Linda Lee Cadwell, Robert Lee, Andre Morgan, Leroy Garcia, Paul Heller, Diana Inosanto, Nancy Kwan, Sylvia Lai, Tony Liu, Angela Mao, Doug Palmer, Barney Scollan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dan Inosanto, Shannon Lee. Some movie stars level a kind of divinity that transcends personal preference — woe betide the dissenter who openly finds Audrey Hepburn cloying, or Cary Grant less than charming.
“Be Water” was posited at Sundance as focusing on the two years Lee spent in Hong Kong, filming four features that would make him a global sensation. But that’s just one section of a beginning-to-end life and career overview told entirely through archival materials, with reminiscences from co-workers, family members and such limited to the audio track.
Settling in Seattle, he began teaching his own increasingly individual form of traditional Chinese martial arts, eventually modified by influences as far-ranging as Muhammad Ali’s boxing style. Participation in an L.A. tournament caught the entertainment industry’s attention, and he soon abandoned his dream of opening nationwide gung fu schools for a new one of movie stardom, figuring that would provide a faster way of changing Asian Americans’ subservient “model minority” image anyway.
But he had to fight for dialogue and a more active role as sidekick Kato on short-lived TV series “The Green Hornet.” Subsequent acting offers were few, despite his acquiring such A-list clients as Steve McQueen, James Coburn and James Garner. The final straw came when primetime drama “Kung Fu,” whose concept he purportedly came up with , wound up starring Caucasian actor David Carradine as a Shaolin monk in the Old West, rather than Lee himself.
Ergo he accepted upstart studio Golden Harvest’s offer of a starring feature role, moving wife Linda and their two children to Hong Kong. They came to feel trapped there by the magnitude of his fan-hounded fame, yet it still took a while for Hollywood to register the phenomenon. Finally Warner Bros. offered a crossover vehicle in “Enter the Dragon,” which, despite his initial unhappiness with the script, would become a massive success everywhere, including the U.S.
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Source: Variety - 🏆 108. / 63 Read more »
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Source: Variety - 🏆 108. / 63 Read more »