Redneck wrote:Edge Guerrero wrote:- The Kung-fu series was a Bruce Lee idea.
he was supposed to play Caine but Hollywood got nervous about having a Chinese leading man, so they hired a Caucasian to play a Chinaman instead. This was considered less offensive at the time.
It's ironic that the same Caucasian would once again take Bruce Lee's role in this movie.
What Kelly remembers about Bruce Lee is they both “had similar struggles” being people of color in America. Race relations in the United States have changed so much from the 70s that a whole generation has grown up without an intimate knowledge of the culture then. Kelly says that Bruce Lee had “caught hell” in Hollywood because he was Chinese. “They didn’t want him in Hollywood,” Kelly said.
Kelly asserts that Kung Fu, the TV show that starred the late David Carradine, was “made for Bruce Lee.” That claim is backed by Bruce Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell, who in her book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew said Bruce Lee created the concept in 1971 for the series which was then stolen by Warner Bros.
Kelly says the writer of the series Kung Fu took the script to Bruce Lee and Lee wanted to do it. The writer, Kelly explains, went to the major studios, who loved the project and “Hey, everything’s good. We just can’t have a Chinese guy that starred in an American (film). So we gotta get a white guy and make him look half-Chinese. But we don’t want Bruce because he’s Chinese.”
https://blog.sfgate.com/abraham/2010/04/10/jim-kelly-on-enter-the-dragon-bruce-lee-discrimination-wondercon-sf/
