Bruce Lee's life inspires movie that is way more interesting now that it has a bunch of made-up shit

By Sean O'Neal | February 19, 2013 | 9:43pm

Aux Features Film

Though Bruce Lee has already received the biopic treatment with 1993’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, that film suffered from its outmoded, 20th-century insistence on occasionally resembling actual moments from its subject’s life. So the time has come for another Bruce Lee biopic, one that takes the modern tack of using a person’s life as mere “inspiration” for a far more interesting story that inevitably becomes a buddy-cop movie. Nixon and Ali writers Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen Rivele—having presumably seen their other screenplay rejected, in which Nixon forces the draft-dodging boxer to team with him to rescue Vietnam POWs—have instead begun Birth Of The Dragon, which uses the real-life 1965 fight between Lee and Wong Jack Man as “a jumping-off point for a wider-canvas action movie in which Wong and Lee team up to battle a band of Chinatown gangsters.”

Of course, “historical” accounts will tell you that no such thing ever happened, that Lee and Wong instead fought for about 20 minutes, then parted without so much as a playfully bickering conversation about gangster-fighting techniques, on their way to a grudging partnership that got results. But this “factual” version of the story has naturally been rejected, because it is boring, and just making up things is far more interesting.

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“Stephen Rivele and Chris Wilkinson have taken a little-known chapter in the life of Bruce Lee and used it as a jumping-off point for a bold, exciting story about the making of an international legend,” said producer Michael London in a statement, before his own story suddenly got much bolder and way more exciting after he turned into a werewolf, slaughtered a half-dozen people in Central Park, then was driven by an angry mob to seek refuge in a hidden sea cave. It was there that, after years of lonely seclusion, in which he was forced to imagine buddy-cop stories using the fragments of coral that washed up on the shoreline, producer-turned-werewolf Michael London eventually met and fell in love with a mermaid.

“But my darling, when the moon is full, our mer-wolf children will surely drown trying to devour their own tails,” were-producer Michael London told his mermaid bride one day, years after his monstrous transformation had rendered him unable to make up a bunch of shit about Bruce Lee’s life. “Hush now, dear,” Michael London’s mermaid wife said, slapping him with her fins in a soothing way she knew he liked. Then producer Michael London began to make gentle love to her fish-hole.