ahead.’”
Weintraub and co-producer Paul Heller cut a deal with Lee’s Concord Productions , then worked with Lee and novice screenwriter Michael Allin on the script. Robert Clouse was chosen as director on the strength of the thrilling, brutal fight scenes in the otherwise mishandled Darker Than Amber (1970), and, because, in Weintraub’s words, “Nobody else wanted to direct the picture except him.”
The story was James Bond by way of Fu Manchu . An unnamed espionage agency asks a Shaolin Temple teacher named Lee to compete at a martial-arts tournament in order to infiltrate an island off Hong Kong lorded over by a Shaolin renegade. Lee goes to the island in the company of Williams, a cocky black fighter, and Roper, a gambler — both of whom are in trouble with the law. Once on the island, they face the evil Han (named after Han Ying-chieh , perhaps?) — a stereotype with a fake, interchangeable hand, a small army of guards, and a jail filled with drug addicts, slaves, and white slavery victims.
To put it mildly, the script was makeshift. Han is hardly more than Dr. No, and even has a white, long-haired cat like 007’s main nemesis, Ernst Stavros Blofeld. The only place the movie excels — in fact, the only place the movie is unique — is in its kung fu and its star. Not surprisingly, getting the project started in a city known for its standard operating racism was no easy task.
Darker Than Amber (1970) star Rod Taylor was considered for the integral role of co-hero Roper, but the versatile John Saxon , an actor who had been toiling in B movies since the mid-1950s, shared equal billing with Lee. Rockney Tarkinton was cast as Williams … at first.
“Jim Kelly was a last-minute replacement,” Weintraub revealed. “He came on the night before the picture was to start. At the last minute Tarkinton said I was taking advantage of him. I disagreed, and that was the end of that. At two o’clock in the morning, I went to see Kelly and said, ‘You’re hired.’”
Weintraub had Saxon, Kelly, and Bob Wall ready to go. He had also hired Shih Kien , famous as Huang Fei-hong’s most consistent adversary, and the “Queen of Kung Fu,” Angela Mao , to play Bruce’s sister. To give the American audience a henchman they could understand, he cast Yang Sze as the muscular bodyguard Bolo (a name and physique which stuck with him, despite the fact that he was a skilled taichi fighter). What he didn’t have, at first, was Bruce Lee .
“For the first three weeks, we shot around him,” Weintraub maintained. “Linda Lee , his wife, was the one who kept things going when he wouldn’t show up on the set. I think he was nervous. It was his first big film. And he was fighting with Raymond Chow at that time. He was fighting with me, too, but not as much. It was just that he was so nervous. On the first day, he had a facial twitch. We needed twenty-seven takes to get the shot. But then he settled down, and we made the film.”
Things ran relatively smoothly, and word started getting around that Weintraub might have a tiger by the tail. “Once we started,” the producer told me, “everybody thought Bruce was going to be something, and started sending me scripts in the middle of shooting. There was a man at Warner Brothers named Dick Moore who understood the market, so we worked up a script with Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander and showed it to Bruce. We tried to do it as a movie first.”
That movie was called Kung Fu and took place in the Sierra Nevadas of 1868. It tells of the Chinese “coolie” laborers building the transcontinental railroad. Among them is Caine, a half-breed. Almost immediately, the movie flashes back to Caine’s training by Shaolin Temple monks, culminating in a final test that has him in a booby-trapped hall blocked by a red-hot cauldron. He escapes the corridor by lifting the cauldron with his forearms, which leaves tattoos of a dragon on one arm and a tiger on the other.
From there Caine
Weintraub and co-producer Paul Heller cut a deal with Lee’s Concord Productions , then worked with Lee and novice screenwriter Michael Allin on the script. Robert Clouse was chosen as director on the strength of the thrilling, brutal fight scenes in the otherwise mishandled Darker Than Amber (1970), and, because, in Weintraub’s words, “Nobody else wanted to direct the picture except him.”
The story was James Bond by way of Fu Manchu . An unnamed espionage agency asks a Shaolin Temple teacher named Lee to compete at a martial-arts tournament in order to infiltrate an island off Hong Kong lorded over by a Shaolin renegade. Lee goes to the island in the company of Williams, a cocky black fighter, and Roper, a gambler — both of whom are in trouble with the law. Once on the island, they face the evil Han (named after Han Ying-chieh , perhaps?) — a stereotype with a fake, interchangeable hand, a small army of guards, and a jail filled with drug addicts, slaves, and white slavery victims.
To put it mildly, the script was makeshift. Han is hardly more than Dr. No, and even has a white, long-haired cat like 007’s main nemesis, Ernst Stavros Blofeld. The only place the movie excels — in fact, the only place the movie is unique — is in its kung fu and its star. Not surprisingly, getting the project started in a city known for its standard operating racism was no easy task.
Darker Than Amber (1970) star Rod Taylor was considered for the integral role of co-hero Roper, but the versatile John Saxon , an actor who had been toiling in B movies since the mid-1950s, shared equal billing with Lee. Rockney Tarkinton was cast as Williams … at first.
“Jim Kelly was a last-minute replacement,” Weintraub revealed. “He came on the night before the picture was to start. At the last minute Tarkinton said I was taking advantage of him. I disagreed, and that was the end of that. At two o’clock in the morning, I went to see Kelly and said, ‘You’re hired.’”
Weintraub had Saxon, Kelly, and Bob Wall ready to go. He had also hired Shih Kien , famous as Huang Fei-hong’s most consistent adversary, and the “Queen of Kung Fu,” Angela Mao , to play Bruce’s sister. To give the American audience a henchman they could understand, he cast Yang Sze as the muscular bodyguard Bolo (a name and physique which stuck with him, despite the fact that he was a skilled taichi fighter). What he didn’t have, at first, was Bruce Lee .
“For the first three weeks, we shot around him,” Weintraub maintained. “Linda Lee , his wife, was the one who kept things going when he wouldn’t show up on the set. I think he was nervous. It was his first big film. And he was fighting with Raymond Chow at that time. He was fighting with me, too, but not as much. It was just that he was so nervous. On the first day, he had a facial twitch. We needed twenty-seven takes to get the shot. But then he settled down, and we made the film.”
Things ran relatively smoothly, and word started getting around that Weintraub might have a tiger by the tail. “Once we started,” the producer told me, “everybody thought Bruce was going to be something, and started sending me scripts in the middle of shooting. There was a man at Warner Brothers named Dick Moore who understood the market, so we worked up a script with Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander and showed it to Bruce. We tried to do it as a movie first.”
That movie was called Kung Fu and took place in the Sierra Nevadas of 1868. It tells of the Chinese “coolie” laborers building the transcontinental railroad. Among them is Caine, a half-breed. Almost immediately, the movie flashes back to Caine’s training by Shaolin Temple monks, culminating in a final test that has him in a booby-trapped hall blocked by a red-hot cauldron. He escapes the corridor by lifting the cauldron with his forearms, which leaves tattoos of a dragon on one arm and a tiger on the other.
From there Caine
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