IMHO I disagree with the ‘utterly wasted’ premise of the OP. While the movies taken as a whole are generally cheap and poorly produced with respect to editing, sets, directing, etc, Bruce Lee himself in those movies and his influence on the fight choreography and fight editing was revolutionary and the rest of HK cinema and mainstream Hollywood didn’t start catching up until the 80s when we started seeing Yuen Woo Ping rewrite the rules tropes of fight choreography.
Bruce was the major reason why the established Shaw-style staccato “punch-pause-kick-pause-scowl-pause-punch-pause” looks so fake and silly in retrospect, and he revolutionized how a fight on film could approach “realism” more accurately and increase audience immersion and tension.
So, yeah, the whole movies are corny, but Bruce changed the cinematic world with those movies and his destruction of the established cinema tropes of the time.
–I was also inspired by Bruce to take up martial arts studies and it has been a wonderful journey. I was a student under one of Bruce’s students for a couple of years as well, huge fun learning experience and got to listen to many Bruce stories passed down to us.
Sorry. Not being discussed in this thread.
I vaguely recall such a scene and suspect it may be one of Jackie Chan’s Condor pieces – and I think he’s really doing that and in the bloopers at the end of the movie there is probably footage of him trying several times and failing. FWIW Chan was an extra in one of the underground fight scenes in EtD but that’s as close as he gets to being part of this thread.
Bumping to say I watched ESPNs 30 for 30 “Be Water”. It really humanized Lee for me and made him real, not some mythical figure. He seemed like someone you could easily be friends with. Whjat a shame he died so young.
Funny factoid that he got the part on GH due to Jay Sebring, the “hairdresser to the stars”, who saw him and recommended him to the producers. They had Lee’s screen test. Man he was fast!
And in case the name isn’t well known, Sebring was one of the victims of the Charles Manson murders, as he was a friend of Sharon Tate who was speaking with her when the killers arrived.
In fact, when the killers ordered Tate to lay down on her stomach, Sebring tried to protect her since she was quite pregnant. This led to to Tex Watson shooting Sebring dead with a handgun.
At the scene, cops would later find a pair of glasses. Bruce Lee mentioned to Roman Polanski (Tate’s widower) a short time later that he had lost his glasses. This led Polanski to initially suspect that Lee was involved with the murder.