Brandon Lee Follows His Father's Path In Martial-Arts Film

Like father, like son. It's taken a few years and false starts, but now Brandon Lee's career is shaping up.

When his new martial-arts movie, "Rapid Fire," opens Friday at several hundred theaters, he'll be retracing the path of one legendary international film star. Brandon is the 27-year-old son of Bruce Lee.

Born in Oakland, raised in Hong Kong, Seattle, Calgary and Los Angeles, Brandon remembers his father teaching him how to defend himself shortly after he began to walk.

"It was like growing up Catholic," he said during a return trip to Seattle. His father had been the instructor for a martial-arts class in Seattle in the early 1960s when he met and married one of his students, the former Linda McCulloch. So it runs in the family.

"My father was working at a martial-arts school in Oakland when I was born. Three months later we moved to Hong Kong, where he started training me. Hong Kong is a very singular place. What I remember most is the smell, which is overwhelming. They call it a fragrant harbor, which is a euphemism at best."

Brandon was just 8 when his 32-year-old father died, apparently of an allergic reaction to a pain-killer. A University of Washington philosophy student, Bruce Lee was buried in Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill in 1973. Linda and their two children, Brandon and Shannon, left Hong Kong and returned to Seattle long enough for Brandon to attend the fourth grade here.

The family eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Brandon began acting in school plays. He continued studying drama at Emerson College in Massachusetts, but dropped out when he got the opportunity to work and study in New York.

Eventually he landed the part of David Carradine's opponent in "Kung Fu: The Movie," a 1986 made-for-TV attempt to revive the Carradine series from the early 1970s. According to Brandon, the original show was his father's idea, but Warner Bros. didn't want an Asian actor in the leading role and never gave him credit.

"I sort of fell into the TV movie, but there was a nice sense of closure about playing that part," he said. "I was trying to get an acting career going, but after `Kung Fu' that was it. No series followed, I didn't have an agent and I got no more offers."

Not in Hollywood anyway. But Brandon was cast in "Legacy of Rage," a Cantonese-language movie that was shot in Hong Kong, where his father had been a child star (he even played a James Dean-style teenager in one film) and had established his international reputation in such martial-arts epics as "Fists of Fury" and "The Chinese Connection."

"My Cantonese is pretty rusty these days, though it came back while we were shooting `Legacy,' " he said. The girlfriend of the fight coordinator on that film, Cynthia Rothrock, has since become the first female martial-arts star in such straight-to-video releases as "China O'Brien." Brandon remembers her as "very gifted athletically although we didn't spend a lot of time talking about her acting ambitions."

"Legacy of Rage," which Lee describes as "a love story that ends in a 20-minute bloodbath," ended up playing only in Chinese theaters in this country. Lee got no more film offers for a couple of years. He played opposite Pat Morita on a television show and did some stage work with a late-night Los Angeles variety club.

"I worked my way through all of Eric Bogosian's monologues," he said. "Finally I got an agent and made a tape of scenes from `Legacy of Rage.' " That led to a co-starring role with Dolph Lundgren last year in "Showdown in Little Tokyo," the leading part in "Rapid Fire" and a multipicture deal with Carolco Pictures.

Next up is "The Crow," in which he plays a rock musician who is murdered and returns from the dead. The character isn't especially athletic, so he won't be demonstrating his martial-arts skills this time, but he will be involved in choreographing the action sequences. His contribution to the staging of the fight scenes is one of the things he likes best about "Rapid Fire."

"I don't want to be presumptuous, but I hope we got some of the quality of the Hong Kong movies into those scenes," he said. "The theatricality of the Hong Kong pictures may be too much for Western audiences, who have to have a certain level of believability, but the action stuff is unparalleled in this country. They make our stuff here look like Romper Room."

His favorite fight scenes are all from Hong Kong movies: Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee battling it out in "Return of the Dragon," the tunnel sequence in his father's "Enter the Dragon" and Jackie Chan's big fight in "Meals on Wheels."

Although Brandon had little to do behind-the-scenes on "Showdown in Little Tokyo," he worked closely with the director, Dwight H. Little, and the veteran stunt coordinator, Jeff Imada, on "Rapid Fire."

Imada and Lee met when they were teenagers at a Los Angeles martial-arts academy, and they've been friends ever since. They worked out the fights on paper and on video before showing them to Little. Lee praises Little for giving them plenty of rehearsal time and listening to their suggestions.

"I got a real kick out of it," he said. "I really enjoy fight sequences. There's a tremendous sense of creativity about them. What worries me are the special-effects scenes. You're not in control if a roof is supposed to collapse on you and you have to trust that it's rigged properly. The accident on `Twilight Zone' (which killed actor Vic Morrow) is always in the back of your mind. There's an ambulance standing by just in case."