by Nat Segaloff
Lee’s scene in Marlowe, released in October of 1969, created a sensation, but — taken along with his guest appearances in routine TV episodics in the same era — was nowhere near a true career launch. Its importance lay not in the scene’s excitement but in the fact that Lee was not playing a stereotypical “Oriental.” Silliphant also hired Lee as fight coordinator for A Walk in the Spring Rain while angling to give him a more substantial role in a series he was developing for Paramount Television about a blind insurance investigator named Longstreet.
“It’s absolutely impossible,” Silliphant laughingly told columnist Joyce Haber when Paramount and ABC asked him to write the two-hour Movie of the Week pilot for Longstreet. “I’ll do it.” [157] He was soon regretting his quick consent. “I agreed as part of the contract to write six episodes for the first season,” he later confessed, “turning the rest of the scripts over to my producer Joel Rogosin, who is a writer, and letting him run with assignments to freelancers. As it turned out, I had trouble writing even four episodes because, with the concept of a blind detective, how many shows can you write in which, to equalize the odds against sighted opponents, you have to have the lights go out in Act III? I do recall having fun with one such episode, however: the series opener guest-starring Bruce Lee, (‘The Way of the Intercepting Fist’ [158]) which dramatizes Jimmy Franciscus (Longstreet) learning how, as a blind man, to fight a dock bully he can no longer see.” [159]
Lee had a second champion at Paramount: Tom Tannenbaum, another private student, who was the executive in charge of taking Longstreet from concept to primetime. Lee’s character may have been called Li Tsung, but there was no mistaking where his thoughts originated.
“I think the successful ingredient in it was that I was being Bruce Lee and I could express myself honestly as I expressed myself at that time,” Lee said, and gave, as an example, “I said [to Franciscus], ‘empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now: water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.’” [160] Lee’s work drew praise from the New York Times and, for an instant, both Paramount and Warner Bros. were after him for a series — only it had to be on their terms, not his. They wanted a modern story, Lee wanted a western, reasoning, “How else can you justify all of the punching and kicking and violence except in the period of the west? Nowadays you can’t go around punching and kicking people, I don’t care how good you are.” [161]
Longstreet squeaked through for one twenty-three-episode season. Independently, however, Lee had been devising a television series of his own. It was called The Warrior and it was about a Shaolin monk who roams the old west in search of adventure and meaning. He took the project to Warner Bros. and nothing happened. At first. In 1972, however, a series produced by that studio appeared on ABC called Kung Fu starring David Carradine as a Shaolin monk who roams the old west in search of adventure and meaning. For years, fans have maintained that the studio stole Lee’s pitch and hired a Caucasian for it because they felt American viewers wouldn’t watch a Chinese actor. [162] When asked about this, Lee was pragmatic. “That problem has been discussed,” he said, diplomatically, “and it’s probably why The Warrior is not going to be on. Unfortunately, such a thing does exist in this world, you see, a certain part of the country. They think that, business-wise, it’s a risk, and I don’t blame them. It’s like in Hong Kong, if a foreigner came to be a star, if I was the man with the money, I probably would be worried if the acceptance would be there.” [163]
It was at this low point that Lee and Silliphant started work on The Silent Flute. [164] Lee outlined his vision of The Silent Flute in a handwritten, undated eighteen-page document, [165] which Silliphant described as being “About an American who becomes involved in a lengthy search for The Book, which might be compared to the Holy Grail or the impossible dream. Even though he has achieved the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, he is driven to find spiritual peace. Of course, there will be lots of physical adventures too, since the hero is an expert in jeet kune do… a practice that carries street fighting to the highest scientific level.” [166] Set in a future society where martial arts are outlawed and the oppressive government has banned all forms of weaponry, it follows the odyssey of a man named Cord as he learns the way of inner resistance.
Full of hope for their project, they pitched it to another of Lee’s private students, Steve McQueen. Lee was expecting McQueen to give him an immediate “yes,” even though there was neither script nor financing (McQueen’s yes would have assured both). When the mega-star was noncommittal, Silliphant knew it meant “No.” Lee, however, felt betrayed. He insisted to Silliphant, “I’ll be bigger than any other Hollywood superstar before I’m through,” to which Silliphant thought, “Bruce, don’t break your heart. How can I tell you that the bottom line is that you are a Chinese in a Caucasian film industry? Warner Bros. wouldn’t let you play the lead in Kung Fu when you yearned to, when you were perfectly qualified.” [167]
Silliphant persevered with The Silent Flute, bringing in another of Lee’s students, James Coburn, who had become a bankable star with Our Man Flint (1966) and had just finished Duck, You Sucker (a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite, 1971) for director Sergio Leone. Busy with paying projects, he hired writer Shelley Burton to start the script, for which he and Coburn fronted $7,500 versus $35,000 if the picture got made. When Burton delivered a script that was “mostly science fiction and screwing,” Silliphant fired him in a three-page, single-spaced letter expressing his outrage. “Your script is not about the material we commissioned you to represent,” it began. “In your personal apocalypse you appear to have been far more intrigued with sex and computer loopholes and with the martial arts. Martial arts is not an affirmation with the animal, but of the spirit.”
Next, Silliphant asked his nephew Mark (his brother Leigh’s son, born in 1946) to try, which also didn’t work out, although it led to a whole separate gambit. [168] Finally Lee, Silliphant, and Coburn resolved to do it themselves. They met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m. and worked the whole film out shot by shot, after which Silliphant took three months to polish it into a treatment-cum-script and sent it to Warner Bros. The studio was interested, but only if it could be shot in India, where they currently had blocked funds. [169] Lee, Coburn, and Silliphant made an excursion to India from January 29 to February 12, 1971, to see for themselves. Tension soon developed among the trio over Lee’s penchant for public displays of skill and Coburn’s desire for privacy. “Bruce came to me,” Silliphant recalled, “and said, ‘I’m the star, not him!’ For the first time I realized my guru wasn’t just a great martial artist, he was also an actor filled with ego. I didn’t respect him any less, I saw him more realistically.” [170]
India was a non-starter, even though Coburn wrote production supervisor S.K. Singh in New Deli that they were prepping the film to be shot there, in the end he refused to go. [171] Warner Bros. lost interest and a despondent Lee left for Hong Kong to find work. Silliphant tried to dissuade him, to no avail, saying that Longstreet was about to make him an American star. When Lee hit Hong Kong in 1970, he discovered to his delight that his supporting role in The Green Hornet had made him famous there. He was signed by producer Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest Films to star in a pair of films that would come to define his screen character: The Big Boss (1971) followed by Fists of Fury (1972). Both were so outrageously successful that American distributors had no choice but to pay attention, even though they admitted they had no idea what to do with the pictures if they imported them to the States.
The adulation Lee received in Hong Kong supplanted his interest in The Silent Flute. He wrote Silliphant on Golden Harvest letterhead in August of 1972, “As you see with the [enclosed] clippings, the ‘Super Chinaman’ is doing his thing in the Orient. However, my desire is still to sock it to them in the States.” He closes with regards for
Jim Coburn. [172]
Lee’s desire was soon met. Although Chinese martial arts films had been playing in Chinese language cinemas in America for years, they didn’t hit mainstream theatres until Warner Bros. licensed the Shaw Brothers’ undistinguished 1972 production of The Five Fingers of Death. Released in the States on March 21, 1973, it became a monster hit, but only in major cities, and then mainly among Asian, African-American, and Hispanic patrons.
Seeing the bonanza in “chop-socky” films, as the show business trades had dubbed them (dubbed being the operative word), National General Pictures — formed in 1967 to distribute films from CBS as well as their own productions — firmed a deal with Raymond Chow to import the two Bruce Lee films. They hurriedly retitled The Big Boss as Fists of Fury and Fists of Fury as The Chinese Connection (to leach on the Oscar-winning 1971 The French Connection), handily confusing film scholars for the next forty years. Despite poorly matched English dialogue, the addition of cartoon sound effects, and muddy picture quality, these films achieved the breakthrough that The Five Fingers of Death missed and captured crossover (read: white) audiences. The reason was Bruce Lee.
Immediately Chow, Warner Bros., and producer Fred Weintraub rushed into production what was to become Lee’s only completed English-language film, Enter the Dragon. Silliphant and Coburn went to Honk Kong to urge Lee to rejoin The Silent Flute, but, by then, he had lost interest. He told them that Dino De Laurentiis had just offered him $1 million to star in his next film after Enter the Dragon. Enter the Dragon was released in Hong Kong in July of 1973 and in the US on August 17 by Warner Bros., the studio that had rejected him as the lead in, if not also the concept of, Kung Fu.
Lee never enjoyed his American stardom; he died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973.
There has been unending speculation about the nature, suddenness, and timing of Lee’s death. The official cause was a cerebral edema, something from which a uniquely fit and healthy man of thirty-two could hardly be expected to endure. Soon it emerged that he had suffered an “episode” during a May 10 dubbing session for Enter the Dragon at Golden Harvest Studios. Then the rumors started. They ranged from an ancient curse to a contract put out by the triads he had tangled with as a teenager back in Hong Kong. A forensic scientist blamed it on marijuana — marking the first time that a death had been ascribed to cannabis (he later withdrew his claim). Other findings suggested an allergic reaction to a pain medication that produced brain swelling. In the end, it was termed “death by misadventure,” which only increased the mystery. Said Silliphant of such rumors and the cult that has grown over the years, “I find it sad. Where were they when he needed them?” [173]
In 1978, with Lee dead and Coburn developing rheumatoid arthritis, Silliphant and Coburn optioned The Silent Flute to producer Elmo Williams at Fox after rewriting it “because, without Bruce in it, we had to make changes.” [174] When the budget came in too high (because Fox didn’t think a martial arts film sans Lee would be a wide enough success), it was returned to Silliphant and Coburn. But it did not die; instead, it achieved cult status in Hollywood among martial artists, two of whom were actors David Carradine and Jeff Cooper. They prevailed on producer Sandy Howard to purchase the script from Silliphant and Coburn. [175] Howard then made a financing deal with Avco-Embassy Pictures, hired Stanley Mann to rewrite the script, and put the picture into production in Israel. It was shot in Ben Shean and Tel Aviv on an estimated $800,000 budget (some sources have inflated it to $4 million) at a time when Middle East tensions were running so high that the producers had to seduce the completion bond company to issue production insurance by telling them that the Israeli army was standing by, just in case. [176] Howard signed cinematographer Richard Moore to direct, making this his only directing credit. [177]
Following principal photography, it was necessary to shoot inserts at a local Hollywood studio to complete or beef up certain scenes, particularly those involving fights. Martial arts journalist John Corcoran was invited on set the first day of the insert shoot by his friend Joe Lewis, the retired world heavyweight kickboxing champion who was pursuing an acting career. Howard had wanted Lewis to star opposite Carradine in Flute, but Carradine insisted on Cooper. Howard later launched Lewis’s film career, giving him his first starring role in 1979’s Jaguar Lives, which Howard produced.
Lewis told Corcoran that Howard was disappointed with the outcome of the original fight scenes shot in Israel. He hired Lewis to double for Cooper in the fight-scene reshoots. Unknown to Carradine, Howard had also hired karate champion Mike Stone to double Carradine in the new fight scenes.
Says Corcoran:
“When David discovered the reason Mike Stone was there, he had a fit and threw Mike off the set. Then he started kicking down the lighting and other equipment. I had just arrived that day and the film’s publicist met me at the door to prevent me from entering the set. But I could hear yelling inside and the racket of equipment crashing. I was only permitted to enter after David settled down. That’s when Joe Lewis told me what happened.
“When shooting concluded that night, David agreed to my request for a taped interview for a national martial arts magazine. In that interview, he expressly stated without hesitation, ‘I’m the world’s foremost fighting star,’ a comment that drew a lot of criticism from black belts when the interview was published. After all, not only was Chuck Norris’s career rapidly rising at that time, but Chuck was a bona fide world karate champion who had won his fighting titles in what is called the ‘Blood-n-Guts Era’ of American karate.
“Conversely, Carradine’s kung fu skills were modest at best. To make him look good on film required a lot of editing cuts.” [178]
It was at a pre-release screening of The Silent Flute at the Writers Guild West where Corcoran met Stirling Silliphant in person for the first time. At that screening, a publicist announced they were seeking a new title for the film and solicited suggestions from the audience. No one offered any. Later it was retitled Circle of Iron and, under that name, it was released on January 19, 1979. The title The Silent Flute was restored for home video. A contemplative picture sent into an action/science fiction market, it was not a commercial success or, given its contorted genesis, an artistic one.
There are two scripts for The Silent Flute. The first is Silliphant’s seventy-page original, dated October 19, 1970, and written in European style, which is more of a narrative than the traditional Hollywood shot-scene-dialogue format. The second is Mann’s December 15, 1977, 100-page rewrite carrying both his and Silliphant’s names. This is the one that went into production. The first is billed Pingree-Panpiper Productions [179] present a film by James Coburn, Bruce Lee, and Stirling Silliphant and carries the production note:
What follows, in spite of the form chosen, is a precisely designed shooting script worked out shot by shot by its creators, that is, by James Coburn, who will direct, coproduce and act in it; by Bruce Lee, who will stage and direct all the combat sequences and also appear in the film as Ah Sahm, as the Monkey Man, as the Rhythm Man, and as Death, the Panther Man; and by Stirling Silliphant, who will coproduce and who has written the screenplay. The Silent Flute will be shot in three locations — Thailand, Japan, and Morocco.
The Coburn/Lee/Silliphant script is written to be read as well as shot. “And so it is with martial arts,” it begins with an introduced by Lee that tells a story of three swordsmen who try to provoke a fight with a master at an inn. They flee when the master catches four flies with his chopsticks. “The story illustrates a great difference between Oriental and western thinking… To the westerner the finger jabs, the side kicks, the back fist, etc. are tools of destruction and violence, which is, indeed, one of their functions. But the Oriental believes that the primary function of such tools is revealed when they are self-directed and destroy greed, fear, anger and folly.” The bottom line, Lee teaches, is that “true mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself — the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be ca
lm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.” [180]
It became the challenge of the script to portray, in the objective medium of film, these subjective and highly ephemeral elements. Watching it now, it becomes painfully obvious why it failed. From a purely cinematic point of view there are simply not enough set-ups (angles) to tell the story. Restricted by budget and time, director Moore couldn’t shoot the footage that editor Ernest Walter [181] needed to construct into sequences that could work on a cinematic and emotional level beyond merely telling the story. The martial arts sequences, in particular, are photographed in a disappointingly meat-and-potatoes manner rather than with angles designed to show them off. Fortunately, they are performed without added screams, smacks, and grunts.
The dialogue, which in Silliphant’s draft was meant to be spoken in Thai, is translated into English in the Mann script and loses its poetry, sounding like fortune cookies. Subtitles would have been more forgiving. But the death blow is struck by Carradine’s expressionless monotone. Where James Coburn could hold the screen with his presence alone (someone noted he has only eleven lines in The Magnificent Seven, yet dominates the picture), Carradine exudes an arrogance that undercuts Cord’s character.
Circle of Iron fulfilled no one’s dream, and, for years, fans yearned for a remake that would do justice to Lee’s vision. In 2010, producer Paul Maslansky, who served as one of Howard’s producers on Circle of Iron, announced that he would bring The Silent Flute to the screen as Lee had intended. He acquired the rights from the estate of Sandy Howard, who had died in 2008, and began work. His son, Sasha, who was also his producing partner, would write the new screenplay from Lee’s original eighteen-page treatment using neither Silliphant’s nor Mann’s earlier work. [182]