For a seemingly very brief period of time, Bruce Lee was one of the most electric personalities in pop culture; a vibrant, intense ball of fire who left the world just as he was becoming one of its most interesting personalities. While he is something of a mythic figure now, more of an image in our minds than a person who actually lived and breathed, Bruce was, like the rest of us, a person who went through highs and lows, who had flaws and inner demons. While a man unlike any other, he was also still just a man.
When he left us far too soon at the age of 32 from a still-disputed ailment, his legend has only grown… Of course, it was inevitable that his wild life would become fodder for a biopic, and in 1993 – twenty years after his death – we finally got one: Rob Cohen’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Not a traditional biopic, the movie blends fact and fiction in an effort to tell a more elevated version of Bruce’s life. Indeed, the director admitted he wanted the picture to play out more like one of Bruce’s movies than a standard biopic, but of course you still want to learn as much as you can about the actual man while watching his life’s story unfold. So how much does “Dragon” get right, and how much is just more Hollywood myth-making? We’re going to get to the bottom of What Really Happened to Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
To kick things off, it’s important to know that the screenplay for Dragon was largely inspired by the book, “Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew,” written by Laura Lee Caldwell, Bruce’s widow. With that in mind, the film could be accused of looking at Bruce’s life through rose-colored glasses, elevating the man to heroic proportions while ignoring some of his less-agreeable traits and history. Apparently, Linda worshipped Bruce, even though it’s almost universally acknowledged that he was a far from perfect husband, so the movie takes on her point-of-view as opposed to regarding its subject objectively.
But let’s start with the early years: Curiously, the film depicts Bruce as almost being an only child, raised by his father in troubled conditions. Lee’s siblings and mother aren’t in the picture, perhaps in an effort to make his life look simpler than it was. In real life, Bruce had a very good upbringing; his mother was wealthy and his father was an accomplished opera singer who toured the globe, which resulted in Bruce being born in the U.S. and becoming a U.S. citizen. He was also a child actor, appearing in several Hong kong productions when he was a kid, something the movie ignores.
Despite his comfortable upbringing, Bruce was a tough and frequently unruly young man, prone to getting into street fights – usually ones that were started by him. He was so competitive that when he saw another young man excel at fighting, he wanted to know the best way to beat him, which led to his martial arts training. In the film, it’s made to look as if Bruce’s father gets the boy to enter that particular world, but that wasn’t the case – Bruce just wanted to know how to best his rivals, so he trained with the best: the famous martial arts teacher Ip Man.
In the film, Bruce – played very well by Jason Scott Lee – heads to the U.S. after getting into a brawl with some British soldiers which leads to his escaping to the U.S. – something there is no record of actually happening. In reality, Bruce got into a fight with a teenager who got injured from the scuffle – and that boy’s father went to the police and reported Bruce, which got him into trouble. With the police sniffing around and Bruce’s violent antics becoming more unreasonable, Bruce’s parents suggested he go to the U.S. to study, as well as to claim his U.S. citizenship.
When in the U.S., Bruce became a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to make money while going to school. In the film, Bruce gets into an elaborate fight with several of the restaurant’s cooks, which of course he handily wins. There’s no record of anything remotely close to this happening, although perhaps it wouldn’t have been so hard to believe considering he was still known for being antagonistic to many of those around him. Bruce saw dishwashing as peasant’s work and resented having to do it, which made his co-workers quite annoyed. So much so that it is alleged that one of the cooks once threatened him with a knife, but no brawl ensued.
Another memorable fight scene in the film occurs while Bruce is working out at the gym and a couple of racist jerks goad him into a confrontation. Once again, there’s no record of such a thing happening – although it’s certainly not hard to believe that Bruce would encounter racism at that time in history. Furthermore, when he became a martial arts instructor, he would frequently invite the quote-unquote toughest guy in the room to come try to knock him out, so while this scene is indeed fiction, you could say it has some hints of historical accuracy inspiring it.
Yet another engrossing fight sequence is when Bruce must square off against Johnny Sun in a bout arranged by some Chinese elders who demand Bruce stop training non-Chinese people in martial arts. Bruce defeats Johnny, but the humiliated opponent takes revenge by attacking Bruce when he’s not looking, inflicting major damage to his back, after which several months of bedrest are required. This too is fiction, though it has vague roots in reality. When Bruce was teaching martial arts in California, his peers thought that he should not train anyone who wasn’t Chinese, but there was no ominous group of Elders who attempted to enforce these rules. A real fight inspired the fight with Johnny Sun with a man named Wong-Jack Man, who wanted to challenge the big-mouthed Bruce. Bruce did indeed win the fight, but his challenger didn’t attack him out of nowhere afterwards. And as there was no Johnny Sun, it goes without saying his brother is fictional too, but Dragon depicts a sequence on the set of The Big Boss in which Johnny’s brother confronts Lee and vows to defeat him – all while the director attempts to film the battle. Needless to say, this is entirely fictional.
Bruce really did suffer a terrible back injury, which disabled him for half a year, but it wasn’t thanks to a cheap blow by an opponent: it happened while he was lifting weights at the gym. Director Rob Cohen subsequently admitted to fabricating the Johnny Sun fight because the weight-lifting injury would not have been a great movie moment, and on that score we can’t really argue with him.
Lauren Holly plays Bruce Lee’s eventual wife Linda Caldwell, who is depicted in the film as Lee’s rock and close confidant. In the film, Linda is the person who suggests Lee start up a martial arts school, which he does successfully. In reality, Bruce had already opened the school when he met Linda, and he was intent on franchising the school in the McDonald’s mold so that they’d be all around the country. Linda and Bruce’s relationship is portrayed as rocky at times, but more or less stable throughout. No mention is made of the many alleged mistresses Bruce had on the side. Bruce was even in another woman’s home when he died suddenly, something “Dragon” fails to acknowledge.
In the movie, while recovering from his back injury, a defiant Bruce is convinced by Linda to dictate his fighting philosophies so that she can write them down and make a book out of it. Not long after, Bruce gets a copy of the book, much to his and his wife’s delight. While this makes for a touching montage, it’s not how things really went down. Bruce had already toyed with the idea of putting his philosophies onto paper before his weightlifting accident, and while his book “The Tao of Jeet Kune Do” did eventually get released – it wasn’t until after he died. In reality, Linda compiled many pages of Bruce’s writings after finding them in a box after he passed away. So, technically, Bruce didn’t actually write the book, though it was filled with his actual notes.
Dragon posits that Bruce Lee was supposed to star in the TV show Kung Fu – not only that, it was based on his idea, but the producers unfairly boxed him out of the project. This isn’t technically accurate, although once again, it carries the hint of truth. Kung Fu was originally intended to be a feature film, based on a 160-page script by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander. The producer approached Bruce Lee about starring in it, and Lee expressed interest. Soon after, the idea of making the rather long script into a movie was scuttled, but out of it came a TV pilot that was half as long. Bruce auditioned for the part, but the executives at Warner Bros. Television thought his strong accent and intense personality weren’t a fit for the character, who had more of a serene composition. Lee was passed over, and after a long search for an Asian American actor, David Carradine was eventually cast, naturally spurring a controversy that remains strong today.
All that said, here’s an interesting wrinkle: it’s true that Lee was interested in creating a TV show that had some similarities to Kung Fu, called The Warrior, which was about a martial artist in the Old West. Whether or not that idea merged with Warner Bros’ Kung Fu is still being argued, but what is inarguable is that the show eventually came to life – albeit in a retooled fashion – as Warrior on Cinemax, with Andrew Koji playing the lead role.
Finally, we can’t wrap this up without mentioning the dream demon that haunts Bruce Lee throughout the film. In some of the more fantastical sequences in Dragon, Bruce is seen being threatened by a sinister phantom, with the implication being that he and his ancestry are cursed. It makes for dramatic cinema, but how accurate is it? Well, that’s tough to say. Of course, no one can possibly know what any one person has dreamt, and even Rob Cohen admitted that this was mostly a device made up to symbolize Lee’s inner demons. At the end, we even see Bruce protecting his young son, Brandon, from the demon, a scene made even more eerie in that Dragon came out mere months after Brandon’s tragic death on the set of The Crow – an event that only added fuel to the idea that the Lee’s were somehow cursed. Bruce’s wife once said Bruce had told her of a demon chasing him in a dream while he was recuperating from his back injury, but whether or not it was a recurring nightmare is unknown.
As mentioned earlier, the film ignores the fact that Lee died in the home of actress Betty Ting, who was long believed to be Bruce’s mistress. Lee died after experiencing a cerebral edema, an excess of fluid in the brain. Just why that happened is still being wondered to this day. The fact that we don’t truly know only adds to the Bruce Lee mystique, which is something that will live on forever.