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THE WASHINGTON TIMES

AUGUST 16, 1992

Bruce Lee's son takes a shot at `Rapid Fire' acting

NEW YORK - Brandon Lee, the 27-year-old son of the late martial arts virtuoso Bruce Lee, makes a winning impression when introduced at a 20th Century Fox news conference in behalf of "Rapid Fire." In the deliriously violent crime thriller, Mr. Lee's character - graduate student Jack Lo - is assaulted by thugs working for Thai drug smugglers and Chicago gangsters. The film opens nationally on Friday.

During the interview, a reporter who alludes to Mr. Lee's "launch" as an action star is arrested in midsentence by him: "Who knows if this will be a launch or a calamity? What's the opposite of a launch? An implosion? An abort? The picture hasn't even come out yet. It's my first time out of the box, so I'm awfully curious to see what happens," Mr. Lee says.

To be precise, "Rapid Fire" is Mr. Lee's third picture. The first, "Legacy of Rage," was made in Hong Kong six years ago. Shot in Cantonese, it didn't circulate beyond Chinatown theaters ! in the United States. An inauspicious American production, "Showdown in Little Tokyo," paired Mr. Lee with Dolph Lundgren, but the film did a quick disappearing act when released last year. In bringing it up, a reporter prompts Mr. Lee to inquire in mock-apologetic haste, "You want seven dollars from me?"

Mr. Lee recalls there had been earlier offers, when he was still in his teens, from producers who seemed too eager to capitalize on his pedigree. They were routinely spurned on the advice of his mother Linda, whom Mr. Lee describes as "a very, very wise woman."

He credits her with shielding him and his younger sister Shannon from potentially traumatic fallout after Bruce Lee's sudden death from a brain aneurysm in 1973, soon after achieving international fame with the low-budget but dynamic martial arts thrillers "Fists of Fury" and "The Chinese Connection."

Bruce Lee's stardom reached cult proportions after his death. "Enter the Dragon," the first Hollyw! ood production to showcase him as a leading man, opened in the United States soon after his death. The earlier imported films were still making the rounds. The situation recalled the eerie background to the release of "Rebel Without a Cause" in the summer of 1955, a few weeks after James Dean's fatal accident.

Born in San Francisco in 1941 to a Chinese theatrical family, Bruce Lee had made a distinctive impression in Hollywood as a supporting character in the "Green Hornet" television series and then created a brief sensation in the private-eye thriller "Marlowe" by dismantling the title hero's office in one amusing, deadpan sequence. Lee nevertheless was obliged to go to Hong Kong at the end of the 1960s to find receptive backers for a starring career of his own.

In Brandon Lee's estimation, his father "created the martial arts genre in the West, indisputably." Most moviegoers attracted to the genre also would share his opinion that no one has surpassed his father as an athletic star. But he insists that comparisons don't haunt hi! m.

"I put it out of my mind," he says, "because it's no way to live your life. The comparisons are more likely to preoccupy other people. I just try and do my work. There was never a torch-passing scene where Dad said, `Carry on and make martial arts films, son.' "

There was, however, a domestic and professional setting conducive to encouraging a son to develop athletic skills. Mr. Lee remembers being trained, in a manner of speaking, from the moment he began to walk.

"It wasn't so much a matter of discipline around the house," he says, "as just a daily activity. We worked out all the time. My Dad was a dedicated martial artist and trained fanatically. He had a lot of students, and they were regularly around the house training."

Mr. Lee recalls "a definite change in lifestyle" after his father's career began to flourish in Hong Kong. "We went from living in a flat with a couple of other families," he says, "to living in what was, by Kowloon standards! , a really nice house. Toward the end, it was obvious that my Dad had become a very famous person."

His mother, Swedish by birth, had had a fling with acting and harbored no theatrical ambitions for her children.

"Quite the opposite," Mr. Lee says. "She had seen the business from the inside and always wanted me to be aware of what it could be like when you weren't in demand. I think it's accurate to say that I wanted to do something like this from a very early age, with my father's example as an inspiration and incentive. But I've gone into the business with my eyes open."

Born in Oakland and raised for the most part in Los Angeles until he was about 4, Mr. Lee was forced to refamiliarize himself with California four years later after his father died. To escape the sheer tumult and hysteria that Bruce Lee's name was causing posthumously in Hong Kong, Linda Lee moved back to the United States with her children and settled in Pacific Palisades.

"Suddenly, it was all very different," Mr. Lee recalls. "In Hong Kong, I had s! poken mostly Cantonese. I knew English, but it was a little wobbly. All of my friends, the entire school system, the culture - everything had been Chinese. Now they weren't anymore. It was such an uncertain time that I abandoned working out for about five years. I got back into it when I was 13, through Mr. Danny Inosanto, who was my Dad's protege at the time he passed away. He had a school in Torrance, near where I lived. I started going there and resumed training on a regular basis."

Before his fleeting association with Hong Kong movie production on "Legacy of Rage," Mr. Lee attended Emerson College in Boston, majoring in theater. Returning from Hong Kong, he spent two years studying acting as a member of the American New Theatre, a company in New York City headed by Eric Morris.

Mr. Lee's square-cut but exotically Eurasian countenance would seem to make him a safer bet for matinee idol promotion than was his father. He's keenly aware that Bruce Lee found it n! ecessary to leave the American film industry in order to be envisioned as a leading man.

"Hollywood executives couldn't see anything to gain from an Asian-American in a lead on television or in the movies. There's still not one bankable Asian star in Hollywood," he says. "The situation improved for black performers over the same generation, but it still hasn't happened for Asians in Hollywood. That's something I'd like to see change before the turn of the century."