Bruce Lee's 'Fist of Fury': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two senses of Sintilla scintilla whatever. I'm Alex Sago and I'm Jordan frun talk. That's a good one. You're really you're really pulling these out. I was worried. Yeah, I got a second win. I'm just I'm a second win. I'm just I'm pounding the damn boards up here uncovered in flop sweat, Jordan. Today we're going to be talking about the one and only Bigger than life legend, Bruce. You're gonna have to do so many beeps in this because I just get so excited talking about Bruce Lee. As I think you have mentioned more than I have on the course of this show. I was a martial arts store as a kid. I was bitten by the bug with my first episode of Power Rangers and was quickly enrolled in the local taekwondo studio and from there spent probably three to five years just spending my weekly family movie night slot on martial arts movies made. My family just watched Jean Claude, Van Damn, Jackie Chan especially. I love Jackie so much and Bruce Lee. Jackie Chan, I think is on a shortlist of the greatest living entertainers in the world. I have a real love for some of the j c v D stuff that's just clownish and ridiculous but still sweet. And you know, Bruce Man like a warrior poet, just the closest thing we had to like a He's like if Michelangelo could kill you with your bare hands, just like a tremendously intelligent Polly math who happened to be one of the greatest living martial artists. We won't be talking about Steven Seagal, though all of you should do a quick Google of his blues guitar because it's very funny. Uh Jordan, we learned in the League of their Own episode that you are a baseball guy in your youth. But tell me, did you have a martial arts moment as a we un Not really. I probably the most heteronormative thing that I've ever done was get into Power Rangers for a few months. And this was a very brief period, but it was during Halloween, so somewhere out there there are photos of me dressed as the Red Ranger. But then, just as quickly as this fixation came, I kind of got over it. And that's kind of all, My god, I can't really bluff this one. I don't really have any background in the martial arts or know anything about the movies associated with it, but I am really interested in Bruce Lee just as a historical figure. I mean, for me, he's like Muhammad Ali, just so endlessly fascinating, even if I know very little about the finer points of their sport. I mean, just you said warrior poet. His quotes alone are just so intriguing. You know, I I fear not the man who was practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who's practiced one kick ten thousand times. And you know, of course there's the great iconoclastic credo. I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you're not in this world to live up of mine. I mean, the man it was a quote machine, and just he's so much more than a fighter. You're absolutely right, and we'll touch on this in the episode. But there was this time in his life when he was recovering from a back injury, and he wrote a philosophy book basically it was published after his death, and he just to hear his thoughts on things. It's so fascinating. There's this amazing ESPN thirty for thirty documentary that came out in called b Water, which takes its title from his famous um you know, philosophy about how to fight basically basically, I mean not even just fighting, how to just live really world. Yeah, I gotta go with the flow. Uh. And there's also Twelves I Am Bruce Lee, which features Ed O'Neill of Married with Children fame. I was shocked to discover that Ed Bundy actually has a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. I have a question for you, just one have a black belt or ease one a black belt? I never understood. Much like Schrodinger's cat, it's both at the same time, live in a constant date of super imposition between having and being go on, Yes, um as befits my sort of ghoulish tendencies, which I really haven't displayed very much on this show, but I'm sure they'll come out. You're coming out dribs and drabs. Aside from Bruce Lee is incredibly graceful athleticism. I'm also drawn to him due to the murky circumstances of his death, with all the rumors of him being killed by you know, the Triad Gang and all all sorts of other theories. So that's interesting to me too. I know, we'll probably get into that in this episode two oh we will. Ever. Lee's second film, Fist of Fury, fifty years old this year, and I mean, obviously End of the Dragon is the bigger one in the popular consciousness, but this film is really interesting as a way point in his career for reasons we'll get into later. And you know, I couldn't wait until talk about Bruce, so from his apparent insistence on fighting any one, anywhere, at any time, at the drop of a hat, to the fact that this movie made Chairman Mao cry, to the fact that it was dubbed into an Australian indigenous dialect just this last year. Here's everything that you didn't know about Fist of Fury. Firstly, he was born the son of Grace ho and leehoy Chewin, a Kenedy's opera star based in Hong Kong, although Bruce was born in San Francisco while his parents were visiting the city for a concert tour by his dad. Fun fact, the family's youngest son, Robert Lee, would follow in his dad's footsteps, making a living with his voice, not his fists. He got famous in Hong konger in the nineteen sixties as the lead singer and founder of a band, the Thunderbirds. Um So. Between his dad's celebrity and the fact that Grace's family were one of the wealthiest and most powerful clans in Hong Kong at the time, Bruce had a relatively calm rible childhood growing up, notwithstanding the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, which we will also get to later. He was born in ninety, which according to the Chinese zodiac is the year of the Dragon, and he was also born in the hour of the Dragon, which is according to my research, between seven and nine in the morning, which I know is two hours. And this is scene is extremely good luck to be born in both the year and the hour of the dragon, and people who are so blessed are supposed to be able to overcome any obstacle, which uh prous demonstrated again and again on film. He was nicknamed the Little Dragon as a boy. Yeah, there's a pretty good biopic of him from called Dragon. The Bruce Lee Story, which was written and directed by Rob Cohen, who is the auteur behind Fast and the Furious and Triple X, is a really fascinating aspect of his early life. For the first two years of Bruce's life, his parents had dressed him and passed him off as a girl to protect him from this Chinese superstition that demon's target the firstborn son in any family. But that is interesting because her first child was a boy who was still born, which I guess she attributed to these spirits, so hence why she wanted to protect Bruce. So I mean, in a way, that horrible prophecy came true. So in the movie, Cohen literalizes this with a recurring dream sequence in uh which Bruce fights a giant samurai demon that he eventually chokes to death with a pair of nunchucks. It rules, and I cannot stress that enough. So anyway, when Cohen met Bruce's widow, Linda Lee Cadwell after he had given her the screenplay, she asks him how did you know about Bruce's demon. It's a weird thing to ask. Um. Those two had such a pure relationship. They were married in secret in August of nineteen sixty four because this horrifying hell hole of a country still had anti missgenation laws on the books. And her dad was a very strict Southern Baptist, I believe, and uh, I guess it was very against their union. But he eventually came around because he's Bruce Lee. Your son in law is Bruce Leech. Uh. So, Cohen explains to this is just a thing I did for the movie. This is a dramatic device, and she tells him this is the demon. Yeah, the giant Samurai demon played by Spennell Thorson. And so she's like, oh, well, Bruce told me the first time he collapsed, ten weeks before his actual death, he felt like he was being stalked by a demon that was trying to pull him away. Ah, so that is spooky. Yes, we should probably touch a little more on his actual death because it's shrouded in so much mystery. I mean, it's just so strange to me that this incredibly physically fit person died at age what thirty two cerebral edema. Yes, and I mean there's a whole bunch of theories as to why this happened. I mean, there's one that says that he just had an allergic reaction to basically like an asp something some medication run of the mill, over the counter medication. Another said that it might have been something to do with heat exhaustion, because I guess the first time he collapsed, he was in a small room on a really hot day doing voiceovers and he turned the A C off so that it wouldn't affect the sound quality from his recording, which coincidentally is exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm terrified. And so there's theories that heat stroke had something to do with his death, but there are also all these theories that his death was something a little more sinister. We mentioned the theories about gang killings at the top of the episode. Uh Bruce supposedly made a lot of enemies during his life by teaching kung fu to Westerners, and traditionally it was supposed to be only taught to the Chinese. And so there's this theory that he was killed sort of revenge for betraying the secrets of this martial art. Yeah, there's a there's this other bit of oral legend lore, if you want to call it that, about this technique called the dim mock or the death touch, which is also in Blood Sport and Kill Bill part two. You know, when she kills David Carry at the end, the five point palm heart exploding technique. The dip mock is this legend martial arts legend where if you hit people in a certain order at these pressure points on their body, they will walk away fine, but within a certain amount of time they will die spontaneously and then kill Bill. It's five steps. And the theory, supposed theory behind the Bruce Lee thing is that at one point somebody did this to him unbeknownst to him. In real life, they can sometimes be days and weeks later, right it really I don't know if this is actual thing? Is the legend? I it's cool. Um. So, Bruce's early martial arts training feeds into what he would call jee kundo, which translates roughly to the way of intercepting fist, which rules. Yeah, it's a um it's less of a system than an approach. Is basically like, hey, you know, if you're a fighter, or your martial artist, or really if you're any kind of artist, you should not feel constrained by borders. You should take whatever elements of any other system that you like and incorporated into your own thing. And this has been thought of as basically a precursor of modern mm A, just combining striking and grappling and all of these disparate forums into one system. And it's interesting that he basically got that because as a kid, as this child actor, he was trained in all kinds of stuff. He was trained in wing chung under the founder of the modern system of that style, guy named Eman uh Tai Chi boxing. You know, he was a dancer, and he also was just constantly getting in street fights in Hong Kong, fighting with other martial artists, other students, American sailors, and he whipped so much ass that he was not doing well in school, and his family was basically like I think that The two stories that I've heard is that he really injured a kid, and the other one was that he may have beat up somebody who was tied to the triads, which are the organized crime in Hong Kong, and he was not doing well in school and he had a dual citizenship because he was born in San Francisco and his family were like, we are getting you out of the country. He apparently had this fighter's instinct in him from a young age. I read that he pulled a knife on a gym teacher in school, who among us yes, um. But the secondary aim of his relocation to the United States in nineteen fifty nine was to claim his US citizenship that he was entitled to because he was born in San Francisco. And I guess you have to get that all wrapped up and get all the PaperWorks admitted before you're eighteen in order to do that. It's interesting that the name that he went by as a boy was le jiuon Fan, which translates roughly to to return and prosper, and some say that his mother hoped for him to return to the U s and become successful. Uh. One of my favorite facts about Bruce Lee is that his early job in the United States was as a ballroom dance instructor. Hell yeah, yeah, I guess. He traded martial arts lessons for dance lessons when he was living in Hong Kong, and even one the Crown Colony Chacha championship, and I guess there's like pictures of him in like a button down shirt and a boat tile like a pompadour holding this like you know, trophy. It's so great. And if you visit the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, you'll find among these feature possessions a notebook containing over a hundred cha steps. So great. Um, but Bruce's relationship to the United States is so fascinating to me. Did you know he was apparently circumcised at age twenty two to seem more American? I sure didn't. This is her of the book Bruce Lee Alife by Matthew Polly. I guess when his brother, Robert, the aforementioned singer, asked Bruce, Hey, why what did you do that? Bruce applied, It's what they do in America. I'm American. I want to look the part. Good Lord really went for it. Yeah. So we mentioned Bruce was a hoofer, a real Broadway Danny Rose kind of guy. And this was largely because of his dad. And he was a child. He was like Jackie Coogan. He was a child start in Hong Kong. His first role as a literal baby carried on stage in the film Golden Gate Girl, his first leading role alongside his dad nine years later in the movie called The Kid. That's how He's eighteen. He'd been twenty films. This media training, I guess you'd call it, really gave him that sense of poise and presence that he is just so central to his iconography. You know, just I remember seeing an interview where he was talking about Steve McQueen and he talks about, you know, Steve McQueen had that thing where you just walk into room and turn it on and it was just like light would bend around him. And you know, Bruce has that in the movies, man, like he just they just do all those snap zooms to him on, like when he walks in the door of the dojo or whatever, and it's just like, Yep, this man is about to destroy the entire room with his presence alone. Um. Yeah, great. Another fact about Bruce Lee that just absolutely blows my mind. I mean, he was one of the most athletic, physically perfect human beings of all time, right, um, not good enough for the United States Military. Failed his draft physical. The Army classified him four F due to some combination. I've seen a bunch of reasons sided of an undecended testicle, poor eyesight, a sinus disorder, and one leg being longer than the other, presumably his kicking leg. That's my strong leg. I mean, I mean to which I say, the Army's loss. He yeah, right. In six months, I learned way more about Bruce Lee's junk in this episode than I thought I was going to be. Oh, yeah, there you go. I'm glad I could teach you something. You were the Bruce Lee expert. I'm really glad I was able to teach you this. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. So in ninety sixty four, Lead lived in Washington State before settling in Oakland. Is a tremendous tide to Oakland and San Francisco. At a long running martial arts school in Oakland, one of the big defining moments of his life occurs Ed Parker, who is the founder of the American Kento Karate system and yes must be said. Elvis Presley's karate teacher invites him to something called the Long Beach Karate Championships International Karate Championships, and it is at this event that some of the modern building blocks of his myth are seen in the public two finger push ups and the famous one inch punch. The former is self explanatory, but the latter is crazy. You know you have seen this on screen in Kill Bill Park two. This is the move that Beatrice uma Thurman's character learns from Pie that she uses to pound her way out of the coffin that she's buried into. That awesome Nio Morricone score. You basically extend your fingertips and put your middle finger longest finger at whatever you're trying to hit, and then, with out retracting your arm for the punch, you push forward to throw a punch. It looks like the doctor Strange thing where he ast really punches the guy's soul out of his body. When does this, I don't think the one is filmed, but nineteen sixty seven it is, and he does this, and it just the guy is supernatural. Yeah, he's just like said, sprawling backwards. I read he flew back sixteen ft is the figure that I read, and it's just I mean, the thing that's amazing about this is that his arm is not drawn back forward an inch an inch and a half maybe two at most, there's no there's no wind up, it's just pure muscular force. That seven footage is incredible. It's some of the only footage that you can see of him sparring in a non choreographed setting. First of all, he does a thing where he's blindfolded and fighting a guy which is just doing the win chung. How what does one do that? I don't understand? Win chung is actually really interesting. It was invented they think it was invented for women as a form of self defense, and so consequently, a lot of it is not really based on like these big demonstrative kicks or froze. It's all very close quarters and they do this. There's a system or practice in there called sticky hands, where you're keeping your wrists and hands in contact with the person that you're sparring with, and you're supposed to be able to counter and attack and anticipate all of their moves with just that physical contact. But there's a point which he's doing this with this guy where all of a sudden he just sweeps this dude's leg. It's just like, how did you have the kind aesthetic awareness to do that? Then then when he's sparring this other guy. It literally looks like the other man is running at half speed, like he is just so ungodly fast. There's another part where he's standing like three ft away from a guy and throws up front hand like back fist, and the dude goes to parry it like a full half second too late, and just bursts out laughing like, well, that dude's in another universe for me anyway. So in the audience at this nineteen sixty four or event is a guy by the name of J. C. Bring, who at the time was a very famous celebrity hairstylist, probably most famous for his relationship with Sharon Tate, whom he was dating at the time. They remained friends even after they broke up, and he would be murdered while trying to defend Sharon by the Manson family in nineteen sixty nine. But Jay was something of a martial arts officionado, and very early martial arts officionado, i should think, and he was incredibly taken with Bruce Lee and actually started to work with him, and he obtained a demonstration tape that Bruce had made, and he was so impressed with this that he gave it to his friend, a TV producer named William Dozer, and so Dozer, I think, gets lead to audition for a pilot that is filmed but not picked up. But he also happens to narrate the Green Hornet TV series, and so Lee has cast his Cato for all twenty six episodes of that shows paltry in season run, and that breaks him to US audiences. But it doesn't only break him to US audiences. It essentially breaks authentic Chinese martial arts to Western audiences. This is in sixty four, so you think about the whole history of westerns and it's just this ungodly clumsy lumbering around like toddlers, throwing these big haymakers and wrestling around in the mud. And producers wanted to lead to fight like that in the show, and he wisely was like, no, I will not. So this is the first exposure American audiences it really had to this style of fighting. And my favorite thing about this is that he was moving too fast for the cameras when he first started doing this, and they were like, they were like you, you gotta slow it down, man, and so he did. He had to run all of his stuff slower than than he actually could, so that it wouldn't just be filmed as an unrecognizable blur is just amazing to me. They also appear on episodes of Batman, which is great. Um, there's a Batman across over yep. And so based on this kind of stuff, a couple of bit parts, he's an iron sides that a detective in a wheelchair show. He's got different stuff popping up here and there. And he's also teaching. Two of his students are just writer Sterling Silliphant and the actors James Coburn and Steve McQueen. And so he's getting his big part and crucially to this next part we're gonna talk about. In nineteen he's credited as the Karate advisor in The Wrecking Group, which is the fourth installment of a comedy sci fi film starring Dean Martin, which also went on to influence the Austin Power series. But yeah, Bruce Lee was tight with a lot of a listers. Um. Speaking of Dino on the rat Pack, Bruce supposedly once kicked the door off its hinges to impress Frank Sinatra. Hell, yes, I love it. This is the rumor that went around Hollywood. It's I'm not totally sure if it's true, but the story went around and made him extremely popular. He turned McQueen onto various martial arts. McQueen turned him onto marijuana, which morphed into a chewable Nepalese hash which he'd be surely fond of. I guess traces of that were found in his stomach at his autopsy, and for a while the authorities were like, maybe that killed him. Yeah, that's not how that works. Um. After Bruce's death, Paul bearers at his funeral included McQueen, who wore a denim jacket over his planet looking Maybe he looks like he's doing a Levi's ad with Bruce Lee's coffin on his shoulder. The pictures from it are insane. Other very famous Paul bears at Bruce Lee's funeral include James Cockburn and the one time James Bond George Lazenby, who was in nine nine on Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's so cute that they had a relationship. Um, this is now getting into once upon a time in Hollywood territory, which I'm gonna try not to get too furious at but it's a big digression and I think it's just crazy. So it's just fun to talk about. Roman Plansky and Sharon Tate both studied with Lee. I think Lee was making something like a thousand dollars an hour to teach Roman Plansky martial arts, and Roman would fly him to Switzerland to train, and Tate studies with him in preparation for her role in The Wrecking Crew, which is the movie she goes to see herself in in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. So, after she gets murdered by the Manson family, Plansky initially suspected that Lee did it a because he was the most dangerous person that plans can do at the time, and be because they found a pair of glasses at the scene of the murder, and during a lesson with him months later, Bruce offhandedly mentions that he lost his glasses. So Roman Plansky conducts his ham handed p iesque scheme. He goes, oh, Bruce, um, why don't I get to my optician and we'll get you fitted for some new ones. He thinks, craftily and stroking his and so he goes to the They go to the optician and Bruce reads off his prescription to um the guy and plans foiled again. I don't know, because it didn't match they did. It didn't match the prescription found at the crimes. And unsurprisingly, you have quite a bit to say about these classes. Yeah, I one of my obsessions. You know. There's the Titanic, there's the Beatles. Uh, there's James Bond, and there's also the Manson murder. Uh. And so please shut me up. I start ramming a little too much, but yeah, Roman kind of understandably drove himself insane in the wake of Sharon's death, and he did a great deal of this amateur sleuthing. He'd had an affair with Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who at that time was still married to John Phillips, also of the Mamas and the Papas, and so Roman thought for a long time that John Phillips was behind Sharon's murder, sort as revenge for this affair because it had been found out. So one day he sneaks into John Phillips's garage and dusts his Rolls Royce with some solution that he'd obtained from the cops that react the traces of blood. So he's trying to see if there are any you know, any evidence that could be found on John Phillips's car. Obviously he found nothing. He also studied the handwriting of his friends to see if any of their writing match the word pig that have been scrolled on his front door. Uh in Sharon's blood. Um. And an interesting note about these glasses that were found at the crime scene, No one to this day really knows why they're there, Like it was really this kind of outlier, and all the evidence that was gathered at at the plans Key house, just these big horn rimmed glasses didn't belong to any of the known killers who were there. And there's a theory that's been taking hold in recent years that because Charles Manson didn't actually officially go to the crime scene, he ordered his followers to go up there and sort of do his his beatings for him. But there's this theory that he, hours after the murders, went up there with another member of the family to basically survey the crime scene and stage it to his liking, to just sort of arrange the scene with the bodies. Because I guess, hours and hours and hours after the killers left people in the area. Neighbors heard two men arguing, and they look at the blood trace map at the property. It looks like the bodies have been dragged around and moved. So there's this theory that Manson went up there and possibly deposited these glasses just to throw off the authorities, to just leave this random clue that didn't actually fit, to try to just throw people off. Yeah, to this day, no one actually knows why they're there. There's which is very interesting to me. Going back to Bruce Lee, he apparently made a point of wearing these old, taped up coke bottle glasses as a way of reminding himself with where he came from and to stay grounded. I love that. So by he's choreographing the fights in an Ingrid Bergman movie, which I love because there's no degree of separation between Ingrid Bergman and Bruce Lee. Um. But that year he damages a sacral nerve in his lower back way lifting. He's laid up for a few months in bed, which is when you mentioned he wrote his book and money was so tight at this point because he couldn't work that. Linda actually starts moonlighting and an answering service, pulling double duties to make ends meet for their family. I love their relationships so much. Their love just sustains me. The pictures of Bruce and his wife Linda together are just some of the most pure images of couple of them that I've ever seen. I know it sounds like he's had a number of affairs. I will choose to ignore them. There's this famous quote of his. I don't know if it's from a movie or from his notebooks of poetry that he wrote, but I always thought it was really beautiful. Love is like a friendship caught on fire in the beginning of flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature, and our love becomes as coals, deep, burning and unquenchable. This guy can do it all. That's beautiful. It's such a beautiful blend of spiritual and physical grace. It's amazing. And so this is the error when he decides to hit well, decides is influence to move back to Hong Kong, and this is also gets into the drama around the television show Kung Fu starts in nineteen seventy two stars David Carradine as this sort of Clinton Eastwood esque wondering martial artist. And the drama is that in one Bruce pitched a TV show with the title of The Warrior that has been confirmed by Warner Brothers that they took this meeting. Uh. And then in his lone English speaking TV interview, which is in Canada on the Pierre Burton Show, he talks about pitching this show and he says that their vision for him was to be in a modernized type of thing because they think the Western is out. But then he says, whereas I wanted to do a Western now, according to Linda, this is the idea that does become kung Fu, and he got screwed out of a credit. Morener Brothers excuses that they had for some time been developing the same idea and they were just like, oh, you know, synchronicity. Oh. And they also said that he was not cast in Kung Fu regardless of who developed the idea because his accent was too thick, or just because of good old fashioned American racism. But he was admirably pragmatic about the circumstances of this, telling Pierre Burton that they think that business wise is as a risk. He says, I I don't blame them. If the situation were reversed and an American star would have come to Hong Kong and I was the man with the money, I would have my own concerns as to whether or not the acceptance would be there. So that's enlightened of him. I'd be piste a sell, especially after I see David carried in sleepwalking his way through all of those fight scenes. So then a guy named Fred Weintraub, who is the original owner and host at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village, New York, and who helped fund the Woodstock documentary UM he is involved in developing Kung Fu, and he gives Bruce the advice that, hey, you should go over to Hong Kong, make some movies and then come back with those on your resume on your c V into Hollywood. That sounds suspicious to be like, hey, we we we stow your idea. Why don't you go to leave the country and come back while we make it. But the cool thing is that unbeknown silly. At this point, the green Hornet has become a huge hit in Hong Kong. It is renamed The Cato Show and made him an enormous celebrity. Wine troop set in that you just couldn't walk the streets of Hong Kong without having five hundred with Bruce, without having five hundred people follow you. So next, without getting too granuler about the history of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, he said, proceeding to do just that. The two big players from this era are the Shaw Brothers and Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest. The Shop Brothers are hugely influential in having kung fu cinema cross over into the United States and international. They made a thousand films and you will recognize some of these titles, stuff like The Five Deadly Venoms and The Five Fingers of Death from just infiltrating pop culture because they were huge hits the midnight movies, grindhouse exploitation circuit, and that's where people like Quentinantino and the Rizza saw them. Rizza has talked about coming into Staten Island to see all of these kung fu movies in Times Square and the Woutang Record Enter. The thirty six Chambers takes its title from a Show Brothers film, they obviously have all those little bits of dialogue sampling the film that are interspersed into their songs. Just a hugely influential thing for him. And in kill Bill not the first or last time I'll be bringing this up. In kill Bill pie by the guy with the tremendous eyebrows and white Beard who trains Uma. That is Gordon lu who is a big Show Brothers star, who is actually in the thirty six Chamber movie pivoting over to Golden Harvest. Raymond Chow, who was a martial artist, launched basically every big star in the last fifty years of Kung fu cinema, Jackie Chan Jet Lead on a Yen, And the rivalry between those two studios is like Disney grade um because Golden Harvest was founded by Raymond Chow and a guy named Leonard Ho who had both been executives with the Shaw Brothers and they defected and they wanted to have a studio that was going to be the opposite of the Shaw Brothers, which was this assembly line, really quality controlled, bang them out system, and so they basically said, we're gonna pay people more and give him more creative freedom. And that was how they were going to run their studio. So Bruce asks a childhood friend of his who he had co started into these films alongside with with the absolutely remarkable name of Unicorn Chan to pass the CV to the Shaws, and they are interested, but they lowball him. They offer him a long term contract about something like two grand a film, and considering he's been making a thousand dollars an hour to teach Karate, too grand a film is pennies and he declines. Chow hears of this meeting and decides to take a meeting with Bruce and offers him a two picture deal, the first of which is The Big Boss. Uh Lee did not enjoy making The Big Boss. He was filmed in Thailand, and he wrote to Linda complaining the food was terrible, he was losing weight, He lost his voice trying to shout above the noise that was on the set, the mosquitoes and cockroaches everywhere, the tap water in the hotel was yellow. He injured himself badly making this. He cuts his hand, you can see like a plaster bandage on it. He springs his ankle. That's why he's like limping half dead. By the last scene, um and he loses his contact lens at one point holds up the scene for hours. The sight of Bruce Lee screaming, like on the pulse of his feet, like feeling around. Didn He also got bitten by a cobra while filming a scene. For that, I believe it. I love that. How by all accounts, whenever he got injured, you know, in the middle of a take, he insisted that the crew not stopped filming until the scene was completed, and it was only after that that hend seek medical attention. Guys A pro, Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of behind the scenes drama this movie. They started shooting it with a three page script, which gave him a lot of leeway to kind of bully his way through the film. He clashed with the first director over the choreography. To understand about what was happening at this time, you have to know a little bit about a subgenre of martial arts movies called this was really popular at the time. This was a big Shop Brothers stuff. There are movies that take place in Chinese antiquity, often starring lightly fictionalized versions of real life historical military folk heroes and all the choreography in them is very fanciful, and it's where you get the wire works, where you get people doing like crazy backflips and flying through air um very flowing and artsy fight scenes. The biggest example of this for Western non siss Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I mean, that looked so alien to us, having people like do these balletic fight scenes fifty ft up in the air, but that would have been very standard for Chinese movie going audiences because of the history of this gen Now, those are the fight scenes that this director, who Chia Sang wanted. Bruce who, as you remember, beat half of Hong Kong to death with his bare hands, wanted these street fight style scenes that would be more realistic, brutal, direct realistic. Uh. They fought, each one of them wanted the other one fired, and Golden Harvest crunched the numbers, decided they had just paid Lee more more recently, and fired the director. He also clashes with the film's build star James Tien, who was a bigger deal than Lee at the time, but Lee kind of edges him out during the production and writing process, probably because people just looked at the dailies and we're like, oh, this is what we this is what we have on a film that. Yeah, point the camera at that. Yeah. And lastly, the Shop Brothers were also making a movie in Thailand and apparently still going around behind Golden Harvest's back trying to sign lead to a new contract. But whatever the drama if, it was a huge hit. When it comes out, it grosses and A just three hundred million worldwide on a budget of a hundred grand. Talk about an r o I. It is the highest grossing Hong Kong film up until Lee's next film, This The Fury, and this might have been why he decided to form his own production company. Um, there's a book written by a guy who worked with him on Into the Dragon and Way of the Dragon that he said Bruce told him the chow on they gave him five percent of the profits from those two films rich It made almost like half a billion dollars and he got five percent of them. So we get to Fist of Fury. The plot of this movie is fairly straightforward and one that is familiar to any martial arts movie fan. Lee is playing guy named chen Jen and his teacher has died under mysterious circumstances and he goes to Japan to investigate. Pretty simple set up with a lot of subtext. Chen's teacher in the film shoes a name with a real life figure name Who yan Uh, who dates back to the Qing dynasty in China, and it's something of a real life folk hero in China. He was seen as defending the Chinese national identity and being very proud of this identity at a time when it was under threat from influences from Europe and Japan. So consequently, in this movie, the Japanese are portrayed as extremely villainous. The Japanese villains used this term sick man of Asia to refer to the Chinese. I wicked this. It has a long, deep history of use as an insult in Asia. I'm not getting into it. I'm sure I will say something wrong, but it is very insulting. So that was written in on purpose. And there's also a point where Bruce kicks apart a sign that says no Chinese or dogs allowed. So the plot of this movie about this honorable pacifistic man being forced into violence and conducting a one man war against a foreign enemy that he did not want to fight. Very pointed for the Chinese and especially for Lee. Very quick history lesson the Japanese invasion of a bunch of territories, including Hong Kong, starts in December of one, concurrently with Pearl Harbor. Right, Lee's dad was nearly killed when he was out of Buddy's house and it was bombed as part of the occupation. So Lee's dad nearly died, and Lida tells the story of Lee as a little kid like sitting out and watching the Japanese planes flying overhead and shaking his fist at them, which is tragic and adorable. Um So this is all all this anti colonialism, pro Chinese nationalism sentiment defending against the Japanese. This is really kind of transcends the genre, deeply personal stuff for him, and this particular strain of nationalism found a fan in another big figure in Chinese history, Chairman Mao. Chairman Mao Everyone making his first appearance on the podcast from front of the Pod Defend the Chairman Mao. So by nineteen four, Mal has been diagnosed with a cataract and Lee is dead at this point. Had nothing to do with that, by the way, And yeah, despite the many people he killed, not this one. Let's just to cover our bases there. He's diagnosed with a cataract and his doctors say, you gotta quit reading so much, so he turns to movies. He goes through a couple of foreign biopics of figures like b Lincoln and Napoleon, and then his deputy Minister of the Ministry of Culture, Luke ching Tang, gets him a bunch of Hong Kong kung fu flicks. And Lee was a really unknown quantity in China because of the country's self impost cultural isolation. So this is the first time that Chairman Mau was seeing any of these and he burst into tears watching Fist of Fury for the first time and cried Bruce Lee as a hero, and then watched it two more times, a personal record for his film viewing that lu said stood for the rest of his life. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Random bits about the film. This is the first one in which his iconic nunchuck routine makes an appearance. He had to use them on the Green Hornet before, but this is the first time when the film just grinds to a halt to watch priestly whip around nunchucks faster than the speed of sound. Also supposedly, I guess, production had to contend with local street gangs demanding payment for using their their territory um and as the path of least resistance. The producers paid up, although Lee was predictably very upset about this and wanted to fight all of them, presumably at once, and could he have taken them? Probably? Yeah. Did you know that, for his total lack of fear of human beings, as ever by this anecdote, Bruce Lee was terrified of swimming pools. I sure didn't. He did not, I guess when he was a little boy, he pushed his younger sister into the pool and she retaliated by holding his head underwater, and it traumatized him so much that he never set foot in the pool again. That's wild. And now we are so thrilled to speak about one of your heroes you mentioned at the top of the episode, Jackie chan who I mean, I know through conversations we've had you've likened to Charlie Chaplin and he's he's them plus Bruce Lee. I mean it's it's funny because they I'll talk about this in a few minutes, but he was basically explicitly positioned as Bruce Lee's air um. But the crucial difference between them is that Jackie was schooled at a like a performing arts school that really pushed for comedy and like and singing. Right, yeah, he's a singer and stage comedy. And so even though all of his early films he's playing this very drait laced, like just sort of Bruce Lee esque badass, he quickly figures out that, like, oh, I am also a tremendously gifted physical comedian. And that's when you just get that tremendous run of eighties stuff like Armor of God and super Cop all this stuff where it's just yeah, man, I mean he would beat the out of someone with a ladder and then like hurl himself down a pole covered with lightbulbs, popping them on the way. It's just like, what come on, man, talk about flop sweat. That man broke his body to give us joy. Anyway, but he's in He's also in End of the Dragon and he tells this really funny anecdote about he like took a punch from Bruce Lee and and he would overplay how much it hurt him, because then Bruce would go over and comfort him and talk to him. And Jackie says he just like being held by him. You mentioned that in Jackie chance autobiography he saw an actual fight on the set one almost set. I guess yeah. So in his autobiography, Jackie Chance onto Biography, he talks of out the tension between Bruce and Logot so bad that they almost blossomed into a fight, and he mentions the incredibly emasculating detail that the director hid behind his wife, using her as a human shield between himself and the deadliest man of all time. And this woman calmed ly down and broke up the fight. Oh, that guy sounds like a piece of I'm being chased by a man who could punch faster than speed of sound? Where is my wife to throw? Like? Was his child not on hand? Could he not just hold his baby up in front of him? Good lord? This thing was filmed in six weeks. That's how he was able to make like four of these in the two years. He was an international celebrity before he died, because they just cranked these things out spoilers. The philm ends with a very butch and Sun dance harder. They come vanishing point ending where there's a freeze frame where he launches that this flying kick at a row of armed policeman in military and there's a sound of gunfire. The implication of course that he has died. And this was a point that low Way and Bruce wanted to make about him sort of honorably paying for sinking to the Japanese level in this I mean someone I was reading about this someone was like, he's basically a serial killer in this movie. He just like goes around just murdering people. So they had to end this with this kind of morality play where he uh and low says this to him. The low is playing the police inspector in this film, and he says, to uphold your master's honor, which you have tainted with this international killing spree you have gone on too. You have to surrender, you have to give yourself up and to have their cake and eat it too. They had him sort of give himself up via a flying kick. Anyway, that's all just very funny, niche Chinese cultural stuff. To me. That's interesting. Um, this the Fury opens in March of nine, goes on to smash the record set by Big Boss. It grossed and estimated hundred million worldwide, which is the equivalent to over six hundred million adjusted for inflation. And this is against the budget of a hundred thousand dollars. That's just it's like that. I think the most famous ones of this sort of stuff like this and Halloween. Halloween was made for pennies and when it was the most profitable independent film of all time, I think until Blair w Um in the Philippines, which Ringo familisly hated. Um one of our bits. So the Philippines were also occupied by the Japanese, so they readily identified with this film's themes. It ran for six months of sellout theaters until the Philippine government yanked it from theaters so that domestic productions could have a fighting chance. On opening night, the rush to get to this movie caused a traffic jam that shut down the city. Incredible, such is the power of Bruce. And this is also so cool to me again because of the same themes. This film became hugely popular in Australia among the indigenous peoples of that country. Because of course they can emphasize with a foreign occupying force coming in and marginalizing the ship out of them. So just last year, Fista Fury became the first ever movie to be dubbed into nongar Da, which is the indigenous language of people's from the southwest corner of Western Australian rapidly disappearing dialect. And because of this movie's importance and historical resonance for these people, they decided to make it the first one that would be dubbed into that dialect that whips. This movie casts a very long chadow in martial arts cinema, I mentioned Jackie Chang got his start as what they called the Bruce exploitation genre, where after his sudden death, they just flooded the zone with a bunch of copycats just to try and full foreign audiences. And this is so funny because the star guys starring guys names like Bruce Lee l I and Bruce Lee l E just to try and trick people. And Jackie Chance first starring role is a movie called New Fist of Fury, very similar and this is where it's interesting about this character chans End that Bruce plays in fist of fury. This character becomes such a residant folk hero in Chinese cinema that they just decided to take this character and start remaking these movies or dropping him into new situations. This is not without precedent. There is a famous historical martial arts named Wang Fei Hung who has been the subject of a hundred and twenty separate martial arts films in which he has portrayed as different actors and just kind of placed into these new scenarios and settings. There's one guy named Kwontak King who started as Wong in over seventies separate movies. Which is that a record for someone playing the same character the most amount of times? It has to well non animated, Yeah, definitely, guy would have to think so. That character has been in many TV shows. This is such a fascinating aspect of the culture to may because they're almost like cover songs in the way that they take certain elements of this character and remix them and rearrange them, like Gently and Donnie Yen and both of their versions. They're wearing sort of tributes similar shirts to what they call the mouse suit that Bruce is wearing in the film I don't think that's interesting and too American audiences to the biggest video game franchises. Fighting game franchises of all time have distinct Bruce Lee ripoffs in them. Lu Kang in Mortal Kombat, the noises he makes everything directly related to Bruce And in tech In there's a character named Martial Law to a great pun who's just Bruce Lee. His move set is all motion cap of Bruce Lee moves, all of his like skins that costumes of the character has in the game are all different stuff that Bruce Lee Warren movies. He makes all the same noises is just incredible. And of course now he must come to Quentin Tarantino did his hero dirty? Yeah, well, you know before Once upon a time in Hollywood. The Ku Bill series is just this love letter to the Shop Brothers Golden Harvest era of cinema. And there are so many specific nods to Bruce and that we mentioned the one in Punch which it becomes a crucial plot point. The yellow jumpsuit that Uma Thurman is wearing at the end of the first film is a rip off the one that Bruce is wearing a Game of Death, which is his famously Unfinished movie which you may have seen where he's fighting Creem Abdul Jabbar in the one clip, and that's the one where they have Bruce Lee's character fake his own death, so they could include actual footage of the real Bruce Lee's open casket funeral. Bruce ploytation is real. It got to that level and ain't great. And I just thought of something else, just off the fly, when she's approaching the Crazy headquarters on the motorcycle, they are playing Al Hirsch's The Hornet Fly to the Bumbabee, the theme song to the Green Hornet. Then the final fight in that movie where she fights Lucy Lou on the rooftop of that bar, beautiful, beautiful scene. It's snowing, and I was just rewatching scenes from Fist of Fury last night and I had this Pristian sense memory because they're in this beautiful zen garden set and you hear this sound effect in the background, which is this it's like a common thing, or maybe it's not common, I don't know. It's in Japanese like zen gardens. It's this mechanism you put in a waterfall and it slowly fills up with water and then releases all of it when it gets to a certain point. I guess it's to control the flow or the levels of the water whatever. The Lucy lou Uma fight is in that same set from Fist of Fury, with that same water fountain thing making the same noises into crucial pauses during the fight scene. The only difference is that it's snowing. It's just it baffles me, man, And just a very quick sidebar about once upon a time in Hollywood. You know, Lee was not a saint. His son Brandon and Linda have both talked about him being very quick to temper and obviously just wanted to fight the entire world at various points in his life. And so it's understandable why he would be a convenient plot point for that movie because he was in the intersection of all of those scenes. But to reduce him to this like arrogant buffoon who loses a fight, now, talk more about what the scene is in the right. So the scene was famously a flashback that um Cliff Booth, Brad Pitt's character is having too when he lost his job as a stuntman on a film. He's backstage shooting and Bruce Lee shows up because Bruce Lee has been in this Hollywood circle this time, and they have like a little impromptu fight, which it must be said, is one of the funnier parts of the movie because when they square off and Lee's doing that and Fred Fitch just goes ah, So that is funny. But you know, it's just they make him lose. He gets thrown into a car and dented the car and dense the car and I think it's the stunt coordinator's car and that's why Cliffe gets fired. But you know, it's just he's played as a bad yeah, and it pissed everyone off, at least Bruce Lee fans, I'll just say it, including koreb ab Dolt Jabbar, who was so moved to anger by it that he wrote an open letter to Quentin Tarantino. And I think Hollywood or Reporter or Variety decrying that depiction. So you know, I think it's so greating to me because I don't give you that he wants to do these this later period thing of his where he just goes into historical eras and rewrites history. You want to get Hitler machine gunned, fine rules, yeah, you want them flamethrowered. And mauled by a giant dog. Also, my other favorite line from that movie when he's like, uh, did you say your name was again? It mixed Rex and he's like, I'm the Devil and I'm here to do the Devi's work. He says, no, stupid or that. Yeah, you want to get them mauled to death by Pitbull's fine rules, but don't go into someone's actual life who you have already pillaged and looted for your own art and make him into a cartoon. Don't do that, man anyway. The reason that FISTI Fury is interesting to me is this is the kind of last stop of Bruce as a regional genre icon and into an international star, you know, Enter the Dragon. It's based on the tremendous success of these two movies that Warner Brothers approaches him after he's formed his own production company to make Enter the Dragon, which is a joint production between Lee's production company, I think Golden Harvest and Warner Brothers, and that is the movie that it's ground zero for the Kung fu craze and the States in the seventies, like kung Fu fighting, all of the black explotation stuff that tips into kung Fu crazes. Fun fact, did you know that nun chucks were outlawed in New York City around this time because gang members were carrying them and beating the out of people with nunchucks. So you can't have nun chucks in New York because of the directly related to Bruce Lee in the kung Fu movie craze I did not know that. Yeah, and so by some estimation, I mean End of the Dragon is barn On the most famous martial arts movie of all time. And it's truly cool because it is a truly international production. Has John Saxon, who had gone to be in I think Nightmare Nolal Street, a bunch of other genre stuff. John Saxon is in there. Um, Jim Kelly, who becomes a blaxplotation star is in that movie. It's got that tremendous laylok shiffer and soundtrack. It is so cool. And that movie has grossed what they think is an adjusted two billion dollars off a budget of eight hundred and fifty thousands. So if nothing else, Lee has financial r o I records for movie making that are just bananas. Yeah, man, And that's when he becomes an icon and uh, this larger than life figure and uh, you know, one of the greatest. He's a goat, you know, the greatest of all time? Man? What else do you say about Bruce Um? All right? I talked about that for ten minutes straight uninterrupted monologue. Did you want to weigh in on anything about the seventies the kung fu exploitation? Does that edge into your sensible awareness? Not really the closest that I get to the seventies martial arts craze aside from Elvis, which I want to say for our Graceland Yes, our bos Lurman centric piece on Elvis and his grace Land home. But other than that, it really only extends to like everybody was kung fu fighting. Yeah, but you are far more of an expert on this than I am. I mean, you know, what else do you say about someone here? He is like Clin Eastwood, you know, in just being this genre influence. I don't even know who. The corollary would be horror, something like Christopher Lee just bringing the genre films across borders and making them these enormous, enormous successes. With all of these resonances and culture, every aspect of culture. Yeah, man, I mean, I'm not gonna talk anymore. I feel like I've I'm literally going horse with my love of Bruce Lee. So I would just say, even if you don't feel like you want to do the full length thing, just go to YouTube and poke around look at some Bruce Lee stuff. And I hope we've been able to make the case for his enduring legacy. And yeah, man, have fun looking him up. It's cool stuff. He's a tremendous guy. Yeah. I have zero background and martial arts whatsoever, but even someone like me is able to appreciate the incredible grace and power and artistry of this man, and also his wisdom. I mean we mentioned this earlier. His writings are so fascinating and beautiful and poetic and insightful. There was a book published pause sumously in that was nominally his philosophy on his fighting technique, but really it touches on all aspects of life. I mean, wow, such a fascinating polly math with really pretty stunning insights on just how to live. Well. He did a lot in those things. Yeah, that's sorry. Bruce Lee was younger than we are. I feel like I just got one inch punched. Well, folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tug. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum on the Ghost Funk Borstra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows