In the early 1970s, Bruce Lee pitched a TV series to Warner Bros., but his ideas were rejected. The martial arts legend will always be known for his starring roles in movies like Enter the Dragon, Way of the Dragon, and Fist of Fury, but before making these films, he had a TV career which he tried to pursue. After co-starring in The Green Hornet, Lee tried to play the lead role in his own show.
The kung fu icon was much more than just a martial artist or an actor. Bruce Lee was very much interested in filmmaking and creating his own stories. Lee wrote and directed Way of the Dragon, the movie that pitted him against karate champion and future action hero Chuck Norris. He also wrote the script for his unfinished film, Game of Death, which he directed as well. Along with Hollywood celebrities and Jeet Kune Do students James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant, Lee co-wrote a screenplay for a movie called The Silent Flute, but eventually abandoned the project. Years after Lee’s death, his screenplay was rewritten and turned into the 1978 movie, Circle of Iron.
In 1971 (before his breakout role in The Big Boss), Lee was working on a different project called The Warrior. The show was centered around a Chinese immigrant who travels to the American Wild West and uses his kung fu skills to fight villains. The setting would have been San Francisco, and the plan for was the main character to be played by Bruce Lee. Lee pitched the series to studio executives at Warner Bros., but they turned him down. Lee attributed this decision to the studio’s unease at casting an Asian lead, a notion which Lee claimed to understand, as he said might share the same hesitation about casting a white lead in a Hong Kong project.
The following year, Warner Bros. created Kung Fu, a TV series about a Shaolin monk in a Western setting. The basic premise matched what Lee came up with for The Warrior, with one of the biggest differences being that the main character was played by a white actor, David Carradine (even though the character was a Chinese Shaolin monk named Kwai Chang Caine.) Lee auditioned for this part, but was rejected because of his thick accent. Kung Fu led to accusations from a number of people, including Lee’s widow, alleging that Warner Bros. turned The Warrior into Kung Fu, but the studio has firmly denied that Kung Fu was stolen from Lee. However, the accusations that Kung Fu is a retooled version of The Warrior still linger today.
During Lee’s lifetime, a proper adaptation of The Warrior never saw the light of day, but decades later his ideas were finally brought to life on the small screen. Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, partnered with Justin Lin and Jonathan Tropper to create Warrior, a show based on Bruce Lee’s original ideas. The Cinemax series, which started airing in 2019, updated the format and some of the concepts involved, but still gives Bruce Lee a writing credit.