This was originally from my article that was mostly about the missing footage of movies made by Golden Harvest (I wrote about the Shaw Brothers equivalent in the past month). There was so much that I mentioned about The Game of Death that it made sense for it to be its own article. Anyway, my opinion is that Bruce Lee should’ve introduced a plot twist where the top floor has Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but no golden treasure. The idea being that the real treasure comes from within the victorious voyager. This would’ve been like the ending for The Silent Flute, where the explorer finally finds the much coveted book, but the pages consist of nothing more than mirrors.
Many fans still want to see the scene where Chieh Yuan attacks Dan Inosanto with a big log (the martial arts equivalent of saying bigger isn’t better). It’s not so much lost as stolen. My guess is that a 50th anniversary special will warrant feverish fanfare. Like some Lee fans, I believe that Bruce filmed the first floor with Whang Ing-Sik et al. There are jaw-droppingly ignored signs of this. First of all, Bruce had filmed a series of fight scenes which were meant to be used for a projector reel that himself and his assisting assailants watch (think back to when Lee is informed of his mission in Enter the Dragon). It’s funny how this reel wasn’t incorporated into the 1978 release. Second and foremost, there are stills of the log attack which prove that someone out there is withholding The Game of Death footage.
While some may dismiss these as publicity photos, note the first time that we see Dan as a pagoda guardian in the Clouse cut is when he’s sitting in his chair unlike what we see in neither version of the short film (which are basically fan edits). Thirdly, Bruce had a tendency to not shave if he wasn’t filming. When he was doing screen tests in April of 1973, he was clean-cut. After his May 10 collapse, he was recuperating until June 9. In the latter month, he was clean-shaven in his G.H. and S.B. photos. He also shaved in July as can be seen in his final televised interview and the mortuary photo. Lastly, there’s a reason why June and July were relatively silent months for the legendary Lee. The basis of my presumption is a diary note that he had written in June for wanting to reserve three months after August for a Shaw Brothers movie.
The question is why would he abandon a unique project just to work on a period movie that was a dime a dozen, especially since he wanted to educate people about the fallacy of routines while celebrating international cultures (as what Inosanto mentioned in the Hong Kong Legends DVD). The presumption that I have is that Bruce may have realized that you can’t have five floors of martial artists and a floor for the treasure if you plan to use a pagoda which has five floors. Because of this, he may have decided to later eliminate the Hapkido floor because of it falling below his standards. He would only scrap this scene if he filmed the second floor with the Wing Chun master, who was to be played by somebody who he screen-tested in April since Taky Kimura and Bruce knew that the latter’s patience was thin-wearing. Since Wing Chun requires intricate handwork, it would have made sense for this to be the penultimate fight.
What made the second floor’s guardian even more formidable was his mastery of the Praying Mantis style, which involves using wristbones to strike (especially when aimed at a person’s temple). A magazine interview with Chieh implied that Bruce had scrapped the proposed first floor (the Taekwondo guardian) so that it made sense for the fifth floor to have treasure. According to Yuan, the first floor would be the one guarded by a gang of Kung Fu fighters instead of a gang of Karatekas led by Bolo Yeung who are outside of the pagoda (as opposed to inside where there is not enough time for outsiders to strategize). Allegedly, Bruce decided to have two Americans assisting his raid alongside James Tien and Chieh. At any rate, it’s a shame that no-one has thought of using CGI to finish the pagoda raid. After contemplation, I don’t think that Bruce should’ve cancelled the entire project. It wouldn’t have been fair on his co-stars and students.
It speaks volumes that he was nice enough to cast an actor (i.e. Tien) who found himself to be no longer the star of The Big Boss. A question has been raised as to how long that it would’ve taken for The Game of Death to be made. The Big Boss took 6 weeks to be filmed. Ditto for Fist of Fury whereas The Way of the Dragon took short of 2 months – Lee’s fight with Chuck Norris took 3 days to complete. According to the September 15 issue of New Nation in 1972, Lee was already filming GOD. The project was known as Yellow-Faced Tiger. It’s been suggested that Bruce had to change the title when Lo Wei presumably stole it for A Man Called Tiger. However, Lo only used it in 1974 for the movie that was also known as Slaughter in San Francisco.
Reading in between the lines, it would appear that Lo wanted compensation for Bruce not only dropping out of A Man Called Tiger but poaching Nora Miao for The Way of the Dragon. Bruce postponed GOD on December 20 (ten days before the release of The Way of the Dragon) because location scouting was underway for Enter the Dragon (which was given the greenlight because GOD had a famous basketballer in it). Other reasons for stopping filming were the deaths of James Lee (an American friend) and Yip Man (the first combat tutor that Bruce studied from). People like to talk about how Bruce was overworked, but there are H.K. movie stars who traverse between two film sets. It’s such a shame that he couldn’t work GOD into the ETD time-frame.
In the December 10 issue of New Nation in 1974, a spokesman claimed that Lee had shot most of the fights. Linda reiterated this in The Man Only I Knew (1975). Wu Ngan’s interview in #17 of Kung Fu Monthly (1975) claimed that all of the interior pagoda fights were filmed. This is where we have to do the math. Like the Shaw Brothers before him, Bruce realized that H.K. movies had the potential to have schedules akin to TV. The fights with Kareem were shot in 10 days because he was due to train for the NBA in a short period of time. Inosanto took 2 weeks to complete his scene (the weapons added an extra layer of intricacy). This is the same amount of time that Bruce had planned for Taky to play the master of Northern/Southern Kung Fu.
In 1977, The Straits Times were told by Clouse (in the July 16 issue) that Bruce shot about 3,048 meters of film (that is 111 minutes if you include the bloopers). Clouse did such a bad job of completing it that Yuen Woo-Ping did a belittlingly better job of compensating for his father’s absence from The Magnificent Butcher. However, Clouse signing up to sit in Bruce’s directorial chair wasn’t the biggest mistake that anyone on GOD had made. That honour goes to Colleen Camp who chose to co-star instead of playing the main female character in National Lampoon’s Animal House. To be fair on her, she didn’t realize how little actual footage of Lee would be used in the final edit.
In 1975, Linda relayed to South China Morning Post that (after his U.S. movie) he did his usual rounds of TV appearances, interviews, meetings with producers and filming. Dan, who remembers Whang being flown over for filming, was under the impression that the film was half-completed. Sammo corroborated this belief in two interviews. This was confirmed by Bruce who referred to it as “halfway done” during the pre-production of ETD. Kim Tai-Jung (who filled in for Bruce in GOD) claimed that he was shown the majority of the movie (including non-action scenes) prior to working on Clouse’s redux.
Doug Palmer (one of Lee’s students) claimed that it was mostly in the can. Lam Ching-Ying (stuntman) told Bey Logan that Bruce had filmed two thirds. It’s a coincidence that Jackie Chan had filmed two thirds of The Young Master before Triads forced him to return to Lo Wei. People have referred to what’s available as a third of what was filmed. The Artport version (as seen on the HKL DVD) would’ve been over 40 minutes long when including the log bit, so that means the final running time would’ve been over two hours. There is no way that this would be permitted since The Big Boss had enough deleted scenes that it got cut down to 100 minutes (albeit I’m grateful that the finished product isn’t rare like the illegal sequel).
Lee was so methodical about undertaking GOD that he calculated how many rolls of film that were to be needed. He was bound to have known what the final running time would be (something that Sammo Hung should’ve duly noted for films like Eastern Condors or The Millionaire’s Express). Films are like plays in that they have three acts, so it would’ve been economical to have each act last for 33 minutes. As diagnosed by fans who had read a John Little book titled The Art of Expressing the Human Body, Lee was OCD enough to appreciate the value of evenness. The remains of the footage as shown in A Warrior’s Journey lasted for almost 34 minutes, yet still lags like the Artport release (where Logan {instead of Little} dubbed Bruce).
What’s available to us lacks the tightness that he was renowned for, so I can imagine him tightening the footage so that the three final floors would be comprising of 28 minutes. George Lazenby cited this number when explaining how Bruce treated him to a private screening so as to see how the last three pagoda fights flowed. The three floors are akin to a three act play. Outside of the Lee league, most people aren’t aware that what we are treated to (in any version) is essentially a rough cut that was meant to be pared down. What you intend to film isn’t always what is meant to be kept. You shoot more than you need so that you can maintain a sense of continuity from shot to shot. It gives you freedom in what edit points that you can choose.
In that respect, Little’s cut is better. The voice acting is accurate whereas the music is better (not cheap-sounding like in Bullet in the Head as pictured above). So who knows how much more is being withheld by (or from) the G.H. studio? By comparison, the S.B. archives are cut and dried. It’s literally the case that their editors cut and dry unwanted footage so not a single soul hurt S.B. by stealing. Regardless of who was cutting and drying, there is one more piece of evidence that is damning with no faint praise. Ng See-Yuen was approached by Raymond Chow to make a movie under the promise that there was extensive unreleased footage of GOD. The double-edged sword is that revealing the footage would prove that Bruce didn’t need to talk to Ray about the supposedly incomplete script on the day of his death.
Taking Lam Ching-Ying’s 2/3 claim into account, I think that it’s to fair to say that Bruce didn’t film the post-pagoda footage but still filmed all of the pre-pagoda footage with the exception of the Korean exterior shots – the shots of him in the countryside were just publicity and rehearsal photos in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Brandon Lee has been quoted as saying that there wasn’t much left of GOD to complete before his father died. He would know since there are photos of himself on the set. Casting aside reels that fall into the category of same difference, the only reason for Ng See-Yuen to undertake the task of making Tower of Death would be if there was earth-shatteringly new reels (such as Simon Yam’s bottle smash in Bullet in the Head as seen below).
I suspect that, self-defeating evidence aside, Ray was chickening out by wanting to hold onto it for unsuspecting generations who wouldn’t be as skeptical about expecting new footage. Even if Ray showed Ng what was left, it’s hard to find an coherent context outside of a documentary. It would’ve been highly difficult to incorporate the footage in Clouse’s 1978 release because Bruce’s four allies could be easily seen in any given shot. Even if there was enough solo shots to pass off the Taekwondo floor as an intimate duel, there is the issue of the running time to consider. The running time of Clouse’s GOD, as it is now, is slightly longer than ETD (which was 99 minutes only after several scenes were taken out).
The other fights in GOD were more distinctive in that Bruce was taking on artists who were specialized in Escrima, Hapkido and Jeet Kune Do. Therefore, advertisers had unique selling points to work with. The Western fans should remember that, for a long time, the H.K. audience were deprived of seeing the Hapkido floor. However, Ray’s biggest mistake was letting people see Whang’s outside demonstration in the 1984 documentary known as The Legend. It’s hard to imagine that Bruce would’ve used Whang for that one scene without having choreographed and shot the first pagoda floor. As for Tower of Death, a.k.a. Game of Death II, it was nothing more than an excuse to make use of deleted scenes from ETD (there would’ve been more scenes but Ng put his foot down). It may as well have been retitled Enter the Dragon II.
In one issue of Golden Movie News (a G.H. magazine), it was claimed that Bruce shot 7,000 feet of film (one hour and 17 minutes) for GOD. Noting Clouse’s testimony of 3,048 meters, this can’t include the bloopers and usable takes which differentiated Little’s cut from the Art Port cut, because the tally would’ve been feature-length. 7,000 feet in meters would be slightly over 2,133. At any rate, the clapperboard dates (such as the translated one as seen at the end of The Legend) show that either more was filmed than what has been shown or that Bruce was more organized than people gave him credit for. He still could’ve finished it while having Clouse film the non-Lee scenes and shots in ETD. The fights which didn’t feature Lee were bound to come up short even with him as the choreographer. Hell, he could’ve had them choreographed by Sammo (or even Han Yin-Chieh if push came to shove).
The official story is that Sammo didn’t co-star in GOD because he got tired of waiting for Bruce to begin filming. In reality, Sammo didn’t want to play the role of an incompetent fighter. Chieh Yuan deserves credit for not taking himself too seriously, especially since he was a professional fighter. Despite being fat, Sammo didn’t have thick skin. There was a report in SCMP circa December 1971 that Bruce’s next movie after Fist of Fury was going to be shot in H.K. and Korea. This implies that GOD wasn’t such a rush job after all, since production didn’t start till August 1972. In that light, it’s sad that Bruce would waste time on The Way of the Dragon since he never intended for that movie to have a Western release. Bruce didn’t even want Bob Wall for that movie, but Bob decided to ride along with Norris, yet Bruce being his nice self didn’t have it in him to tell Bob to go back home.
Back to GOD, the October 1972 issue of Galaxy Pictorial (another G.H. mag) reported Bruce as having already filmed the opening scene – a symbolic scene set in a blizzard where a bamboo tree survives the wind yet an oak tree doesn’t. Without the benefit of hindsight, his foresight should’ve made him reserve this scene for one of his Hollywood projects – Green Bamboo Warrior, since we already have him in GOD illustrating flexibility with the green bamboo whip. Also, it didn’t help matters that Cheng Cheh nicked the idea for his December 1972 release – Four Riders. During the first 4 minutes of this S.B. movie, it had a similar if not exactly duplicate snow scene in Korea (Cheh wanted to symbolize peace after the Korean war as well as the calm before the storm).
It’s too bad that the scene wasn’t derivative enough, because then Bruce would’ve wanted to sue the Shaw studio for plagiarism or refuse to work for them. He wasn’t the sort of person to let things slide off his back, so he wouldn’t have wanted to get back at Ray by doing the costume photo shoot for S.B. in June. Also, Ray would’ve been less paranoid about Bruce leaving G.H. to be a player for S.B. and, thus, make it obvious that G.H. were cheap by comparison. In the timeline of events which had actually unfolded, finishing ETD made Bruce want to move to Seattle and treat H.K. as a secondary (if not non-existant) business venture. This means that he would’ve remade GOD as a U.S. film. There is a reason why he spoke English in the footage.
A 1972 issue of Golden Movie News revealed that Bruce had planned to do two versions – one for the Mandarin market whereas the other would be for the Western one. Then again, this didn’t pan out so well for ETD. As for GOD, maybe he intended to only reshoot the shots where you could see his allies. After all, Bruce considered remaking The Way of the Dragon as a San Francisco sequel for the U.S. audience. GOD was a motion-pictured storyboard (Tom Bleecker implied that it was a proof of concept) which showed Fred Weintraub what would happen if Bruce was to climb the Korean pagoda with James Coburn, Steve McQueen, Norris and Wall (imagine him fighting Dan as he did during the above promotional shot for the Clouse-led mutiny). As it turns out, McQueen and Coburn were approached to play Steiner (Hugh O’Brian’s antagonist role) in Clouse’s revisioning.
In October 1972, Fred told the H.K. press that Warner Brothers were going to handle the worldwide distribution. Under these circumstances, W.B. could’ve easily bought the remake rights to the movie. One could conclude that GOD was an elaborate smokescreen to convince Ray that Bruce would never abandon him after making his first U.S. movie. Perhaps Bruce deliberately didn’t finish GOD before moving to Seattle because he was convinced that Ray wouldn’t let him be killed without having the entire movie in the can. I don’t pay much heed into the team-up with Lazenby on The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss since G. H. was going to be jilted by Bruce (who humoured Ray about George so as to avoid being snuffed out by the Triads who had put a price on his head).
Bruce shouldn’t have threatened his superior like Jackie did in the above deleted scene from Project A II. Considering that Bruce intended GOD to be as multi-levelled as the propaga that he was traversing, one could rightfully assume that his U.S. allies would’ve been eliminated in order of who has the least star power. This would mean that Coburn would’ve been a shoo-in for Chieh Yuan’s role, which leaves Mister McQueen gunning for Tien’s role (a rival of Bruce’s character). This makes sense since Bruce always positioned himself as Steve’s rival (the final wish that Bruce had was for ETD to outgross Steve’s The Getaway). As for who gets top billing on the poster, it would be displayed in order of the floors which they get knocked down on.
As a result, Lazenby would’ve been redeemed for ditching the Bond franchise (it’s not like he was dismissed for demanding a higher quota). Tiana Alexandra would’ve more likely played Bruce’s sister because he fancied her enough that he had kept a file of her photos (in a way that’s reminiscent of the above deleted scene in Bullet in the Head). For the sake of commercialism, Bruce’s wife would’ve been played by Sophia Loren so as to satisfy Carlo Ponti’s desire to pair up the two stars. Bruce had a desire to work with Polly Shang Kwan (a butch beauty if there ever was one) on a future production, so she could’ve played the Hapkido master in the badly named temple of gold (which would’ve resembled something like the below kick photo with Angela Mao).
This isn’t wishful thinking, because Polly (alongside Sam Hui) visited Bruce on the set of GOD during breaks in filming Lo Wei’s Back Alley Princess (Angela was in the sequel). This is also plausible since Bruce considered Mao as a second choice for the G.H. version if Chi Hon-Joi had rejected his request. While Chi is criticized by Lee fanatics for not picking up his choreography, he got a hang of Hung’s in Hapkido (which was made before). Speaking of Chi, the Chinese character on the sign is dragon instead of gold. When the three survivors step onto Chi’s floor, it is apparent that Tien and Yuan know him. This can also be seen when Chi laughs at Yuan because he knows that he lacks skill, so he is toying with him.
Chi doesn’t have dialogue which acknowledges that there is a mutual recognition because even Bruce was aware that obvious exposition is something to be avoided, regardless of how expositional that his flexible bamboo speech is. Chi embellishes his status with a gold belt as a remembrance of the nondescript treasure that is at the top of the pagoda. Yuan is wearing a Hapkido uniform because this was his way of telling the guardian that he deserves a free pass, which is why he is never stopped by the gold guardian when he goes up the staircase. For the U.S. remake, Bruce would’ve more likely hired Ann Winton (sic) to play the guardian on the first floor (which was to be named Gate to Enlightenment). The first reason would be because of When Taekwondo Strikes (a 1973 gem that was first released in the West as Sting of the Dragon Masters), whose set that Bruce visited (it was him who pitched the project for Jhoon Rhee).
The second reason is that a beautiful white woman would help sell the film. Not only does it work from a feminist perspective but from a sexist point-of-view i.e. if you can’t beat the best female fighters then you can’t beat the best male ones. On June 15 in 1973, Bruce appeared on Ivan Ho’s Enjoy Yourself Tonight for the TVB channel. The co-star of The Game of Death, James Tien, appeared on the same episode. Something had to have been said about the film which may have given away one of two things – it was almost completed or Bruce intended to cancel it. Back to When Taekwondo Strikes, It’s possible that Bruce had only visited Golden Harvest in June and July so that he could be Jhoon Rhee’s guardian angel. After the film was completed, Jhoon left H.K. for the U.S. on July 6.
In Bruce’s original vision of GOD, there was a sketch with notes where Bruce listed the billing of the five main actors in Chinese characters – himself, James Tien, Chieh Yuan, Carter Wong and Tony Liu (whose name got scratched out). Chieh’s name is the only one which is written in blue ink versus the pencil marking for everyone else. This is to highlight the fact that the actors were to be billed in order of survival i.e. Tien’s character was the second survivor before being killed by Kareem’s character. Since Bruce intended for a Westerner to assist Hai Tien (the main character) and the three members of the Korean mob, we were more likely to see Jim Kelly in GOD than Bob Baker – who Bruce didn’t even cast in ETD. There is more weight to this than what seems to be a joke made in passing.
On page 21 in Volume 2, Number 1 of an underground Blaxploitation magazine called Badazz Mofo, Jim confirmed it in an interview where he talked a great deal about his relationship with Bruce. Jim claimed that, before he returned to America, he was invited by Bruce to co-star in his next film. Had GOD been completed, Godfrey Ho would never have made patchworks (movies involving mismatching footage of differing styles). Back to the actress also known as Ann Winter (who I have been trying to locate for an interview), Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975) would’ve been way more successful had S.B. realized that they should have a white actress. After all, look at what happened to The Bod Squad (a 1974 Kung Fu sexploitation classic).
ETD clearly benefited from adding a white performer to the black and Chinese ones. The Cleopatra Jones sequel would’ve been seen as the precursor to Charlie’s Angels, complete with a DVD re-release titled Charlie’s Devils (especially since Charlie was the name afforded to the Vietcong by the U.S. soldiers). The success of the GOD remake would’ve inspired the cineaste Wachowskis to have Bruce play Morpheus to Brandon Lee’s Neo in The Matrix (also by Warner Brothers). Granted, Bruce would’ve been in his late fifties, but so was Lau Kar-Leung (a.k.a. Liu Chia-Liang) when Drunken Master II was filmed. Maybe the Wachowskis could’ve got Bruce to train his daughter (Shannon Lee) so that she could play Trinity. The romance would have to be removed but, then again, it would’ve been refreshing to have asexual protagonists.
My final thoughts on GOD is that there was some dialogue by Roy Chiao in Clouse’s version which would’ve been the perfect set-up to include the footage of Lee traversing up the pagoda with Tien and Yuan. This wasn’t included because Ray Chow wanted to make a point that an actor can die from resisting the Triads, hence the Tien versus Kareem scene taken out of context so as to be positioned in the first act. As for the Yuan versus Inosanto scene, Ray decided that the footage would make his first Bruce Lee documentary more exclusive than it deserved to be. Remember – this is the same man who had these two men’s scenes described as “screen tests” in his second documentary about Lee. This is also the same man who wanted Clouse to use as little footage of Lee as possible for reasons that can be ascertained from reading this article. For what it’s worth, don’t feel too bad since Tien and Yuan didn’t attend Lee’s funeral.
Pop Cult Master 