The transcript below is from the video “Bruce Lee vs Gene Lebell — Why Judo Gene Taught Bruce Lee” by Goldenbell Training.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Judo Gene LeBell SAVED Bruce Lee’s career. Let me repeat that in case you didn’t hear it the first time – Gene LeBell saved Bruce Lee’s career. Let’s break this down.
Do you remember in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” how Bruce’s first day on the set of “The Green Hornet,” Bruce kicks down the door, he destroys the set, and then he beats up the bad guys? It’s like, “I’m Bruce Lee, and I’m here! Look at how awesome and amazing I am!”
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Well, you have that depiction of Bruce contrasted with another totally fictional depiction of Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” where Bruce Lee is spouting off all this nonsense about making Muhammad Ali a cripple before he gets slammed into a car door by stuntman Cliff Booth.
Now on the Joe Rogan podcast, Quentin Tarantino tried to say that fight was based on some true stories from the set of The Green Hornet where Judo Gene LeBell was called in to teach Bruce a lesson because Bruce Lee was disrespectful to the American stuntmen, and he was always tagging them, or hitting them on purpose to make the fight scenes look real, just like was Steven Seagal does. The problem with all of this is that Quentin Tarantino gives the polar opposite depiction of Bruce Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” that is given in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” where it’s like “oh look how AMAZING Bruce Lee is, everyone is in disbelief of how awesome he is!”
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Well, the truth falls in between both of these accounts, and just like I’ve done in the previous two videos on Quentin Tarantino’s comments about Bruce Lee, we’re going to find out ONCE AGAIN that Quentin Tarantino is completely wrong and should just stop speaking on Bruce Lee entirely.
So this story was posted in a Facebook group for Fight Choreography by Lane Leavitt, a stuntman who has been working on TV and movies for the last 40 years. Lane shared how Bennie Dobbins basically saved Bruce Lee’s career by introducing him to Judo Gene LeBell. Now Bennie Dobbins was the stunt coordinator for The Green Hornet, and he was also Van Williams stunt double, so in addition to being the stunt coordinator, Bennie was also doing the stunts and fight scenes as Britt Reid/ The Green Hornet.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
So go back to Bruce Lee on the set of the Green Hornet in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” and remember how Bruce bursts through the door, tears up the set, and then he has the bad guys scared half to death? Well, Bruce, in the early days of production, wasn’t much far off from that, except that, well, it wasn’t totally awesome. Now the people who like to point out how “Bruce was only an actor who made 20-something films as a child before he came over to America, they seem to leave out the thing about how Bruce grew up running the streets in Hong Kong with his gang and he was getting into fights with other kids.
Yes, he and his friends were primarily upper middle class Eurasian kids, but Hong Kong in the 40s and 50s had refugees spilling into the city. The police were corrupt. Triads were controlling many of the neighborhoods. It’s like if you went out looking for trouble, well, trouble wasn’t really hard to find.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
When Bruce started his training with Yip Man, he was still making movies, and he was still getting into fights and trouble in school. But one of the things Bruce was NOT doing was making movies about fighting. In one of Bruce’s last movies in Hong Kong, he even played a character who refused to fight, which was the opposite of the real Bruce Lee at that stage of his life.
When Bruce came to America, mostly because of his fighting and delinquency in Hong Kong, he was still getting into scraps. I mean, one of the first things he did was basically start a gang of underlings that looked on the outside as a martial arts school, but the real relationship was “I’m you all’ Big Brother, you’re all under my protection, and I’m teaching you Kung Fu so that I have sparring partners to help me stay at the top of the food chain.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Now I’m saying all of this because when Bruce started playing Kato and doing these fight scenes in The Green Hornet, even though he did these amazing demonstrations at Ed Parker’s Karate World Championships to get the attention of Jay Sebring and eventually get him in front of the producers for his screen test, Bruce’s experience was fighting on the streets of Hong Kong, and getting into scraps in Seattle, and then whatever exchanges he had in Oakland which included his most known fight with Wong Jack Man.
So when Bruce is asked to do fight scenes with these other stunt guys as Kato on the set of The Green Hornet, well, he’d never done any kind of fighting for the screen. His experience was fighting in the streets. The stuntmen at the time were used to those John Wayne punches and fight scenes in Old Westerns where everyone threw over-exaggerated haymakers from 3 feet away. The punches were never going to make contact, and it all came down to the camera placement and the stunt performers ability to sell their reactions.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
When Bruce hit the scene, none of these guys had ever seen anything like what he was doing. No one knew what Kung Fu was in Hollywood in 1966. I mean, if you read Steven Lambert’s autobiography, Hollywood really didn’t even know what Kung Fu was even in the early 80s. You didn’t have places like JAM in Reseda where people can go learn tricking and extreme martial arts from stuntmen with years in the Industry. And the guy who owns JAM, he’s been Black Panther, Falcon, basically every black character in the MCU. The other thing you didn’t have were Wushu schools all over California that could say “yeah, if you train here, we can send you to Hong Kong to learn to be a stuntman and then hook you up with our contacts in the Stuntmen’s Association. You didn’t have any of that back then. This stuff that we have around today did not exist back then. Bruce Lee was the first, and it’s the reason why he’s so iconic, because he changed TV and movies forever, and, well, that was because of his help that he got from Gene LeBell. So let’s get back to the story about how that happened.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Okay, so like I said, Bruce in the early days of The Green Hornet was a complete mess. Like a hot-ass mess. He didn’t know how to pull his punches, so he kept hitting people. He moved too fast for the cameras to pick up his movements. And not only that, but he was also too fast for the stunt performers to react to his movements, so sometimes he hit them before they could react, other times he would manage to pull his punches, but he moved so quickly that they didn’t know to react to the punch because they literally didn’t see his moves.
Bennie Dobbins finally pulled Bruce Lee aside to show him the dailies because everyone on the set was laughing at Bruce. His fight scenes were horrible. Stuntmen did not want to work with him because, like I said, he wasn’t pulling his punches. So he wasn’t even tagging them. He hit some guys full force and injured a few of them, and that’s something Steven Seagal is notorious for doing.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
And just a quick side note on that, I know there’s some Steven Seagal fans who get upset with me if I say anything close to being negative about Steven Seagal. Well, this stuff is all coming from Lane Leavitt, the stuntman, not me. I didn’t see anyone in the Facebook group call him out on the Steven Seagal stuff he was saying. So if that chafes your chaps, you’re just going to have to deal with it.
So Bruce, well, Bruce Lee wasn’t cool with finding out that people were laughing at him at all because, I mean, at that point of time, he sucked. He felt really humiliated about the whole thing. And I mean, you guys know Bruce had a bit of an ego. He wanted to be the best, and he strived for perfection when it came to him, martial arts, and how he looked on film. He prided himself on being the best. Well, Brucem he humbled himself, and he asked Bennie what he could do to fight for the camera the right way.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Like I said, nobody knew anything about Kung Fu back then, so Bennie called “Judo” Gene LeBell in order to get him to help Bruce fight for the camera correctly. And when Bennie called Gene LeBell, he basically said “yeah, this Chinese guy, Bruce Lee, does that thing you do, so you’re pretty much the only person who can help him.” Do I need to remind you again that nobody knew anything about Kung Fu? All anyone knew was that Gene LeBell did some kind of oriental fighting stuff, and Bruce was an oriental who talked about fighting, so they’re obviously a perfect match, right?
So Gene LeBell and Bennie Dobbins both worked with Bruce to teach him how to perform for the camera for fights, how to learn camera angles, and most importantly, to stop hitting people on the set. Bruce completely humbled himself, and since we know that Bruce and Gene were obviously NOT doing the same thing, they were able to compare notes and exchange some of their techniques from their respective styles.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Remember, Bruce was doing a lot of flashy Kung Fu that he’d picked up from his other various teachers and friends, so Gene needed to know how to help him make that stuff look good for the cameras, and with Bruce already having about 5 years of Judo experience before meeting “Judo” Gene LeBell, well, Gene was more than willing to also show him how to add grappling to his fight scenes.
So when I call BS on Joe Rogan’s claim that Judo Gene LeBell taught Bruce Lee grappling, it’s because Bruce had already started learning Judo in 1960. What Gene LeBell taught Bruce was grappling for the screen and that’s something that Gene LeBell continued to do for decades. He even taught Bruce’s son Brandon Lee at one point when Brandon finally decided to start learning how to fight in the late 80s.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
Now something else interesting is that Bennie Dobbins later became one of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do students, and a number of photos are circulating from a photo shoot Bruce Lee did with Bennie Dobbins just before Bruce left to make “The Big Boss” in Thailand. So it just goes to show how Bruce was able to humble himself in order to learn from both Bennie Dobbins and Judo Gene LeBell but it also shows the relationship that Bennie and Bruce had that Bennie was able to later become one of Bruce’s students.
So that whole thing Tarantino said about Bruce having this disdain for the American stuntmen, that’s just another example of how Tarantino was lying about Bruce to sell his movie. I mean, Bruce hated the American stunt community so much, even though Bruce is also American but Bruce hated them so much that he asked his boss and Gene LeBell to teach him, he shared his stuff with them, and then later he wanted to create a Hong Kong Stuntmen’s Association just like the one that existed in America and he would have if he hadn’t died unexpectedly in 1973.
Prince Bell Jr. (Goldenbell Training):
So anyway, this was a cool story that Lane shared in the group a few weeks ago. It’s an example of how no one should be above admitting when they are wrong and should be teachable at all times. This is like saying we should strive to always maintain the beginner’s mind. If you want to learn more interesting facts about Bruce Lee, you can check out this video on Bruce Lee’s amazing kicking speed and how he earned the nickname, “Three Legs Lee.”
Be on the lookout for my next videos where I’ll be talking about The Problem with DK Yoo, and also sharing my thoughts on Commander Brown and Detroit Urban Survival Training, well because, look, all of the casuals are interested in those two guys, and hey y’all, I gotta pay some bills this month and my wife wants to go shopping for Chinese New Year. So anyway, while y’all wait on me to knock out those videos, keep training, remember to breathe, and I’ll see you in the next video.
