It’s a little known fact that Bruce Lee got his incredible martial arts skills from a combination of hard work and radiation exposure when he was five. All right, just the hard work bit. But now a film company is planning to embellish a real-life tale from his 20s for Birth Of The Dragon.
Writers Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen Rivele (no strangers to the biopic field after Nixon, Ali and the in-development Freddie Mercury film Mercury) are looking at a way to expand upon a duel between Lee and Wong Jack Man that went down in San Francisco in 1965.
Wong, then China’s most famous Kung Fu master, took on Lee at a time when the Hong Kong Triads ruled the US city’s Chinatown. But the writers are tasked with turning that into the story of the two men teaming up to battle gangsters. So… It's fan-fiction writ large?
"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,” says Groundswell chief Michael London in a statement.
Of course, if this does happen, they’ll need someone to play Lee. No easy task, that, as Jason Scott Lee might testify...