For people on here who don't know, I'm an academic (PhD in film studies), and in addition to publishing a few articles on Bruce's movies (with a couple more in the pipeline), my PhD supervisor and I recently hosted an academic conference on "Bruce Lee's Cultural Legacies" out here at Cardiff University (for a conference report:
https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2018/07/19/conference-report-bruce-lees-cultural-legacies/) and Matt Polly came by to give a keynote talk. Aside from being super cool and super funny, Matt absolutely knows his shit when it comes to Bruce Lee, and, as someone who knows more about Bruce Lee than probably anyone that's ever posted on this forum, I can say without hesitation that his biography is
the definitive Bruce Lee biography in which he collects together all the information that fans have likely scraped together from various sources over the years
and adds tons of new information backed up by solid sources.
The early portions of the biography detailing Bruce's parents' lives and then detailing Bruce's childhood are the most fascinating portions since so little (correct) information is out there. Polly interviewed a number of Bruce's childhood friends and fellow Wing Chun students and got several really cool and funny stories that I'd never come across. And yeah, he was a little shit growing up
Bruce wrote this in a letter to Pearl Tso (his high school girlfriend back home) in 1962:
"When you drop a pebble into a pool of water, the pebble starts a series of ripples that expand until they encompass the whole pool. This is exactly what will happen when I give my ideas a definite plan of action. Right now, I can project my thoughts into the future, I can see ahead of me. I dream (remember that practical dreamers never quit). I may now own nothing but a little place down in a basement, but … I am not easily discouraged, readily visualize myself as overcoming obstacles, winning out over setbacks, achieving “impossible” objectives ... I feel this great force, this untapped power, this dynamic something within me."
Taky Kimura.
Yeah, it was Bruce's attitude that got him almost as many detractors as acolytes. In the 1993 documentary
The Curse of the Dragon, Alex Ben Block (a film critic and the author of the first English-language Bruce Lee biography,
The Legend of Bruce Lee, published in 1974) pointed out the following:
"You have to go back and remember what kind of guy Bruce was. If he didn't like your traditional method, he told you so, and he didn't care if he was on television or on top of the Empire State Building. He said what he thought ... The martial arts [represent] very traditional forms, and those traditional forms had been done over hundreds and thousands of years. Now, along comes Bruce Lee, [who] says, 'I'm going to take a little bit of this form and a little bit of that form and mix it with some kickboxing from Thailand and with some American boxing and I'm going to use this and that and I'm going to shorten my strokes and I'm going to do this and that, and I know better than all of you' ... It doesn't go over real well."
Haven't listened to the podcast yet, but Polly does make a detailed (and more than just a little plausible and convincing) argument in his biography for the cause of Bruce's death being heatstroke.
Yes. And not just one or two things -
a lot of things. And not just a lot of trivial things - a lot of
very interesting things, from his ancestry and his early Wing Chun training to his troubled home life with an opium-addicted father and his difficult departure back to the States to his time in Hollywood (which included a couple of affairs which have been substantiated and detailed for the first time, including one that'd literally never even reached the status of rumor yet is given detailed accounting by Polly thanks to his interview with the actress in question who'd never before gone on record) to his untimely death.
No matter how hardcore a Bruce Lee fan you think you are, you literally have a zero percent chance of closing that book without learning at least half a dozen new facts about the man.
Polly found it surprising, too, which is why he wrote the book. He joked at the conference that, in addition to wanting to write about Bruce for his own fan reasons, the other big reason that he wanted to write the book was because he felt insulted on Bruce's behalf
The thing with Bruce Lee is that he was
so famous and people wrote about him
so much that it's just been assumed that everything that there is to know or say about him is already known and has already been said. But the truth is that the few biographies out there are light on facts (and even lighter on
correct facts and legit sources) and narrowly focused on the time between
The Green Hornet and
Enter the Dragon.
Polly's biography really is
the Bruce Lee biography.
He spent 7 years working on the book. And it paid off.
