Original subtitles

It was a tough time for our generation in Hong Kong.

It wasn't flourishing like now.

But there was Shaw Brothers.

Oriental Hollywood.

Big studio.

During that time, Shaw Brothers trained numerous filmmakers.

So the new generation keen on learning filmmaking

would go to Shaw Brothers.

Mr. Run Run Shaw was an incredible businessman.

His contribution to the movie industry was tremendous.

He was responsible for making Hong Kong movies global.

Shaw was operating factory-style.

Even for big stars, their base salary wasn't that high.

Every day, early in the morning, 7 o'clock or 7:30,

a big bus would carry all the filmmaker's people,

like the carpenters, lighting men, the cameraman, whatever.

Action director/filmmaker Cheng Cheh was a king at Shaw Brothers

because he was the only director... He'd make money easily for Run Run Shaw.

I learned so much from director Chang Cheh.

He became my mentor and gradually made me a leading actor.

He was quite a genius director, but he was quite bad-tempered.

All the crew people would be scared of him, even the boss.

He doesn't frighten me, I'm strong, see?

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 is San Francisco, 1940.

I am 24 right now.

And you work in motion pictures in Hong Kong?

Yeah, since I was around six years old.

Since Bruce Lee appeared ina few TV shows when he was a kid,

many Hong Kong people knew him through that.

Whether he was working in the U.S.A. or Hong Kong,

I don't think anyone considered him an American.

Personally, I consider him a local.

He represented us.

Yeah, Bruce had done all these movies

as a kid, caused a lot of trouble,

he'd been sent to America.

Did the Green Hornet, which to him was a step down.

Kato, we're dealing with a man of infinite brilliance and infinite madness.

But it was the Green Hornet marketed

as the Kato show in Hong Kong, that opened the doors for him.

When Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong for the first time,

in fact, he really wanted to join Shaw Brothers.

And then he visited us at Shaw Studios.

The person who was responsible for Bruce's return was a good friend of his,

Little Unicorn.

When at Shaw, Little Unicorn was always telling people how incredible Bruce Lee was.

We worked together on FIST OF UNICORN.

Bruce was the martial arts consultant.

Bruce liked showing off.

There was this background actor, who was doing the tiger and the crane.

Then Bruce Lee came back on set.

You know Bruce Lee and his unique bouncy walk.

So this guy said to Bruce Lee, "You seem powerful onscreen.

I wonder if you know how to fight for real."

You want to fight?

I'll take you on.

When lunch came, everybody gathered around them waiting for a scene. I'll take you on.

When lunch came, everybody gathered around them waiting for a scene.

That guy kept on doing his tiger and his crane.

Did not bother Bruce Lee one bit. He tried to hit him on the mouth.

Bruce ducked, then one slap.

Ducked again, then another slap.

The actor had blood all over his mouth.

That day, it was summer and he was in a short-sleeve t-shirt.

He flexed his bicep and pinched his skin,

showing me that there was absolutely no fat at all.

All muscle.

When he pinched, his skin just popped off like a piece of tree bark.

The blood shot out this high!

It wouldn't stop bleeding until an hour later.

What caused that?

He took electric shocks where you hold onto two pieces of copper pipe.

You have to hold onto it with great strength in order to not lose your balance.

He would turn the knob up to level ten!

I would try it, too.

The kind of kung fu I practiced was from inner force to outer force.

But he fought against the electricity from outside in.

I mean, I could handle level eight, almost nine.

I went, �Ahhhhhhh!"

Imagine doing it all the time?

You'd go crazy!

His explanation was that it was a shortcut.

With karate, you'd spend ten days practicing with one board.

This way he only needed to spend five minutes.

That sure took a toll on his body.

He liked eating white meat.

Healthy stuff.

But he took lots of vitamin pills.

I think he might have overloaded his body.

Run Run Shaw recommended he meet Chang Cheh.

He met Bruce Lee, who was very cocky.

"I want to be the lead."

Chang Cheh said, "Leading role? Buddy, you're a nobody.

The number one role? Impossible.�

Bruce said, "No.

I'm out of here."

As far as I know, if I remember it correctly, he only asked Shaw for $10,000 U.S.

That's why he ended up signing with Golden Harvest.

Golden Harvest was considered very much an upstart, a small independent.

He came in and showed people that there was a different way to do things.

At that time, I heard that Golden Harvest wasn't doing too well,

to the point that they were almost out of business.

The first movie that Bruce did as an adult was Big Boss.

And that was, for its time, considered a huge success.

Bruce was considered a local star in Hong Kong

and in Singapore, Malaysia.

Before his films had been released in Japan

or anyplace else in the world.

Even in Hong Kong, the Bruce Lee.

movies were the first Chinese movies that

non-Chinese people really started paying attention to.

The fact that Bruce got interviewed on the English TV

out here and everything.

Even now, it's hard to see.

Hong Kong actors getting interviewed on

the British side of things.

The audience didn't love THE BIG BOSS because of the director,

they loved it because of how great Bruce Lee was.

Bruce Lee was uncontrollable by anybody or any director.

They didn't understand why he had to make those strange yelling sounds.

This yelling was influential and fans were crazy about it.

He just hit a certain moment in history where people were looking for that kind of hero.

Now hear this.

I shall accept punishment for the lives that I took.

-You just leave this school alone. -Yes. Sure.

The Big Boss and Fists of Fury and even Way of the Dragon,

they weren't designed to be international releases.

But the demand was so strong that suddenly you had buyers coming in.

So that was the beginning of Bruce Lee becoming a quote, international star,

I was working with him on Game of Death

when we stopped Game of Death to go work on Enter the Dragon.

Game of Death was never finished, he only shot about three or four fight scenes

before Warner Brothers came along and picked him up for Enter the Dragon.

Bruce Lee was the first leading man

to achieve recognition for introducing the genre of martial arts films

to the global market.

The truth in fact is we were just at the cusp of that fame.

Before the release of Enter the Dragon

when he passed away.

On the 20th of July 1973,

all of the newspapers in Hong Kong carried shock headlines.

The death of Bruce Lee.

The cause of death was cerebral edema,

which is the swelling of the brain

and that was reportedly caused by a headache tablet he'd been taking.

Nobody believed it.

It was like, whoa, in the middle of it,

we're really getting into this guy, then all the sudden he's gone.

These kung fu movies were so hot at the time,

so they tried to find a replacement for him.

The next question is, can we find another Bruce Lee?

I was assigned by Golden Harvest to bring Bruce's wife,

Linda and the children back to the States for the funeral.

It was suggested that we take

a documentary film crew with us.

The world of Chinese movies has lost a hero and a leader.

Many people have lost a friend.

Raymond Chow, who was Bruce Lee's producer,

started shooting footage of the funeral.

Started shooting footage in Bruce Lee's house.

Like days after he died.

His home stands empty.

Only memories of the past remain here.

The idea morphed to building it out

into being a complete film.

And so we spent about another five months

assembling all the other footage that went on to become

Bruce Lee The Man, The Life and The Legend.

So right away they started making these movies.

I mean, you can almost look at this documentary

as a sort of a Bruceploitation film.

McQueen and Coburn helped carry the coffin to the hearse

for the final journey to the cemetery.

Hong Kong Chinese film industry was moving along,

whether it was with David Chang or with Jimmy Wang Yu

or with any of the other stars of the day.

For the international market, we tried selling a lot

of the other martial arts movies and the swordplay movies.

They met with limited success around the world.

They all wanted the next Bruce Lee.

Back then, we used to bring our products to different film markets.

To Cannes, to Milan, to AFM, etc.

We would meet distributors.

"We want Bruce's movie!" "Impossible, he died!"

"Yeah, but we still want Bruce Lee's movie, man!"

They would go to people in the martial

arts schools, the gymnasiums and so forth.

Hey, anybody looked like Bruce Lee.

Anybody was good. They were scouring everything.

My name is Ho Chung-Tao.

Chinese name, English name is James.

And they give name called Bruce Li.

Bruce Li is the best known double for Lee

and is an accomplished martial artist in his own right.

We felt that you should take a good look at

his abilities and compare for yourself.

When I was small, we were very rich,

but our money was taken away from us.

My father did not make it financially.

After that, we had a hard time.

I went to four different elementary schools.

Why then, do you still get into fights every day?

I can't... I can't help fighting.

I wasn't fat but maybe chubby when I was young.

I don't know what I did in my past life.

Some people just didn�t like me.

I was bullied a lot.

That's why I started practicing martial arts.

Additional kung fu movements are grouped according to

the section of the body you want to attack.

These groups are good in practice,

but the real fight is different.

I saw "Green Hornet� when I was in high school.

I was like, "Wow! What kind of kung fu is this?

This is real kung fu!"

Unless you�ve been in a real fight with another person,

you wouldn't know what martial arts is all about.

Once you fight, you know it.

You can always tell when someone uses their elbows.

He didn't do any weird scissor moves or anything like that.

Real fighters use their core, not just the arms.

Real fighters use their core, not just the arms. Action!

Action!

Then there was this film production company that was looking for new talent.

They saw me and decided to hire me.

Not bad.

-Kung fu good! -Uncle.

After CONSPIRACY, I was hired by Hong Kong producers for

SUPER DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY.

I'm producing the Green Hornet program for NBC TV this fall

and I would like you to play a part.

-Are you interested? -Me?

There were many Bruce Lee biopics.

The first one with Bruce Li was SUPER DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY,

but it was hugely romanticized.

That, that hurt me.

Get back. Let me handle them.

Well, what's the matter? Want to fight?

I think these bastards won't bother you anymore.

Really, it was more of a gimmick.

He went on and did about four or five other films

about Bruce Lee's life.

You can see all the different interpretations

all these different filmmakers had of Bruce Lee.

He had, like 19 different lives.

According to these guys.

Only one man in the world could play the part.

Bruce Li starring in Bruce Lee

the Man, the Myth.

Bruce Lee the Man the Myth is probably one of the most popular ones.

It's probably the most even handed as well.

Bruce Li was his friend in life,

Bruce Li was his student

in the martial arts.

I don't think he'd ever even met Bruce Lee.

Every kick and hit reminds you of his master.

Some people told me to raise my salary, but I told them no. Every kick and hit reminds you of his master.

Some people told me to raise my salary, but I told them no.

I actually cut my salary in half for BRUCE LEE THE MAN THE MYTH.

Why?

Because I wanted to show people what Bruce Lee's real kung fu was all about.

A master in three forms of Wing Chun.

No wonder he fights like his master, all new, all true.

His True Story.

But it's nonsense.

Bruce Lee, who is in Rome to shoot the Colosseum sequence,

is confronted by some mafiosi!

Bruce Lee?

Yes, my captor is very lovely.

You must have guessed that I wanted to know more

about you and your kung fu.

She certainly is... very sweet.

Bruce Lee, my friend, your kung fu is really classic.

You will be a Chinese hero.

You will conquer the western world.

Bruce Lee was always proud of being Chinese.

When he went to America, he became very progressive and

he started to learn western boxing, and he started teaching

martial arts to whites, and they didn't like that.

It's like, hey, those are our secrets.

So when The Dragon Lives

came along, he's born in China.

It means that boy is destined for big things.

He wasn't. He was really born in San Francisco.

And when he goes to America and he's only there for,

I think it seemed like a month or something like that,

and in that month, he meets a girl in one scene

and 15 minutes later she's his girlfriend. The next thing

you know, when he's in Hong Kong now, she's his wife.

Bruce Lee really married a white woman in real life.

Well, let's get her in there because we got to get her in there.

They did have some skeletal

biography of Bruce Lee, so it's a highly fictionalized

biography of Bruce Lee.

Goes to America, fights racism.

What sort of movie are you making?

Oh, it's called Hong Kong Today.

Hong Kong Today? Huh?

So why must I wear this crap?

Well, that's what the Chinese all look like,

so what else are you supposed to wear?

Comes back to Hong Kong, he's shipped over this American

training device which looks like this giant demon head.

It was developed in the States, it's quite new.

And he starts punching on it.

He locks himself in his room and he's

like beating on it because he wants

to become the best martial artist.

And they're always banging on the door going,

Bruce, what are you doing? You've gotta stop.

And it was such a clear indication

of how America has totally

spoiled this Chinese martial artist.

When I'm dead.

Then I'll rest.

First kind of wave of these films pivoted around

Bruce Lee's death.

Someone important died.

It's Bruce Lee, kung fu star, at age 34.

His death is still the headlines here.

Bruce Lee's death, a great blow to cinema and kung fu.

-It can't be. -It says it in the paper there.

Yeah, right there.

How could he die?

This guy was so strong.

Bruce, you feeling alright?

I'm alright, but if something should happen to me...

You'll be my successor.

And remember, you must always uphold, as I have,

the honor of the martial arts,

wear that garment and wear it well.

Of course.

I'll have to find out if there was some foul play.

And if there was, I'll avenge. I'll avenge.

So that's what these films all revolved around.

Why did he die? Who killed him? How do we avenge him?

The other was sequels and prequels and

sort of pseudo spinoffs.

FIST OF FURY II tells the story of the brother of the Bruce Lee character.

Back then, protection for intellectual property wasn't like it is now.

I'd often ask the producers, "Is it okay to shoot this?"

They'd say, "No problem, we'll take responsibility."

So we just did it.

Today, it�s much stricter.

Get going, Japanese, get the hell out of here!

Well, let's see how tough they are.

We would watch the original film to try and pinpoint its strengths.

-And you are? -Uh.

-My name's Wong. -I am Woo.

You may call me Mr. Wong.

Now what's the point of this?

Then we follow the main plot,

but try to be as different as possible.

It's not just copying.

There was even a FIST OF FURY 3,

with the brother of the brother.

The fights were great in both films.

So we asked him to do all the moves and poses like Bruce.

I believe that was our producer, Mr. Shaw.

Mr. Shaw was great.

He had an exceptional eye for talent.

We knew it the first time we saw you.

Ask our producer, Mr. Cho.

I think you were born to be Bruce Lee the second.

It's a heavy responsibility, give it some thought.

Learning his kung fu style? Okay.

I could do that.

But taking his name?

I didn't like that.

Hey, he's the one, the troublemaker. You bastards again?

Get out!

I walk on set, I looked at Ho Chung-Tao.

He's playing Bruce Lee.

I looked at him and said, well, if

I really stretch my imagination a little bit.

If people buy into it that he looks like

Bruce Lee, even though Bruce Lee is

no longer with us, then they can make the gap.

I don't think I looked like Bruce Lee.

I really don't.

But I could imitate him

because I studied him closely.

What were his movements like?

People who study art would say that hands are the hardest thing to draw. Why?

Because even the slightest movement makes a huge difference.

Watch Bruce Lee when he's about to fight.

He would be very relaxed, but ready to fight.

His hands would tell you he's about to fight for real.

Many people would imitate this one particular move.

He did that because he was sweating when he fought.

He didn't do it randomly.

Bruce Li is a good actor.

He's really good at fighting, as well.

But I think there is more to him.

I always thought if it wasn't for the market�s demand,

he would've done better if he was playing his own characters.

He would've been quite good.

He was an easygoing guy.

Soldier?

When we weren't shooting, he'd talk about his son,

how he had to take care of him while working in Hong Kong.

His son was disobedient.

He would imitate Bruce Lee's signature sound.

If imitating Bruce Lee meant slowly losing part of himself,

well, it's a pity.

well, it's a pity. I don't like Bruce Li, because it just like chicken.

I don't like Bruce Li, because it just like chicken.

because they give me, I have no way to change it.

I was actually repulsed by the idea of acting like Bruce Lee.

There have been many imitators.

But there's only one Bruce Lee.

He didn't have a choice. A job is a job. He needed it.

Bruce Lee's films were a global phenomenon.

Production companies would make films

with actors who resembled Bruce Lee.

We also made those films in South Korea.

Now that you've seen some of the Bruce Lee look-a-likes,

we feel that the latest is by far the greatest.

From deep in the heart of the orient,

introducing the new, sensational fighter: Dragon Lee.

The rest will be history.

My name is Moon Kyoung-seok. My stage name is Keoryong.

In Europe and Hong Kong, I was known as Dragon Lee.

Starting from a young age, I have loved martial arts movies.

I watched them every day for fun.

After watching, I would practice in front of the mirror, imitating Bruce Lee.

When the film production company suggested we work together, I thought,

"Okay, sounds fun. Let me give it a try."

Dragon Lee was one of my favorites.

His introduction was he had

done this film in Korea,

but an American producer

named Serafim Karalexis found this film

and he bought it and he brought it back,

turned it from a 90 minute to a 60 minute film.

Stuck on a bunch of footage that he also managed to

pick up of Bruce Lee as a child actor when he was,

like, eight years old and fifteen years old.

Stuck that at the beginning of the movie, made sort of like

a little pseudo documentary thing at the beginning,

and released it as the real Bruce Lee.

Your attention please.

An historic event has developed recently

due to better relations between the United States and China.

An early Bruce Lee film has been found in the Chinese Film

archive, and arrangements are being made to make it available

and ready for screening in theaters across the country.

The real Bruce Lee is back,

and this theater will be privileged to showing it first in this area.

Coming soon.

Not yet rated, but due to

the action, we can expect it to be R.

And it became this gigantic, huge success.

Nobody is madder, Nobody is badder.

Dragon Lee.

At that time, I remember that Dragon Lee was signed

as a contracted actor for a very small amount of money.

At that time, I was contracted with the Hwacheon Movie Corporation.

He didn't get along with the boss.

They basically exported my talent to Hong Kong.

So this is your kung fu. Do you want to challenge me?

I met Linda in Hong Kong,

and she told me about his life as a martial artist.

He would ask for a piece of paper to be held up, and he was so fast

that it would turn to shreds from his punch.

His speed, power and accuracy were the best.

He had a hard time fitting in when he first came to Hong Kong.

Hey, what are you doing?

You always seem to be fooling around, get on with your work.

I gradually introduced him to beef shumai, sticky rice.

You're responsible for framing Sammy.

Then you injured Lin Young, now you've killed my brother!

In Hong Kong, we treated him very well,

so he always thought of us.

Reflecting on Dragon Lee, I get a bit emotional.

Dragon Lee, who was this Bruce Lee

times ten, this gigantic, muscular guy.

And every time he would, like, look at you,

you'd hear his neck cracking.

At this point, the nunchaka was so ingrained

into Bruce Lee lore, like anybody that pulled

up a nunchaka, you're instantly thinking of Bruce Lee.

But he made a pair of thumb chucks.

So he had one stick from the nunchaka that went to, like,

a keychain to his thumb and he would spin it around.

One time he had, like, a knife sticking on one.

He would always come up with these bizarre ways to let

the evolution of Bruce Lee

follow him through his progress.

-What are you doing? -I'm trying to think of

a way to destroy the magnetic sword.

He actually did a couple of really good films,

he did one called Dragon on Fire, which was also known as Dragon the Hero,

which wasn't a Bruceploitation film, it was a period piece.

But then when Dragon Lee steps into it,

he's doing his Bruce Lee thing.

It's almost like you've got this modern

day Bruce Lee that steps into this period film where

everybody's doing this very traditional martial

arts and he's sitting there thumbing his nose.

I was in about 36 films as a lead actor.

If Bruce Lee did not exist,

my life trajectory would have taken an entirely different path.

Action!

I'm not particularly proud of having acted as an imitator.

Because Bruce Lee's martial arts skills were so extraordinary,

and so many people were mourning his death,

the positive aspect of my films was to help appease that longing.

the positive aspect of my films was to help appease that longing. Cut!

Cut!

He's terrific!

Hello!

My name is Bruce Le.

At age 10, in school I started learning karate and boxing.

At that time, we didn't call it Thai boxing.

It was Burmese boxing.

Burmese boxers don't use gloves.

In the 1960s, when I was a kid, Burma expelled the ethnic Chinese.

They killed a lot of Chinese people.

Chinese people fled. Some of them went to the United States.

Some went to Taiwan. Our family went to Macau.

I knew nothing except kung fu, so I opened a martial arts studio and taught students.

Bruce Le is actually a proper kung fu guy, he'd won tournaments in Macau.

Lo Wei started talking to me.

"Hey, any interest in doing movies?� He took action photos of me

and sent them back to Hong Kong.

Soon after, they asked me go to Hong Kong.

And that's how I started.

We'd been filming for ten days and it was really dull.

One day, it was my turn to film a fight scene so I felt pumped.

So then everything was set up.

"OK, camera! Action!"

The director shouted, "Cut! Cut! Cut!" He asked me, "What's the problem?"

I said, "I don't know.�

The person I was fighting moved to hit me, and when I blocked, his bone broke.

The other actor punched my abs.

My stomach was very tight. His hand was too limp.

And so he hurt his hand.

That was my first fight scene, and I treated it as real fighting.

I gradually learned how to act in kung fu films.

The Big Boss II was Bruce Le's introduction to Bruceploitation.

He was still being billed under his real name, but he, in that movie,

plays the character that Bruce Lee played in The Big Boss.

My stage name was Wong Kin-lung back then.

And then somebody realized he kinda looks a bit like Bruce Lee.

And give him a pair of big sunglasses and a bowl haircut

and we can turn him into him.

You looking for me?

You can call me whatever you want, as long as you pay me.

Bruce Le, who is the one I like best because he was a workaholic,

wanted to resemble Bruce Lee as much as possible,

and wanted to mimic his persona as much as possible.

I feel that the spirit is most important.

It's not just imitating him.

That's pointless.

Bruce Lee did forearm workouts.

Bruce Le worked on his forearms, too.

Bruce Lee trained his forearm muscles through Wing Chun training.

In Wing Chun, forearms are crucial for defense.

If your forearms are weak, they will get broken when you use them for defense.

Bruce Le was said to have run two and a half hours every morning

before training six hours a day on average.

At that time, many people contacted me because the aura I exuded was like Bruce Lee's.

A friend of mine told me, "Jean-Marie, we're gonna strike it big with Bruce Le!"

�Are we? All right."

He moved the same way as Bruce Lee, he had the same haircut,

and he jumped the same way.

And this friend Andr� Koob went on:

"I need your help to organize the whole thing and to manage the actors."

After which, we had producer Dick Randall join us in Italy.

He was a great guy.

Dick Randall was like my godfather.

He produced many of my films in Europe.

And we shot sequences at all the great monuments in Rome.

We went and shot in the Colosseum.

Only two people have shot there.

Bruce Lee and me.

After which, we came back to Paris and started to shoot on Paris rooftops.

Though not an international star, he was a bankable B-movie actor

and he knew he was not Bruce Lee.

He also knew that with his method he was going to make money.

Bruce was a dream to work with.

Does Bruce observe a special diet?

Snake blood.

Snake blood. Snake blood.

Snake blood.

Bruce drinks snake blood every week.

The thicker the venom, the better the blood.

It makes his body stronger and gives him the energy he needs for this type of movie.

In his prime, he was sometimes playing in three films at the same time.

In his prime, he was sometimes playing in three films at the same time. He only did one film where he actually played Bruce Lee in it.

He only did one film where he actually played Bruce Lee in it.

It was about Bruce Lee's youth in Hong Kong

before he went to America.

Do you see the meteor in the sky that is shining for your son?

I am an astrologer.

Interesting to note in that film,

the one that plays the antagonist Shih Kien,

who was the bad guy Han in Enter the Dragon.

-You are this famous Bruce. -Yes, I'm Bruce.

Well, today I'm going to teach you a lesson.

That's the only time that he ever did a Bruceploitation film.

Because all these actors that all these small parts

in Bruce Lee's films, their stock shot way up

when Bruce Lee passed away.

Bolo.

Bolo, who is the big bodyguard in Enter the Dragon.

First off, this guy's done more Bruceploitation

films than probably anybody that would ever live.

Unfortunately, at that time, Enter the Dragon, they never fought.

So that's why they put them up after those films.

They would pit him up against these

Bruceploitation actors to sort of convey this

what if Bruce Lee and Bolo had fought on Enter the Dragon?

Sometimes they'll literally put him in the same outfit.

So that would go on the poster, of course.

And you're like, did they film those guys fighting?

Well, maybe it's in that film.

He works a lot and he's a very busy person.

I never really seen him much. I grown up, I've gone to school

and he travels so much.

From my recording for what I know is at least

like 140, 150 films in his career.

Enter Jim Dragon Kelly.

The Jim Kelly films were a mix of Blaxploitation and Bruceploitation.

No, no, you stay here until I get back.

Do those dishes or something.

They're done.

The Black Superman of the martial arts.

Star of the famous Enter the Dragon.

Jim Kelly is as cool as 007. He's James Bond and Bruce Lee

rolled up into one cool package of dynamite.

He was fresh off of ENTER THE DRAGON,

and his physique was similar to Bruce Lee's.

He moved a bit like him.

He sometimes sported a red suit with a stripe,

very reminiscent of the yellow suit.

I like to think of you as my white knight.

Never the white knight, baby.

He even used nunchaku once.

So they mixed a lot of genres together.

Clever producing.

Clever producing. Okay. Class dismissed.

Okay. Class dismissed.

And there were others that we built up. Angela Mao.

Here comes the lethal lady of kung fu.

She's a crack karate queen who really drives men nuts.

For five, six years, she was the biggest female name in martial arts.

She was the female Bruce Lee.

Her pictures made almost as much as Bruce Lee.

Queen of the Deep Thrust.

And then she vanished.

By the late 1980s, everybody's saying, where is Angela Mao?

Hello, everybody.

I am Angela Mao.

Bruce saw a few of my films and said, �Why don't we create a character for you to play?"

After THE BIG BOSS and FIST OF FURY, he was the hottest star in Hong Kong.

To be in his film, even if it was half a day, I'd still be so happy.

But I never thought Bruce Lee would bring me so much fortune.

Stay where you are. We caught you red-handed.

Have a look what's behind you.

I left the industry 30 years ago.

Today, people still remember me because of him.

I'm very thankful to him and to everyone out there.

All right let's do it once in rehearsal, now, try.

Now you give him a kick here.

Hold it! Mr. Chung, that should cover. This act is too dangerous.

During the �70s, the pace was much faster.

There were many independent companies.

Shaw Brothers had their own studio,

whereas independents often shot on real locations.

That's when experience comes in handy.

Without experience, you wouldn't know how to organize everything.

We shot a lot in forests and mountains for the fight scenes.

For indoor house scenes, we'd ask to borrow acquaintances� mansions.

These people, maybe they're not in Hong Kong.

Maybe they're all abroad, leaving someone,

like the gardener, to take care of the place.

So, "We'll shoot here and give you a thousand dollars a day."

"Why not?"

As for street scenes, sometimes we didn't have permission.

We'd do it either really early or really late.

We had to be flexible and alert to avoid getting into trouble.

Making a kung fu film back then,

the actors, the crew, we all became good friends.

We communicated and negotiated everything easily.

I liked that idea, having discussions and meetings,

including actor, choreographer, cinematographer, screenwriter.

On film sets, I helped the cameraman hold the camera.

Gave me a chance to work out my muscles.

When I got to work in Hong Kong and in the Philippines

and Thailand, you saw seven to ten people.

They did everything a 200 man crew did on a big shoot.

A good crew could shoot a complete film in 15 days.

The storylines weren't complicated so there weren't many lines.

A lot of the time we were told to just make up our lines.

A lot of the time we were told to just make up our lines. Leave the casino until later. We'll have the duel first.

Leave the casino until later. We'll have the duel first.

Right. We'll take care of this duel business first,

And then later, the casino.

Sometimes they wrote pages on the set.

"Hey, these are today's lines.�

"Yeah, but what do they mean?"

Audiences, they didn't care about your story,

they cared about the actions.

A good fight choreographer communicates with the director beforehand,

to arrange things on the set like props.

In terms of choreography, basically everyone talked about it while writing the script.

How the fight started, how someone gets captured, how someone wins the battle,

what moves the character uses to win.

The moves in each scene need to be different,

and the moves are designed based on the era and set of the story.

and the moves are designed based on the era and set of the story. Not a bad leg technique.

Not a bad leg technique.

I have a good teacher.

The moves in kung fu films have to be very well-designed.

It needs to be a little complex, jumping from here to there.

One character could do 52 kicks in a single shot,

unlike today, where you can cut, edit, and tweak it so that no one notices it's multiple shots.

Back then, you had to do all the action in one long take.

We'd do 40 moves in one tracking shot.

We would do many takes for each shot.

I even did 100 takes once.

It's not the same now. There are only short shots.

I see, you're begging to be killed.

If you've got a fight scene where you have five foreigners

fighting Ho Chung Tao, then another fight scene,

five foreigners fighting Ho Chung Tao and another one.

So they just try to mix people up and

make them look different.

Let's go.

Everything we did, every move, we did ourselves.

Kicking cars with real glass, jumping into water

without even checking in the water, nothing.

At that time I thought I was Superman.

Until once I jumped from the third floor,

at time we only had boxes and mattress made out of straw.

I jumped right in between, I broke my tendon.

Many people get hurt.

I jumped down from high and broke my leg.

I hurt my back. Many injuries.

One time, during a scene where I had to do a flip on a wooden bench,

I fell, hit my spine, and fractured a vertebrae.

This hand, it got stabbed with a fork.

With an injured hand, I had to continue shooting with a simple dressing.

No choice.

"If we don't do it today, we won't have a chance tomorrow."

No budget.

At that time, I didn't know to fake hit.

I did real kicks with my heel instead of a fake kick with my foot.

I often hurt the other actors.

I would get yelled at by the choreographer.

We were all poor and eager to make money.

Of course, sometimes we told the director,

"Hey, I have to leave at 5 o' clock to shoot this other film,�

or even at 3AM. We had night shoots, as well.

You had days off when you weren't filming.

So if you're a lead actor and you have to act

every single day, then, no, you have no time off.

It was tough. It was not easy.

One time scared the hell out of me.

I was on set mornings and nights.

I didn't sleep for a whole week.

At the end of that week, I didn't even dare to sit down

because if I did, I'd fall right into a deep sleep.

because if I did, I'd fall right into a deep sleep. Hey, you look exhausted, what's wrong with you?

Hey, you look exhausted, what's wrong with you?

Actors need to look alive.

My eyes were so red.

I was exhausted. How could I fight, right?

I was exhausted. How could I fight, right? You're moving too fast.

You're moving too fast.

You've already moved off before the other actors have got near you!

I was so busy then, one film after another.

I had no breaks during those years.

It's okay.

Carry on.

Bruce Lee!

Instead of it just being the Southeast Asia market,

suddenly the Philippines wanted them, suddenly Thailand wanted them.

Suddenly Europe started to want them, suddenly America wanted them.

This big boom came and people were looking for Hong Kong cinema.

I mean, every week back then they would release a film or two

in theaters and a lot of them were Bruceploitation

films because those are the ones that the buyers were

grabbing up because they figured that's what was going to sell.

I look back at it and think about how

easy it was for the pirates to operate.

I had not only discussions at the boardroom

level at Golden Harvest, I had multiple conversations

with leading law firms.

There was very little we could do.

Bruce Lee "Le" or Bruce Lee "Li"

are still not the same as Bruce Lee "Lee."

That actually impacted more on the Lee family and

their ability to exploit the likeness

and the trademark of Bruce Lee.

For Linda, it was both

financially bad and secondly,

it was very emotionally frustrating.

People wanted more. There was no video at the time.

Films like this weren't going to appear on TV for years.

Every neighborhood had a theater and every

theater had kung fu movies.

Dojos just came up all over the place.

A lot of people really started to think of Asian

men as being strong and heroic.

Let the foreigners experience kung fu just to let them see

what kung fu's really like and to teach them that

Chinese are not cowards.

And talented and charismatic and sexy.

But would you really like to take me?

Of course, honeymoon in Hong Kong.

I can't believe it.

Which is not something that Asian men

in the U.S. were thought of.

In Hollywood movies, there were generally very

few kinds of roles for men.

You could play a Japanese soldier and

get killed, or you could play a houseboy.

Inspector Clouseau's residence.

Or maybe pull a rickshaw.

Women had a little bit,

somewhat more interesting parts.

Townsend Harris, first white man to open up the Orient,

and the beautiful geisha was sent to love him and kill him.

Although they were, generally speaking, either

geisha girls, prostitutes or girlfriends of the white guy.

How do I say it? People back then idolized Westerners.

Mainly because overall education was low.

People thought everything from the West was better.

So Bruce Lee came along and all of a sudden, boom, boom.

It was disruptive to the film industry.

So that, of course, engendered

a lot of pride amongst Chinese people.

It wasn't only just Asian Americans who liked it.

There's huge numbers of African Americans

who love kung fu movies.

Maybe because Bruce Lee often played someone

who is fighting against the system.

And then just through his sheer strength of will

and incredible martial arts skills,

he was able to beat the system.

Oh, 42nd Street, the circus.

42nd Street, in those days, was quite a shady area.

In the movie theaters, people would be selling joints

and bags and stuff.

People would smoke right next to you.

They'd drink next to you.

But most of the theaters were young people.

Principally male-dominated, blue-collar audience,

action-oriented audience.

And we were constantly successful with these pictures.

I met Serafim Karalexis there.

Mr. Van Clief.

He's the gentleman that really started

the kung fu phase in America, he and Terry Levene.

They had movie theaters and they showed

three, four kung fu movies per day.

They were both innovators on the kung fu market.

Ron Van Clief was working here in New York

as a martial arts instructor.

He was a remarkable athlete and a remarkable actor.

The death of Bruce Lee came as a surprise to the world .

A Chinese millionaire from San Francisco

was willing to pay $100,000 up-front to find out the truth.

The assignment went to the most feared man in America.

Ron Van Clief, otherwise known as The Black Dragon.

I met Bruce Lee at the All-American Championships

at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

He watched me fight in the eliminations.

And he said that my spirit was so strong,

he named me The Black Dragon.

About eight years later, I met Serafim Karalexis.

And the first film I did for him was called The Black Dragon.

Black Dragon rips into the Hong Kong underworld

a nd takes no bullshit from any of them ,

as he revenges the death of Bruce Lee.

We did some promotion for The Black Dragon,

Black Dragon's Revenge, Super Weapon,

The Way of the Black Dragon, Kung Fu Fever,

which they renamed Black Dragon Fever.

We'd bring him to live shows

at the Lyric Theater and the Selwyn Theater.

Terry had me do exhibitions on a stage

that was really small, narrow.

One of my students fell off the stage into the audience

when we were doing one of the demonstrations.

That guy bothering you?

How can I ever repay you?

I'm sure Ron has some ideas of his own.

This is the part that always gets left out

when everybody talks about the history of the Asian cinema.

There are two markets that actually help

to drive the Chinese cinema.

One being the United States, and the other being France.

It was you that killed Bela.

I hate it when people look into my business.

I had friends in France

in jail.

No inmates dared to give them any trouble.

"Oh, Chinese kung fu! Let's not get too close!"

They'd fight the Black people but wouldn't get close to the Chinese.

They wouldn't dare.

I knew about Bruce Lee because they talked a lot about him on TV

and they'd show his movies at the Ren� Chateau cinema,

The Hollywood Blvd.

What showed the importance of Bruce Lee were all the other Chinese films,

about one-hundred, released in Paris.

Bruce Lee was the best, the most beautiful.

Back then, you had arcade cinemas with half a dozen screens,

with hookers in the hall and the first shoot 'em up video games,

showing three porn films, an American horror film and a Hong Kong film.

That's where they played Bruceploitation.

I knew very soon that the only legitimate Bruce Lee films were

WAY OF THE DRAGON, ENTER THE DRAGON, FIST OF FURY and THE BIG BOSS.

Bruce Lee was so popular that there were many articles about him,

warning readers against the fake Bruce Lee films.

Let�s call a spade a spade: those guys were counterfeiters,

and I had them prohibited.

They tried their best but the judges rejected all their protests

and stuck to the charge of counterfeiting.

I made it impossible for them to use the name "Bruce Lee" in titles.

They were real assholes! Thieves!

Yes, let's use the right words for what they were.

Officially, there were about 80 Bruceploitation films,

but the actual figure must have been closer to 200.

There were 3000 cinemas in Germany, 2800.

These cinemas played them in the smaller halls.

Our Bruce Lee movies had been sold to us as "Bruce Lee" movies.

The tricky part was that we never wrote Bruce "Le" or "Li." We always wrote "Lee."

We exclusively called them L-E-E with titles like

THE TIGER CHASES ALL.

That was my father's idea.

And it went very well.

I would estimate that there exists about 40 Bruce Lee movies

on the German market.

So you are Bruce Lee!

That's not what I said.

Asian people, especially Taiwan people,

They would not believe it.

It's not the real Bruce Lee, oh, forget it, forget it.

The westerns can't tell a Korean from a Japanese

from a Chinese. Most of them can't.

Bruce Lee hadn't had such a fan base that people recognized him.

"Ah, that is Richard Burton."

Or "That is Bruce Lee."

�Bruce Lee" was a synonym for great martial arts fighting.

The audience wasn't critical. They were all satisfied.

At this time, they were rushing to the cinemas.

At this time, they were rushing to the cinemas. I was five when Bruce Lee died.

I was five when Bruce Lee died.

So I was like, he's a Chinese man.

I didn't know at the time he was a real person.

I thought he was a character, almost, because

I'd see other people playing Bruce Lee.

I was twelve years old. I was in San Francisco,

and there was a poster up on the Marcus street cinema,

and it said, the Young Dragon.

It had this Chinese guy, and he was all ripped up

and shredded, and he had the aviator glasses on.

The tagline was Bruce in his first film at age 18.

That's it. It didn't say which Bruce.

So I went in, and within ten minutes

I realized I'd been seriously duped.

I didn't hang around the theater too much

for critical reviews, for obvious reasons.

But putting that aside, I don't recall anybody or any incident

of a serious nature where a customer was dissatisfied.

But we did receive one three-page letter from a moviegoer

who complained about how this was not the real Bruce Lee.

Well, my father sent him a check for 9.90 Deutsche mark.

I forgot to tell you I also distributed the worst film of Bruce Lee,

because if I hadn�t bought it some silly bastard would have.

I called it RETURN OF THE DRAGON but it was in fact a "Green Hornet" montage.

Ren� Chateau presents the first film of Bruce Lee

in the role of Kato, the masked avenger.

When Bruce Lee died, it was a big deal. I was very upset.

And I said, if you could get the TV show,

same people that did Batman, you could cut it up and all your troubles be solved,

because Bruce Lee's the biggest star and he's great.

We took the best episodes and we made it into two movies.

And from that, my dad became a big independent distributor.

I want to just point out, these ads were the thing

that really also brought people in

so much in the advertising, and it was such a big part of it.

Now, you would think this is going to be a sequel to Big Boss 1

but it absolutely has zero to do with any Big Boss.

This is an example of three movies that have the same title.

The title is THE SISTER OF BRUCE LEE but she never mentions anything about any brother.

And her name is not "Lee" either.

And her name is not "Lee" either. This film got released while Bruce Lee was alive.

This film got released while Bruce Lee was alive.

So it's essentially the first Bruceploitation movie.

Bruce, of course, went nuts because films of him helping do

some of the choreography on the set turned into the most

exciting kung fu picture ever directed by Bruce Lee.

This would quickly change to...

The most exciting kung fu picture ever directed.

And then Bruce Lee, of course, is now missing

from the front of it.

"The film that Bruce Lee never finished."

He never started it!

This is a film that really has zero, zero to do with Bruce Lee.

But you get this guy that is basically

Bruce Lee with a Charles Bronson mustache.

"Bruce Lee Has No Rival."

He looks 50!

It's Bronson Lee!

Nothing will stop the rise of Bronson Lee.

Here... it's Bruce Lo.

How did that come about?

When I was doing the trailer,

and in it they had a guy who looked like Bruce Lee,

and his name was Kurata.

So I said, they had Bruce Le, Bruce Li,

do they have Bruce Lo yet? And he said, that's a good idea.

Bruce Lo, that's very good.

Witness Bruce Lo as he takes on a dozen

skilled fighters, bare handed.

I'm told that he didn't even know

that he was called Bruce Lo in the United States.

I'm Japanese.

So, everything, spirit, mind, style,

always in the Japanese style. Yeah.

This is called the Japanese crab technique.

So Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger.

We've got, obviously, this image drawn of Bruce Lee in a coffin.

Now, that was bad enough, but when you get over

to the Death of Bruce Lee poster,

this is an actual photo of Bruce Lee at the bottom here.

In, uh, in his coffin.

And they put it on the poster.

We have a picture, enter something or

whatever it is, and we show the entire

30 minutes of his funeral.

In Hong Kong.

Bruce Lee was buried,

but not before making a deal with the black angel of death.

Now his tormented soul returns as Bruce Lee

Fights Back From the Grave.

Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave, primarily, was a faux

Bruce Lee, a fictional Bruce Lee.

His name might have been Bruce Li, Bruce Lee,

Bruce Flea, for all I know.

We had a director who we hired

to go to a cemetery in

New Jersey, sacrilegiously

open a grave, and have himself come out

of the grave dressed in a Bruce Lee mask.

Special effects, and a few things of that nature,

which cost an awful, awful lot of money.

Around about $35.

He faces every contest.

The fighters, the killers, the mobsters,

the slime of the underworld.

You have kind of like the seven stages of dying.

You have this shock and you have this acceptance and this anger.

And I think there's a certain sense of

that you can follow through with these films.

In the beginning, all the films dealt with his death,

and then you progressed into this stage

where everybody was going, okay, he's dead.

We got to deal with it now.

And that brought up these what if scenarios.

I didn't coin this phrase, but they were like Bruce Lee conjectures.

If we wanted to see Bruce Lee as Indiana Jones.

What if he had lived and he played Indiana Jones?

We stick him in New Guinea, and he fights the snake clan,

and you got Bruce Li in New Guinea.

BRUCE LEE MAKES JAVA IN BORNEO.

That's the French title.

A critic noted,

�There's no Bruce Lee, no java, and no Borneo in this film."

Bruce Li, despite being Bruce Lee clone number one,

could turn out incredible duds.

Playing a sub-Kato, i.e. the character played by Bruce Lee in "Green Hornet,"

he wore an oversized cap, an oversized mask, and after a while dresses as a superhero.

Green Hornet

turns into Superman.

We should also mention BRUCE LEE THE INVINCIBLE,

where Bruce Li fights two gorillas

who are obviously stuntmen in suits.

So Bruceploitation wasn't afraid of going into absurdity.

So Bruceploitation wasn't afraid of going into absurdity. There was a point where the Bruce Lee actors

There was a point where the Bruce Lee actors

actually started to go through their own transition,

trying to change up their own images so they weren't

so stuck in the whole Bruce Lee mold.

Dragon Lee started getting really into comedy,

so he was still doing Bruce, but he was doing this

weird kind of comedy hybrid version of him.

As an actor, you have to have a thousand faces.

Bruce Le, basically, in his morphing, went into very

extravagant sort of James Bond sort of pink kind of filmmaking

career where everything was either topless women.

Or gangsters.

I wanted to change the style of my movies.

An example is the Dick Randall production starring Richard Harrison and I,

CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER.

CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER. He teams up with basically a James Bond

He teams up with basically a James Bond

character in the story, this white guy.

And they both go on this mission to try to

stop this drug that's been stolen that can actually

disseminate every male on the planet,

make everybody infertile.

Great storyline.

If you look at the poster,

it says, starring Bruce Le.

Then it says, and Jack Klugman and Jane Seymour.

And you're like, what? And what they did was they were filming

this movie and they went to a party where Jack Klugman and

Jane Seymour at this party, and they just filmed Bruce Lee

walking up to him and shaking their hand.

You can't even hear what they're saying.

And he walks into Jane Seymour and just

stands next to her for a minute and then walks off.

And now they're starring in the movie.

And it was just classic.

I don't know if you know the film Pieces. He's in it.

He makes one little appearance where he shows up,

has a karate fight in a walkway.

I didn't even know what I was doing. I really didn't know.

Hey, it's my kung fu professor. What's the story, Chow?

Oh, I am out jogging, and next thing I know, I am on ground.

Something I eat. Bad chop suey. So long.

They really left no stone unturned.

Hey, that looks like, you know, Bruce Lee. I heard they brought him in.

The clones of Bruce Lee,

which is so self reflexive of the genre itself. Bruce Lee dies.

Nothing, doctor. His heart has stopped beating.

This evil doctor comes up with an idea to clone him

and turn him into different Bruce Lees and then ultimately

take over the world, which sounds sort of like

the Bruceploitation genre in itself, right?

At that time there was talk of cloning.

Dick Randall said that he wanted to shoot THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE.

Pretty good!

The producer had quite an imagination.

"Why don't we make three Bruce Lees together? May be sellable.�

So that film had Dragon Lee and Bruce Le and it had another Bruce Thai.

Bruce Thai was a newcomer who knew nothing about making a film,

who we asked to come over and shoot.

It was easy. I was patient with him.

Dragon Lee was in Korea and was often busy.

He came for 15 days so we shot some of his scenes first and let him leave. That's it.

I didn't really see the other two actors that much.

I filmed one-third of the movie.

Another actor was in a different third.

Yet another actor in another third.

A portion of that film was brought to South Korea

and I filled in the missing parts.

That is how the film was made.

They each go on an adventure for the government.

And at the very end of the film, the clones come

together and they say, to hell with this. Let's fight the doctor.

Get him.

Are you sure it's Bruce Lee? Doesn't look like him.

In one of my kung fu walkabouts, I discovered

the most incredible,

the worst and the craziest one I've ever seen.

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN.

When a person dies, their face and their body undergo a change.

Bruce Lee dies and in Heaven he meets and sometimes fights with

Laurel and Hardy,

Popeye,

Clint Eastwood,

Emmanuelle,

Emmanuelle, I love it.

I love it.

What do you take me for?

Don't think you can trick me, baby.

Dracula,

Listen, Dracula, your zombies can't help you.

James Bond.

The fight sequences are actually decent.

In the background, guys are disguised as mummies,

moving their arms in all directions while the lead characters fight in the foreground.

moving their arms in all directions while the lead characters fight in the foreground. It's a crazy fun film to watch.

It's a crazy fun film to watch.

Sheer madness!

When a man's endowed like Bruce, the girls are bound to want him.

He's gotta have his fun, eh, Brucey?

That's enough.

Bruce Lee is played by Bruce Liang,

one of the many clones of the era.

In my childhood, when I was ten, we were very, very poor.

I grew up with my grandma.

We got bullied a lot.

Since then, I promised to protect my grandmother.

I needed something to practice with,

and I found the rice storage at home.

My grandmother discovered the rice had turned to dust

because I was hitting it so much.

I got a bulletproof body from all the beatings,

even before I could learn to protect her!

That's how I started.

Bruce Liang did The Dragon Lives Again.

He did a film called Little Godfather in Hong Kong

where he basically plays Bruce Lee making Way of the Dragon when he was in Rome.

Not a move.

In my opinion, what Bruce Lee did in movies,

if you take that into real life, you can't really do that in real life.

All those fancy moves.

If you don't protect your space in a fight,

you'd be at a real disadvantage.

You're a pretty clever guy.

Bruce Lee had his own style,

so Bruce Liang and I tried to have different styles.

Where we hit, ran and jumped, we hit, ran, fought and jumped,

and we would do it all in one continuous take.

When we went to Rome,

it was difficult to get filming permission,

so the cameraman would hide the camera in a bag.

When we got the cue,

we would do the fight, then run away from the location.

Back then, because I fought so many people so much,

I became something of a legend.

"If I can beat up these four guys, I'll get paid $100.�

So I fought and fought to a point where I was fighting against 15 people.

That got me several hundred dollars.

It used to be so hard to make a few bucks.

Now that we could make more,

we all wanted our families to prosper.

Can't be too picky!

You'd like a fight, huh?

An Indian producer approached me.

He asked me if I knew how much money I was worth.

I said an amount.

He told me, based upon his company's estimate,

I was worth about ten times more.

Some film companies even shot one movie and split it into two.

For example, I would act in one film,

then some sequences would be cut

and used in a different movie.

But they never asked for approval.

There was no time to finish so many projects.

They'd take old films and edit them together.

They made a lot of money. And I received very little.

It's not about the money.

It's more about whether I feel comfortable or not.

I'm a very honest person.

I'm a very honest person. I gave you 200 a day. Now I give you three.

I gave you 200 a day. Now I give you three.

-Five. I'm begging you. -All right.

Now, through the miracle of motion pictures,

we bring you the story and the film

that superstar Bruce Lee wanted you to see.

There were attempts to advertise the game of

death that whatever it is,

the Return of the Dragon, Part Five has the secret,

unseen footage. Well, that's very easy

to stop those claims, or at least to make legal

threats that would make the distributors think

twice before they would actually go forward with it.

But there was a lot of mystery about

what was the actual footage.

Well, the truth was we knew that it couldn't

be pirated because the negative was being

held in a vault at our own laboratory.

What they did do, though, was take some of the frames

that we had released back before Bruce died,

very famous shots of him with Kareem Jabbar

and try and inject them into their films.

This image of Bruce Lee

in his tracksuit with the nunchaku, particularly,

was so prevalent in people's brains years and years

before Game of Death even came out.

It was all about you wanting to go

and hopefully this was maybe the movie

that Bruce Lee actually was in.

At the time of his death,

Bruce Lee was working on this film project.

Soon it will be at this theater, a living memorial to this

great fighter and kung fu superstar.

Pleasure to meet Mr. Lee's killer.

-Well chosen. -Thank you.

It was sold as "The Unfinished Film of Bruce Lee,"

and fans, particularly in France,

were tremendously disappointed when they saw the film.

Bruce Li's wig was, again, a two-bit wig,

his yellow suit was oversized,

and his fights were video game fights, with elastic-fisted opponents,

one of whom, with a turban, kept bouncing on his butt.

You'd think it was made for laughs

if you didn't know it was meant to be serious.

After this undeniable turkey, released in 1977, one year later we got

ENTER THE GAME OF DEATH, with Bruce Le,

a blatant pastiche of GAME OF DEATH.

I knew that GAME OF DEATH was unfinished,

so I suggested to my boss that we shoot ENTER THE GAME OF DEATH,

in which my character fought as he climbed the tower.

He had to fight all the way up so you have to have some variety.

I found someone with a lot of snakes.

He was a demon of snakes.

The guy had not made a film. He was a prop guy,

but he was willing to play any role.

You couldn't find a film professional because of the snakes everywhere.

We found some very special people.

With the greatest cast ever assembled in one motion picture.

The Shaolin Magician, Poison Fingers, The Incredible Ape.

And last but not least, Abdul the Giant.

1978 saw DYNAMO with Bruce Li

sporting the yellow suit from GAME OF DEATH.

And in 1978, we got the "official" GAME OF DEATH,

with the real footage of Bruce Lee.

A giant in his time, a legend in his death.

He lives again.

And fights for his life.

in the Game of Death. Four years in the making.

Initially, it was not our intention to finish the film.

It was not until a good

two years after he passed away

that the serious conversations started at

Golden Harvest about, is it possible to finish the movie?

We had shot 30 minutes of usable footage that ultimately

was cut down to be about 15 minutes in the film.

It was probably the worst Bruceploitation movie of all time.

It promises so much.

It's got that fantastic opening

sequence that you're expecting.

This is the bombastic music comes in, it's all there,

and then suddenly it's got footage of Bruce Lee's funeral.

I can say definitively that Golden Harvest refrained

from making any knockoff movies, with the exception of Game of Death,

where I did use doubles for Bruce Lee.

It is better to die a broken piece of jade

than to live a life of clay.

Even though it's being done in the guise of a Bruce Lee film,

it uses all the same tricks that all the Bruceploitation films

use to make you think, am I seeing Bruce Lee right now?

There's a cardboard cut out of Bruce Lee stuck on a mirror.

The double sits down in front of a mirror, and they literally

just take a cardboard pasting of Bruce Lee's face,

like a photograph, and stick it on the front of the mirror.

And he's just behind it, and you're like, what?

Here we go. Everybody settle down.

In the story, he's reenacting a scene from Fists of Fury where

he runs at the camera and this kick and these guards are

all sitting below the camera, and they shoot him.

In Game of Death, they have it where a gangster

is placed in these extras

and really shoots him in the face.

The idea there was that his face got

a little bit changed from the bullet hitting in the face,

so he was always wearing disguises, beards and glasses.

And so that's kind of how they worked it off.

Commercially it was a phenomenal success.

With the true Bruce Lee

fans and aficionados,

I think I would say mixed.

And there were some people that were convinced

we still had another hour of footage that we were

holding back for part two and part three.

There are no secret five minutes of footage

that I have stashed for my old age retirement pension.

For the action scenes that had to be done without

Bruce, we used a young,

in those days, aspiring action director

by the name of Sammo Hong, because Sammo had been involved

with Bruce on the Enter the Dragon with me

and worked as a stuntman on the other movies.

There's one person that's great at imitating Bruce Lee that no one mentions:

Sammo Hung

in the movie ENTER THE FAT DRAGON. I wrote the script.

Even though he's chubby, he's able to capture the essence.

He's got the moves down, as well.

And for my money, Sammo was one of the smartest

martial arts choreographers.

He went on to become a very successful

director in his own right.

Imitating Bruce Lee is good if your starting point is good.

That's a good thing.

Do I look like him?

In the movie, I'm not him.

My role was a country boy.

His role model was Bruce Lee.

He liked to imitate him.

It's not like I was Bruce Lee.

Does the star really look like Bruce Lee?

Yes, he does.

More than you, for sure.

There's a great sequence where

Sammo gets hired to be an extra

on a Bruceploitation movie and has a fight with the actor because

he feels you're not worthy of Bruce Lee's spirit.

Cut, cut, cut, cut. Why didn't you move?

He doesn't look like Bruce Lee.

What do you mean?

I can tell you this,

that Bruce Lee is my hero. You're not in the same league.

The funny thing about the Fat Dragon is it's very easy to go

oh, this movie is just a piss-take,

but it's actually a very respectful piss-take.

It's a fine Bruceploitation piece, without an ounce of vulgarity;

highly watchable, funny, with good fights, well-directed.

The most important thing when shooting a movie

is to look at the personality

and to capture that personality.

It's action-comedy.

Every five years, a trend dies.

So Bruce Lee's action cinema transformed into something more humorous,

with more comedy elements.

THE NEW FIST OF FURY with Jackie Chan, he didn't want to do it.

THE NEW FIST OF FURY with Jackie Chan, he didn't want to do it. -What do you want? -From what I've seen of you,

-What do you want? -From what I've seen of you,

-I reckon you'd fit. -No thanks.

And he doesn't really look like Bruce Lee, except for the claw marks on his face,

probably imposed by the producers.

New Fist of Fury and Fist of Fury Two,

which was Bruce Li, were kind of competing sequels to fist

of Fury because they were being done about the same time.

But...

Mine did better.

Yuen Woo-Ping and I were having a meal together.

He told me that he was going to make SNAKE IN THE EAGLE'S SHADOW.

Hey...

I called it.

Big, big hit.

Ng called me into his office. He says, there's this other

film I would like you to do.

Play a bad guy in the film. It's a new guy called Jackie Chan.

He's done a few films in Hong Kong.

The preacher.

I'm not any sort of priest. I come from Russia.

But we're going to try something different.

But Jackie always said the way he became famous later

was by doing everything that Bruce Lee didn't do.

I'm gonna get my ass kicked for the whole movie and then win

at the end. And that's what Bruce Lee never would do.

And if you give me a chance, I will be the best comedy

action martial arts star in the world.

Nobody was interested in

comedy action kung fu.

He went off and he made two movies away from Golden Harvest,

the Drunken Master movies that convinced us

we didn't understand how to use Jackie.

God Chang, the drunk God with the double kick.

So in the finest traditions of the movie industry everywhere,

Golden Harvest turned around and said, we always knew that would be a success.

We love you. We want to make a deal with you.

As we say, the rest is history.

Jackie Chan, at this point, was starting

to come up and people were taking notice of Jackie Chan.

What if Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan had done a movie?

Well, you got Golden Dragon and Silver Snake,

or you have Bruce and Jackie to the rescue.

Dragon Lee is the Golden Dragon. Johnnie Chan is...

The Silver Snake.

At some point, it's going to come to a place

where everybody's sort of processed what happened.

Game of Death finally come out. Now you guys let him be.

Many believe Bruce Lee is still alive.

A recluse preparing to return in 1983,

ten years from the day of his disappearance.

So here is the, what we call Clearwater Bay studio nowadays,

not easy to find this kind of studio. No more.

No more studios.

No more Golden Harvest. So much closed, yeah.

Most of production gone to China.

Before, we shot the 400 films.

Now only 30 films a year.

Even though the advertising or commercial films still,

they also move their base back to China

to shoot there because Hong Kong is too expensive.

It's a That's a history of

Hong Kong film industry, a downfall of the Golden Empire.

We're at Zhong Ying Film Studio, Taiwan's biggest production studio back in the day.

Passing the main gate, here are some recording studios.

Back then, most of the kung fu movies came from Central Film

because there are three blocks of studio spaces here.

More than ten crews could shoot at the same time.

There were always at least 5-6 crews shooting

during the peak of martial arts films in Taiwan,

when roughly 300 films were produced annually.

We used to joke that spent more time at Central Film than we would at home.

Not many streets are left. Most are in ruins at this point.

Now the best they can do is tear these down and build new sets.

If anything is still usable, it would only be to shoot a horror movie.

Or an abandoned town scene.

Director Huang Shing Lei said to me, he said one thing:

"If you didn't look like Bruce Lee, you would have probably become more famous!

Because you are always in his shadow,

you don't get to show you."

We never had a big budget.

You can tell from my movies. There's nothing fancy or fake. It�s all real.

We didn't have a choice, you know.

That made things very hard.

I always wanted more opportunities to make really great movies, but where were they?

Anyway, after I returned to China I got that chance.

They offered me a million dollars. I took it.

I really wanted to make one movie to praise and represent Jeet Kune Do properly.

But then my family crisis hit and I left.

My wife passed.

I had four kids.

Those few years were like a blank sheet of paper.

Even the way I raised the kids was like a blackout to me.

It was all a blur.

I just wished to be myself again.

Back then, I was a single young man.

After I got married, it was a difficult time

to consistently support the family.

It wasn't easy to earn a living.

When I look back at that time,

I certainly failed as a family man.

To this day, I have followed the path of righteousness, Jeongdo,

the right path as a martial artist.

I go up into the mountains and practice Jeet Kune Do and board-breaking.

Extensively.

I regret not being there for my wife.

I try to make up for it as best as I can moving forward.

As soon as I stopped working out and training,

all the injuries flared up, one after another.

So then I started studying osteopathic medicine.

Little by little,

I gained back my purpose in life.

I'm grateful that my children have grown up and are living stable lives now.

I never charge for teaching kung fu.

It's a great skill. I wouldn't want it to die out.

Shooting kung fu films was chaotic and messy, but mine were surprisingly successful.

Ever since then, I was only asked to make kung fu films.

But it was also a personal preference

because I don't feel strongly about comedies, musicals or love stories.

It was a golden time for filmmaking.

The vibe on the set was so exciting.

It's just not like that any more.

Action movies nowadays do not do real Chinese martial arts justice.

The true essence has been neglected.

You gotta have that spirit.

We just have a few moves.

But those few moves have to be so fierce and powerful.

Right when you get ready to throw the punch,

your opponent already knows they're doomed.

You're done for.

For us, we really did everything. Whatever you wanted, we were able to do.

You want fights? Flying? Anything. We could do it all.

When we hit something, BANG! We would still laugh even if we bled.

"Ha ha ha, I'm bleeding!"

This is real.

Life is short.

You don't get to accomplish much in a lifetime.

You can be a student, a kid.

Then you get married, become a dad.

But in movies you can live in the old times,

you can live in modern day, in the future!

Anything is possible!

You can be the strong one, or you can be bullied.

Such fun!