Los Angeles, California, January 1971.

In a modest flat in the east of the city, the telephone rings.

The man who Answers is 1.

70m tall, weighs 61kg and moves with a precision that most people never achieve.

Even with a lifetime of training.

He is 28 years old.

He has almost no money.

Outside of a small circle of martial artists and fans of a television series that was canceled two years ago, he is almost completely unknown.

But he has something more dangerous than money or fame.

He has a vision.

The voice on the other end of the line belongs to a television executive from Warner Brothers.

The executive has a proposal for a new series, Kung Fu, a wandering Shaolin monk in the American West.

The role seems perfect for Bruce Lee.

He developed the concept.

He pitched it.

He spent months developing the character, the philosophy and the fighting style that would make the series something never before seen on American television.

Bruce Lee listens attentively.

Then the executive delivers the news that will change the course of Hollywood history and set in motion a chain of events involving millions of dollars.

Organized crime, betrayal and a battle that Bruce Lee will fight not with his fists but with his will.

They give the role to someone else.

What happens next? In the following 24 months involves an 8 million pound film contract, a Hong Kong crime syndicate with connections from Kowloon to Beverly Hills, a mafia boss who controls distribution channels on three continents, and a man who refuses to be wiped out.

This is not simply the story of Bruce Lee’s rise to global stardom.

This is the story of what stood in his way and why those who tried to stop him failed miserably.

Hong Kong, the New Territories, 1970.

Before the call.

Before Warner Brothers.

Before all that.

Raymond Chow is 41 years old and has spent the last ten years working for Shaw Brother Studio, the most powerful film production company in Asia.

Shaw Brothers controls what gets filmed, what gets shown and who gets paid.

In the Hong Kong film industry.

Raymond Chow understands the system from the inside out.

He also understands its limitations.

In 1970, Chow makes the most important decision of his professional life.

He quit Shaw Brothers and found his own production company.

He calls it Golden Harvest.

The office is small.

The budget is minimal.

The staff consists of a handful of people who, like Chow, believe that the Hong Kong film industry is about to change in ways that the established studios cannot imagine.

What Chow needs is a star, not a star in the conventional sense, not an actor who can follow instructions and deliver his lines convincingly.

He needs something rarer a presence, someone who transforms the screen not through acting technique, but through something that cannot be taught in any acting class in the world.

He needs someone who makes the audience feel that what they are seeing is real.

He finds Bruce Lee in retrospect.

The meeting between Raymond Chow and Bruce Lee in late 1970 is one of the most important business meetings in the history of cinema.

Lee is in Hong Kong to visit his family, frustrated by the limitations of his career in America.

Angry about the Kung Fu television series and looking for an alternative path, Chow offers him one.

Two films, The Big Boss and Fist of Fury.

A salary of $15,000 per film, modest by Hollywood standards, but more than Lee had earned in years of working for American television.

Lee accepts the offer.

What neither man knows on the day they shake hands is that this agreement will not bring in 15,000 pounds per film, but millions that the Big Boss will break box office records across Asia.

That Fist of Fury would do the same.

That within 18 months, Bruce Lee would become the most recognizable face in Asian cinema, and Raymond Chow would have built Golden Harvest into a real competitor to Shaw Brothers and that Shaw Brothers and the men who controlled distribution in Asia and the Chinese diaspora communities of North America, would not take this lying down.

Los Angeles, the Golden Dragon Restaurant in Chinatown, March 1971.

The men who meet in the private dining room of the Golden Dragon on a Tuesday evening in March 1971, are not the kind of men who appear in newspapers.

They don’t give interviews.

They don’t attend film premieres.

They are not interested in celebrities.

They are interested in money.

The Chinese film distribution network in North America in the early 1970s is not a random association of independent cinema owners, showing Asian films to immigrant communities.

It is an organized system.

The cinemas are controlled.

The distribution channels are managed.

The percentage of box office receipts that flows back to the producers in Hong Kong passes through certain hands at certain rates that are non-negotiable.

These agreements have been in place for decades.

They are older than Bruce Lee.

They are older than Golden Harvest.

They are older than Raymond Chow’s ambitions and Bruce Lee’s talent.

They are, in the language of the men who uphold them.

Simply the way things work.

The man at the head of the table in the private dining room of the Golden Dragon has no official title in the film industry.

His name is not important in these circles.

What is important is that he controls the flow of Chinese language films into cinemas from San Francisco to New York, from Vancouver to Toronto, every Hong Kong studio that wants to show its films to Chinese diaspora communities in North America pays for this access.

Shaw Brothers pays.

Every independent producer pays.

Golden harvest has not yet paid in his enthusiasm for independence and his focus on production, Raymond Chow has underestimated something fundamental about the business he has entered.

Distribution is not a minor matter.

Distribution is everything.

A film that does not reach its audience does not exist, regardless of its quality or the talent of its stars.

The man at the head of the table puts down his teacup.

He speaks quietly in Cantonese to the men sitting around him.

The gist of his statement is this golden harvest will come to an agreement.

Or Golden Harvest films will not be shown in North American cinemas.

It’s very simple.

It has always been very simple.

No one at the table mentions Bruce Lee by name.

There’s no need to.

Everyone present knows that Bruce Lee is the reason for this conversation.

The Big Boss has not yet been released, but news travels fast in the film industry, and rumors about Bruce Lee’s film shoots are already extraordinary.

A problem, says the man at the head of the table that is best addressed early on.

Hong Kong Golden Harvest Studios, August 1971.

The Big Boss hits Hong Kong cinemas on the 3rd of October 1971.

Within 72 hours, it breaks all previous box office records in the city.

Long queues form in front of cinemas before sunrise.

The police are called to three different locations to control the crowds.

The film grosses 3 million HKD in its first week.

Such an extraordinary sum that Shaw Brothers executives refused to believe the initial reports and send representatives to count the box office takings themselves.

Bruce Lee is not surprised.

He knew this would happen with the certainty that characterizes every aspect of his approach to his craft.

Not because he is arrogant.

Bruce Lee is many things, but arrogance implies a gap between self-perception and reality.

Lee’s self-confidence is different.

It is the confidence of a man who has spent 20 years learning, training, refining, failing, adapting and training again.

He knows what he is capable of because he has tested himself at every limit he has ever encountered, and found that the limits were not where other people thought they were.

What surprises him is the speed.

Raymond Chow calls him the morning after the opening weekend, and quotes figures that neither man would have dared to mention in their most optimistic conversations.

Lee listens.

Thanks.

Chow hangs up and starts training.

There is nothing else to do in Lee’s philosophy.

Success is not a goal.

It is a temporary state that requires an immediate response.

No celebration, no rest, but a renewed focus on what comes next.

What comes next is Fist of Fury and at the same time, 8000 miles away.

What comes next is a call from Warner Brothers Los Angeles, Warner Brothers Studio Burbank, November 1971.

Ted Ashley is the chairman of Warner Brothers.

He is 61 years old, has been in the entertainment industry for four decades, and understands talent in the specific, unsentimental way that successful studio executives must understand it not as art, not as a human trait, but as commercial capital.

When the reports on the Big Boss land on his desk in November 1971, Ashley doesn’t think of Bruce Lee as a human being, martial artist or philosopher.

He thinks of Bruce Lee as capital.

The numbers are unmistakable.

In six weeks after its release in Asia, The Big Boss has grossed more than any other Hong Kong film before it.

The audience is young, male and spending money on a scale that belies conventional box office analysis.

More importantly, these figures come from markets that Hollywood has largely ignored.

Southeast Asia, the Chinese diaspora communities in North America, an audience that does not normally attend Hollywood productions in large numbers.

Ashley calls a meeting.

The question on the table is simple.

Can Warner Brothers win over this audience for an American production? And if so, who is the vehicle? The answer to the second question is obvious even before the meeting begins.

Fred Weintraub is a Warner Brothers producer who has been watching Bruce Lee with interest since the days of The Green Hornet.

Weintraub is a producer who is successful not by following industry consensus, but by recognizing value before consensus is formed.

For more than a year, he has been arguing internally that Bruce Lee represents an opportunity that Warner Brothers is missing out on.

The figures from Big Boss give him the necessary leverage.

Weintraub proposes a co-production with Golden Harvest, a martial arts film produced with Hollywood resources and distribution, starring Bruce Lee.

Shot in Hong Kong, the budget he proposes is modest by Hollywood standards, about $800,000.

The distribution potential, he argues, is extraordinary, not just in the Asian market worldwide.

Ashley approves the project in principle.

Weintraub flies to Hong Kong, Hong Kong, The Peninsula Hotel, Kowloon.

December 1971 the meeting between Fred Weintraub, Raymond Chow and Bruce Lee at the Peninsula Hotel in December 1971 last for hours.

The result of those four hours is the framework for Enter the Dragon.

Although the film still has no title, no script and no confirmed budget, what it does have is something more important the agreement of three men, each of whom wants something that the others can offer, Weintraub wants access to Bruce Lee and Golden Harvest’s production infrastructure in Hong Kong.

Chow wants Warner Brothers global distribution network and the legitimacy that comes with a partnership with Hollywood.

Lee wants something more complex than the other two.

He wants to prove something.

The rejection of the kung fu television series has not faded.

It has solidified into fuel.

Lee understands with a clarity that neither Weintraub no Chow fully grasp at this first meeting that Enter the Dragon is not just a commercial opportunity.

It is a statement.

It is proof, in the most public forum possible, that an Asian man can carry a Hollywood film, not as a supporting character, not as an exotic background element, but as the undisputed center of the story.

This is significant beyond Bruce Lee’s personal ambitions.

It is significant because no one has ever done it before.

The weight of this fact hangs unspoken, but present over the three men in the room.

The deal they negotiate during those four hours is ultimately set out in a contract worth approximately $8 million, including projected revenues and advance payments for distribution.

It is the biggest deal of Bruce Lee’s career in 1971.

It is one of the most significant Asian-American co-productions in Hollywood history.

Three weeks after the meeting at the Peninsula Hotel, someone sends a message to the man who heads the distribution of Chinese language films in North America.

The message is simple.

Warner Brothers is now on board.

San Francisco a private office above a restaurant on Grant Avenue, January 1972.

The man who receives this message does not panic.

Panic is for people who don’t have contingency plans.

He has contingency plans ever since he received the first figures for big bosses six months ago, and realized that Bruce Lee would not remain just a phenomenon in Hong Kong.

He has had contingency plans.

Bruce Lee would become something bigger, and something bigger meant upheaval.

His name is linked in public records to a number of restaurants, a trading company and a property investment firm.

None of these companies are the reason why everyone in this room answers his calls immediately, or why the people around him listen to him without interruption.

When he speaks.

He controls three things that are important in this conversation.

He controls access to cinemas in eight North American cities with significant Chinese diaspora populations.

He controls a distribution company that handles the physical transport of film copies, and through relationships that are not documented in any corporate records.

He controls a percentage of the revenue generated over the last 15 years by every major Hong Kong film shown in those cities.

Warner Brothers involvement fundamentally changes his calculations.

A small, independently operating production company from Hong Kong is manageable.

A co-production with Warner Brothers with its global distribution infrastructure, is something else entirely.

He cannot block Warner Brothers.

He has neither the resources nor the reach to do so, but he knows someone who can.

The call he makes that evening connects him via two intermediaries to a man in Las Vegas.

The man in Las Vegas is not Chinese.

He is not in the film industry, but he understands better than almost anyone else in America how distribution networks work, how money flows through legitimate businesses while serving illegitimate purposes, and how pressure applied at the right point in a supply chain can transform an entire industry.

The man in Las Vegas listens.

He asks three questions.

He says he will think about it.

He thinks about it for 11 days.

Then he makes a call himself Hong Kong Golden Harvest Studios, May 1972.

Bruce Lee does not counterattack in the way his opponents expect him to.

This is perhaps the most fundamental misunderstanding made by all those who have ever underestimated him.

They see the films, they see the speed, the precision, the explosive power of his screen presence and assume that his response to pressure is the same as his response to a physical opponent.

Immediate, direct, overwhelming force applied to the point of resistance.

They are mistaken.

Lee’s fighting philosophy, which he has developed and refined over 20 years, is not based on the idea of meeting force with force.

It is based on water.

Water does not attack the rock directly.

Water finds the places that the rock cannot protect.

Water is patient in a way that force can never be, and given enough time, water destroys everything.

He starts making phone calls.

Not with lawyers, not with Warner Brothers executives.

Not with anyone.

You would expect to respond to a distribution threat of this kind.

He calls journalists specific journalists.

American journalists who write for American publications with an American audience that has never heard of the distribution agreements that apply to Chinese language films in North American cinemas.

He calls academics who study Asian American culture.

He calls civil rights organizations that have documented the systematic exclusion of Asian Americans from mainstream American entertainment over the past decade.

He doesn’t tell them about the threats.

He doesn’t describe the men who visited Raymond Chow’s office.

He tells them about Enter the Dragon.

He describes what the film stands for with a quiet intensity that everyone who has ever met him remembers for the rest of their lives.

He talks about what it means for an Asian man to be at the center of a Hollywood production.

Not on the sidelines, not in the background, at the center.

The journalists listen.

They write Los Angeles, various locations, June 1972.

The articles appear over a three week period in June 1972.

They are not cover stories.

They do not trigger immediate cultural earthquakes, but they accomplish something that is strategically more valuable than just causing a stir.

They create a record they establish in print, in publications that are archived and read by decision makers, that end to the dragon exists, that it is significant, and that Bruce Lee is its undisputed centerpiece.

This is important because it makes something impossible.

The men who exert pressure on the distribution channels are not stupid.

They understand leverage.

They know that a film that no one has heard of can quietly disappear.

Scheduling conflicts pile up, distribution deals fall through, production loses momentum, and eventually funding and finally ceases to exist without anyone outside the industry noticing or caring.

That’s how films die.

Not in an explosion of controversy, but in silence.

Bruce Lee made that silence impossible.

Every article published about end to the Dragon is a thread connecting the film to public consciousness.

Every thread makes it harder to kill the film without the killing being visible and visible.

Killing generates exactly the kind of attention that the man exerting pressure cannot afford.

They are not interested in being visible.

Visibility is the only condition under which they cannot operate.

Weintraub calls Lee at the end of June.

His voice conveys something it hasn’t conveyed in months.

Relief.

Three of the cinema chains that were previously unavailable have suddenly become available.

A distribution company that had previously stopped answering calls is calling to propose revised terms.

The scheduling conflicts that had arisen so quietly and mysteriously are beginning to resolve themselves.

Lee thanks him and hangs up.

He is already thinking about the next problem Hong Kong.

The set of Enter the Dragon, July 1972.

Filming continues at full intensity.

The production has lost six weeks due to the distribution crisis.

Six weeks of momentum.

Six weeks of crew costs.

Six weeks in which the $8 million budget has been strained in a way that smaller productions would not survive.

But Enter the Dragon is no small production.

It is backed by Warner Brothers, driven by Fred Weintraub, produced by Raymond Chow, and at its very center is a man who sees every obstacle as information.

The fight sequences, filmed in July 1972, are unlike anything that has ever been captured on film before.

Not because of the choreography, although that is extraordinary, not because of the camera work.

Although Robert Clouse and his team capture the movements with an intimacy that Hollywood action films have never attempted before.

They are unlike anything that has been filmed before because of what lies behind the movements.

Lee isn’t acting.

He never acts.

Every punch in every sequence carries the weight of 20 years of training, and the specific, focused energy of a man who, over the past six months, has been told in various ways by various people that he doesn’t belong in the space he occupies.

The cameraman watching through his viewfinder as Lee executes a combination sequence against three opponents in the mirror room, set, interrupts the shoot between takes and says to no one in particular.

I don’t think I’m seeing acting here.

He’s not seeing acting.

He sees Bruce Lee, who through his movements, his presence and the absolute conviction of a man who has decided that the world will see what he believes to be true, is giving the answer to all those who ever told him that an Asian face cannot carry a Hollywood film.

Las Vegas, The Sands Hotel, August 1972.

The man in the corner alcove receives a report.

The report is not good.

The sales pressure has failed.

Warner Brothers has made alternative arrangements.

The journalistic campaign has made the production so visible that further intervention would be too costly.

Enter the Dragon will be completed.

Enter the Dragon will be released.

He finishes his coffee.

He looks out of the window at the Las Vegas strip.

The signs, the lights, the extraordinary machine of appetite and money that he understands better than almost anyone else in the world.

He has built his life on understanding how systems work, where pressure can be exerted, where money flows and where it can be diverted.

He miscalculated.

Not in terms of distribution channels.

Those calculations were correct, not in terms of cinema owners or scheduling conflicts.

Those mechanisms worked exactly as intended.

He miscalculated in terms of Bruce Lee.

He assumed that Lee’s response to the pressure would be that of a film industry.

Professional legal action, negotiations, the usual tools of a man operating within a system he hadn’t counted on, a man who understood the system well enough to detach himself from it completely and reshape the terrain on which the battle was fought.

He doesn’t make the call.

There’s nothing to say.

The fight is over.

$8 million will flow through the production of Into the Dragon and into Warner Brothers global distribution network.

The Chinese diaspora audience in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver and Toronto will see Bruce Lee on screens that cannot be blocked.

And even audiences who have never thought about Hong Kong cinema.

The portrayal of Asians in America, or the distribution strategy for Chinese language films will see him.

Because Fred Weintraub was right about one thing from the start.

Bruce Lee is universally understandable.

Los Angeles, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, August 19th, 1973.

Enter the Dragon premieres in the United States 26 days after Bruce Lee’s death in Hong Kong on July 20th, 1973.

He is 32 years old.

The official cause of death is given a cerebral edema, swelling of the brain caused by a reaction to a painkiller.

He did not live to see the premiere.

He did not live to see the queue forming in front of Grossman’s Chinese Theater, stretching all the way down Hollywood Boulevard.

He did not live to see the reviews, the box office results, or the cultural debate his film sparked.

He did not live to see that he was right about everything.

Enter the Dragon grossed $90 million worldwide upon its theatrical release, with a production budget of $850,000.

At the time, it was one of the most profitable films in Warner Brothers history.

It played in markets that Hollywood had ignored for decades.

It created an audience that no one believed existed.

It opened doors that every studio executive in the industry immediately wanted to walk through.

The distribution networks that had tried to prevent it are irrelevant.

The cinema chains that suddenly had scheduling conflicts are now desperately competing for bookings.

The mafia boss in his corner booth at the Sands Hotel sees the numbers rising and understands with the clarity that comes only after complete defeat.

But he wasn’t fighting a film production.

He was fighting an idea whose time had come.

Bruce Lee understood something about power that most people never grasp in their entire lives.

Power that depends on controlling what others can see, what others have access to, what others are allowed to experience.

That kind of power is always temporary.

It is always vulnerable to the one force.

It cannot contain the truth which finds a way to be seen.

The men who tried to block to the dragon were not villains in the cinematic sense.

They were businessmen, protecting agreements that had been in place for decades and generated enormous wealth.

They used methods that had worked before.

They applied pressure where it had always yielded before.

They acted with the quiet confidence of people who had won the same fight many times before.

They had simply never encountered Bruce Lee before.

These weapons in this fight were not the weapons from his films.

No one was beaten.

No one was thrown.

The extraordinary physical instrument he had perfected over 20 years.

The tool with which he could deliver a blow with enough force to send a man flying across the room, was never used in this conflict.

Instead, he used patience, visibility, strategic thinking, the understanding that a fight fought on the opponent’s terrain is already half lost, and that the first task of a true strategist is to completely change the terrain.

He changed it.

And in doing so, he created something that outlived him by 50 years and continues to this day.

The $8 million Hollywood enterprise that a mafia boss tried to ruin not only survived.

It became the basis for a transformation that redefined the expectations of American audiences.

The expectations of actors and the understanding of what is possible on the cinema screen.

Every Asian American actor who has appeared in a Hollywood film since 1973 stands on the ground that Bruce Lee prepared every martial arts sequence and every action film produced in the last five decades can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the work that Bruce Lee fought to bring to the screen.

The men who tried to prevent this are no longer here.

Their agreements are no longer here.

The specific network of theater controls distribution pressure, and carefully cultivated scheduling conflicts.

All of this dissolved in the following decades and was overtaken by the very forces that enter the dragon, had helped to propel forward.

Bruce Lee has not disappeared.

He can be seen in every frame of every film that dared to put someone unexpected at the center of the story.

He can be found in every training room where young people practice a movement they saw on screen for the first time and felt in their bones to be real.

He is in the special attention that the greatest performers devote to their work.

The refusal to betray something, the insistence on being.

The understanding that the audience can sense.

The difference between someone who shows them something, and someone who shows them the truth.

He woke up at five in the morning.

He trained when no one was watching.

He fought battles the public never saw, with weapons that left no visible marks.

He made a film that the powerful tried to prevent for a global audience that the powerful did not believe existed.

He was right.

They were wrong.

And the result? $90 million.

50 years of cultural influence.

A door that has never closed since he pushed it open, is the most eloquent response to all those who ever told him he didn’t belong exactly where he stood.