Bruce Lee and me 2

21-7-08: Bruce Lee and me (part two)

Media Asia giving me access to the Bruce Lee archive was like giving Dracula the keys to the blood bank. I was IN! The crypt keeper down at the vault where MA stored the materials it had inherited from Golden Harvest was a little fellow named Larry. He showed me what they had on the Bruce Lee films. I was surprised how few photographs of Lee they owned. Apparently, Harvest boss Raymond Chow only bought from the unit photographer the photos he specifically wanted, and all the rest remained property of the cameraman himself. (This explains why private collectors in the prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /US have more photos than the studio does!)  I asked Larry if he had any unusual Bruce Lee footage stashed away. Hmmm, he said, I do have some stuff I’m not sure about… And he shuffled off to find it.

Much has been made, on some of the Bruce Lee Internet forums, about what happened next. First, though, some history…

 For those not in the loop, Bruce Lee had, before his untimely demise, shot scenes for a film to be called Game of Death. He interrupted shooting on this project to make Enter the Dragon, and died before he could return to finish it. In 1978, Golden Harvest hired Enter’s director, the late Robert Clouse, to create some kind of framing device that would allow the unseen GOD footage to be exploited. This is the film that most fans know as ‘Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death’.  For most of the movie, the ‘Bruce Lee’ character, Billy Lo, is played by various doubles, and by shots spliced in from other Bruce Lee movies.  The finale sees the real Bruce Lee, in his yellow tracksuit, fighting his way up three levels of the villain’s lair. This is a heavily edited version of the footage Lee had shot for the original Game of Death project.  

Obviously, Robert Clouse and the other people responsible for the 1978 film had viewed all the ‘original’ footage shot by Lee. Clouse vowed openly that he would use as little of it as possible. At around the same period, shots from that original footage were edited together for a documentary, Bruce Lee, The Legend. After that, the original footage went back into the Golden Harvest vault, where it remained. It’s quite possible that, during the intervening years, various people screened the footage, or even took copies. If so, they did this privately, and none of the footage was ever released commercially. That is why,  when Larry started showing me his ‘mystery’ Bruce Lee footage, I was stunned to see that it consisted of almost all Lee’s dailies from the original Game Of Death.Contrary to several on-line accounts, I did not dig up rusted cans of Game of Death footage from under a chicken coop in the Golden Harvest back lot. (Though I wish that’s how it did happen, ‘cos that makes for a much better story…) I was in the relative comfort of the MA archive, and the footage had already been transferred from 35mm to digital betacam.  I sat through various clips from the 1978 Game Of Death, and then, there was the real Bruce Lee, on set and in action, for take after take…     

Some Bruce Lee experts have taken issue with the claim that I ‘discovered’ his footage. Let’s set the record straight: I no more ‘discovered’ the footage than Columbus discovered America. It was already there.  He just stumbled onto it and shared it with the rest of the world. I did much the same with this footage.  Nothing of it had been seen, in public, since 1979, until, in 1997, I, as a Media Asia executive, found the footage, and started making deals to license it. We did a very lucrative deal with Artport in Japan for them to edit together their own ‘Game of Death’. (It has a lot more real Bruce Lee footage, but is otherwise not that much better than the 1978 film!) I licensed it as bonus footage for the British company Hong Kong Legends when they re-issued Game of Death on DVD. I sold the footage to John Little, a Canadian Bruce Lee expert who was then representing the Lee Estate. John edited the footage into his own docu-drama, Warrior’s Journey. (This, too, had more Bruce Lee, but was otherwise not that much better than either the 1978 Game Of Death or the Bruce Lee, The Legend documentary.) Everyone knew that the footage was gold dust. No-one really knew how to make it into jewellery…

As a side line, I began working in Japan as a Bruce Lee vocal impersonator. I did the voice of Bruce Lee heard on the Artport Game Of Death and the HKL DVD, and that used for a Japanese Bruce Lee typing game (no, really…) My childhood dream to ‘be’ Bruce Lee had been temporarily achieved (even though I looked more like Bruce Willis.)

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