The Highs and Lows of Success

With Fist of Fury completed, Bruce Lee was a free agent. For a while he considered another Golden Harvest production, The Yellow Faced Tiger, but the appointed director, Lo Wei, refused Bruce's requests that the film should be written by a professional script writer. Lo Wei, in the usual fashion of Chinese directors wanted to use a script as a bare guide and improvise as the film went along. Bruce Lee bowed out of the project and immediately formed a joint production company with Raymond Chow. This new arrangement put Bruce Lee on an equal footing with Raymond Chow, as opposed to simply being a hired actor. The problem of who would direct the next Bruce Lee film was easily solved- Bruce Lee would do it himself. For many weeks afterwards, Bruce studied volumes of books on the art of film production.

Bruce Lee was now an actor, a director and a film producer. However, he still had the problem of who would write the next script. Unable to find a suitable script, the two partners agreed that Bruce Lee should write the next script. And so, the next Bruce Lee feature film, Way of the Dragon, was solely a Bruce Lee project.

Although Way of the Dragon was a little rough around the edges, as may be expected from a director's debut, the audiences in Hong Kong's cinemas were ecstatic. Way of the Dragon grossed HK$5 million- more money than any film before it!

Now, for the first time in his life, Bruce Lee was finally wealthy. To celebrate he purchased a Mercedes 350SL, registration AX 6521. He also moved his family into a luxury Kowloon town house. The days when Bruce Lee could not afford to repair his broken glasses were gone forever.

Bruce Lee intended Way of the Dragon to be the first of a trilogy involving the character Tan Lung. However, as soon as the dust had settled from Way of the Dragon, Bruce received an offer from Warner Brothers which seemed too good to turn down. The studio agreed to pay Bruce Lee $500,000 for the shooting of a martial arts film entitled Blood and Steel, but which would eventually reach the big screen as Enter the Dragon. The senior Warner Brothers producer, Fred Weintraub, was in no doubt as to who should star in the film- he had already seen Bruce Lee in action in The Green Hornet and was well aware of Bruce Lee's sensational impact on the cinema circuits of Asia.

None of the shoots for Bruce Lee's previous films had been easy, but Enter the Dragon proved to be the most challenging of all. Bruce was nervous about making his first international feature film and persistently delayed the start of production. There were problems with translation for the international cast and crew. There was also cultural conflicts- not least that the American crew would not eat Chinese food! There were frequent injuries to the cast because of a lack of professional stunt equipment and Bruce Lee, himself, was also at the receiving end of a whole range of injuries and accidents such as a lacerated hand from a broken bottle in a fight scene with Bob Wall, and a snake bite from a cobra.

As time went on, the problems on-set piled up. At one stage, the martial arts extras threatened a strike when they discovered that the Hong Kong prostitutes, hired to appear in a key scene, were being paid at a higher rate than them. Bruce Lee also threatened to walk out at one point after a clash with script writer Michael Allin. There were also countless, time-consuming arguments between Bruce Lee and Raymond Chow who was the co-producer of Enter the Dragon. Another problem was that most of the martial arts extras were members of the Chinese syndicate, The Triads and they would often make challenges to Bruce Lee. For the most part, Bruce would ignore there taunting, but on occasion Bruce would accept a challenge to defend his honour. He never lost.

In Bruce Lee's mind, his entire future depended on the success or the failure of Enter the Dragon. He worried and worked at every single aspect of the film. By the end of shooting he had lost weight and was a ball of nervous energy. He was virtually living on vitamin pills and herbal drinks. He began to realise that stardom came with a heavy price; he could not walk through the streets of Hong Kong without being mobbed and the media pried into every aspect of his life. He became extremely suspicious of people and less friendly. Everywhere he went he would be bombarded with challenges. A dark cloud seemed to settle around him and only Linda received his complete trust.