and his wife had met and fallen in love.

Among those of the funeral were close friends James Coburn and Steve McQueen,

who served as Paul Bearers.

At the age of only 32, Bruce Lee had left behind a wife, two children, and an

unrivaled legacy in the world of entertainment and martial arts.

But ironically, it would be the films in which

he didn't appear, where his legend would live on.

In a desperate effort to salvage Bruce Lee's last film, the producers hired a

look-alike actor and resorted to obvious and, at times, laughable camera tricks.

Cut!

Okay, that's a print.

That was great, Billy.

Okay, everybody.

Get there.

What do you think?

But mixed results couldn't prevent game of

death from being an enormous financial success.

The fact is that without Bruce Lee, there is no future

for the martial arts and for the martial arts movies.

So, he affected not only the martial arts field,

but the style of filming action in the movies.

Before Bruce Lee, you have the classic punch, John Wayne punch, you know?

After Bruce Lee, you have a more choreography, a more spectacular way of fighting.

On the strength of five films, Bruce Lee had forever redefined the action

movie genre and opened the doors for martial arts superstars, like Jackie Chan,

Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Just about everybody now, who does action, resorts to

some form of karate or kickboxing or something like that.

But of all the actors who dared fill the fallen star's footprints, the one with the

greatest chance seemed to be Bruce's only son, Brandon.

I started learning martial arts with my dad right about the time I could walk.

And a weird question to you when people ask

me about following in my father's footsteps.

Because if by that you mean doing really excellent films and doing the kind of work

that my father did, doing that quality of work, that level of work, absolutely.

That's what I want to do.

But if you mean trying to imitate him in some way,

trying to be a poor man's Bruce Lee, not at all.

The young actor seemed poised on the brink of superstardom

as the title character in a supernatural thriller, The Crow.

But on March 31, 1993, nearly 20 years after his father's untimely death,

28-year-old Brandon Lee was killed when a prop gun fired a lethal charge.

Like his father's before him, his death was ruled a freak accident.

And like Game of Death, The Crow was completed

with the aid of body doubles and special effects.

Unfortunately, the bizarre circumstances surrounding Brandon Lee's death did little

to quell the ever-growing myths about a mysterious curse.

They said Brandon was killed by the same hand that

killed his father 20 years before, by the same mind.

With Brandon's death, there was a resurgence of the rumors about Bruce's death.

There was a rehashing of them in the public again.

And there was an attempt to connect the deaths of Bruce and Brandon.

And really, that's a great disservice and a great tragedy.

Trying to connect it up with curses and falsehoods and rumors is not right.

Brandon's death was the result of the most unfortunate and

unlikely freakish chain of events than that could ever be imagined.

In a way, I'm glad that Bruce was not here to see this happen to Brandon because it

would have hurt him so badly as it has all of us.

To millions around the world, the name Bruce Lee looms larger than ever.

Magazines continue to print articles about him.

Fan clubs are devoted to him.

And his martial arts philosophy continues to

attract a growing number of devoted followers.

It's his ideas, his concept, his legacies actually live beyond his death.

And that's what makes him great.

One of the most amazing things from my perspective on Bruce

Lee was that a man of 32 years of age could be so prolific.

He created a new film genre.

He created a self-help philosophy, which is absolutely brilliant.

And he created a new martial art, which people

have been carrying on since his passing.

So the important thing about Bruce Lee is not how he died or that he died.

It's how he lived.

He's probably the best friend you can have.

He's very loyal.

He once told me that if somebody is trying to attack you, I'll take them off.

That's a friend.

The integrity with which Bruce lived his life, what he believed to be right,

that is a clear example of the way it should be done.

I remember he said, all right, if I'm gone for any reason, don't get

hooked up with all these people that are going to be giving me parades.

To give me parades, something's wrong.

He was definitely somebody to look up to and something to aspire to.

He had such a passion for life.

I strive to have as much passion.

If I could rewind time and do it all over again, I would

have asked so many more questions and learned so much more.

He certainly left a gift for the rest of us, a path to follow footsteps,

to follow so that we can start in a direction and then find our own way,

which was his lesson.

The reality is that the day Bruce lived died because he was a concept.

He had in his mind a work in progress.

Be formless, hopeless, like water.

Be water, my friend.

The famous phrase about the cup of water of Bruce Lee, the Chikunto students of

nowadays, are many glasses, co-adapting Chikunto in themselves.

All type of knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge.

As an actor, as a martial artist, as a human

being, all these I have learned from martial art.