The writers of Ali and Nixon have been hired to write an “origin story” about Bruce Lee. Well, sort of. It actually sounds more like the origin of a story where Bruce Lee becomes some kind of crime-fighting Van Helsing, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

QED International and banner Groundswell Productions are aiming to tell a Bruce Lee origin story with Birth of the Dragon, tapping scribed Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen Rivele to pen the tale.
Birth of a Dragon, according to QED and Groundswell, is inspired by the true-life duel between Bruce Lee and Wong Jack Man, who was China’s most famous Kung Fu Master. The no-rules fight took place in San Francisco in 1965, when the city’s Chinatown was controlled by Hong Kong Triads.

Okay, so far so good… They already did a version of that in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, based on Linda Lee’s book, but I’d love to see a less biased version…

The writers are using this true event 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.
“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 QED CEO Michael London in a statement. [THR]

Well sure, why depict a real, unique story with interesting characters and inherent drama when you can just slap the names on a Bruckheimer movie that everyone’s already seen? A movie about Bruce Lee? Pf, no one’s going to want to see that! Not unless you can turn it into a Chinese Gangster Squad with Kung Fu. It’s got the blandness people love, with the meaningless name recognition they demand.

Studio thinking at its finest.

[banner image via]

I just found this letter to and response from Bruce Lee – whose 72nd birthday would’ve been today -  via the always fantastic LettersofNote. I put Bruce Lee in the headline because he’s got the name recognition, but the real star of this exchange is Roland Lee. The turn of phrase “Furthermore, he picked up a hammer and hit himself all over” is brilliant, and I could read it ten times over and still laugh every time. I want that worked into my epitaph somehow. “He had four loving children, having retired after working for the Illinois Railroad Company for 42 years. Furthermore, he picked up a hammer and hit himself all over.”

As to the what/where of the letter, Shaun from LettersofNote says: “In the 1960s Bruce Lee answered a bunch of fans’ letters via Black Belt magazine. Many are reprinted in this book (‘Dear Bruce Lee’).”

Anyway, great letter, and happy birthday, Bruce. We’d trade that crusty old sack of farts Chuck Norris for you in a heartbeat.

Latino Review is reporting a scoop that Warner Independent Pictures is doing a “noir-style remake” of the Bruce Lee-classic Enter the Dragon, starring Korean pop star Rain (see also: Speed Racer, Ninja Assassin).

“The Shield” exec producer Kurt Sutter said he’s writing “Awaken the Dragon” as a contemporized drama about a lone FBI agent who pursues a rogue Shaolin monk into the bloody world of underground martial arts fight clubs.

Aw, crap.  Cam Gigandet’s going to be in this, isn’t he.

“I’m a huge noir fan, and this plot lends itself to the film I want to make,” Sutter said. “I wanted to set it in these underground fight clubs where the action is really raw and expose the brutality of Shaolin Kung fu. This will be more ‘Raging Bull’ than ‘Crouching Tiger’ in its viciousness.”

Huh.  The raw brutality of kung fu, eh?  I thought the whole kung fu mystique (at least, the mystique of actual kung fu, not the crazy wire-fighting stuff) had been broken when they started having actual martial arts fights, and the kung fu guys won approximately… never.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be wanking dismissively using only my chi.

Also, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this picture of Rain. It’s a Raingel!

UPDATE: Had to put the trailer after the jump because the code was f-ing up my main page.

Ip Man stars Donnie Yen as Yip Man, Bruce Lee’s mentor and the first martial arts master to teach the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun, which apparently involves punching people really fast until they die. Boy, if I could move my hand that fast I’d never leave the house!

Whackety schmackety doo…

[Thanks to sexy reader Shaun for the tip]
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Columbia pictures has confirmed that Stephen Chow, director of Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, will direct the upcoming Green Hornet movie.  Chow will also star opposite Seth Rogen’s Hornet as Kato, a role popularized by fellow Hong Kong-ian Bruce Lee.

His boarding, announced by Columbia presidents Doug Belgrad and Matt Tolmach, also gives an inkling to the kind of movie Columbia is looking to make as Chow is known for his martial arts action-meets-Bugs Bunny style. [THR]

So what the hell is the Green Hornet?

Though various incarnations sometimes change details, in most incarnations the Green Hornet is Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher by day who by night goes out in his masked “Green Hornet” identity to fight crime as a vigilante, accompanied by his similarly masked Asian manservant Kato and driving a car, equipped with advanced technology, called “Black Beauty”. The Green Hornet is often portrayed as a fair-to-above average hand-to-hand combatant and is often armed with a gun that sprays knock-out gas (an electric stun weapon called the “hornet’s sting” was added to his arsenal in the TV series). [Wikipedia]

Going comedy with this project was the right call.  Let’s be honest, knockout gas and a manservant? It already sounds like a joke, so if you’re doing a remake you probably want to be in on it. Either that or you have to modernize it to the point that it’s not the Green Hornet anymore.  When people try to do a faithful remakes of stuff that was cool 80 years ago, you get… well, you get something like The Spirit is what you get.  They might as well be making Who’s On First the movie.