The transcript below is from the video “What Happened To BRUCE LEE & BRANDON LEE? | SEATTLE WA GRAVE SITE” by Daze with Jordan the Lion.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
Well, good morning Lion Hearts. It’s your old pal, Jordan the Lion and your old pal over here Amy, and we are in Seattle, Washington and today we are doing a special Patreon sunglass vlog for Stacey Richardson. Today we are going to Capitol Hill and we are going to talk about the life of Bruce Lee, and we’re going to go to the grave of Bruce and Brandon Lee. So, days with Jordan the Lion, it begins right now.
Amy, you look super cool. Do you know what the connection between Bruce Lee and Elvis is?
Amy:
Their karate kicks.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
Ed Parker.
Amy:
Oh!
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
So, Bruce Lee was actually born in San Francisco and I’ve vlogged that before. If you go watch my San Francisco vlogs, you’ll see that we went to the hospital he was born in. His father was a famous Hong Kong, Cantonese, opera star. And so, they immediately moved to Hong Kong and Bruce stayed in Hong Kong and was raised for his first 18 years.
Okay. So, how Bruce Lee ended up here in Seattle is basically a long story but to shorten it for you, Bruce’s father was a famous, uh, opera star and so Bruce was actually in like 20 movies before he was ever 18. His dad got him in a lot of movies in Hong Kong, so he was kind of a little bit actor there. But his dad also because Bruce was getting in so many street fights, enrolled him in wing chun, which was a martial art form and he was becoming so interested in that, that he was being proficient at it. He even won like his high school boxing tournament and everything, but Bruce continued as he was learning to get into street fight. And one of the street fights that he got into was with one of the members of the tri, one of the sons of one of the triads and his father got worried that maybe that there was a hit out on Bruce. So, he decided to send Bruce when he was 18, to Seattle because he had a contact here. And he was actually probably right they believed that that after Bruce beat that, that son that there was a contract on him.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
So, he came out here and where what was behind us was the first Chinese restaurant outside of Chinatown, here in Seattle. And it was Ruby Chow. And Ruby Chow’s husband was a friend of Bruce Lee’s father and Ruby Chow had a restaurant here and let Bruce be a busboy waiter and he actually lived in the restaurant. Now, it’s a like a medical tower you can see above us, but believe it or not right here on Jefferson, is where it all started for Bruce Lee here in Seattle at 18. He, uh, ended up majoring in drama over at the University of Washington, here in Seattle and that’s where he met his wife Linda.
All right I tried to do this a year and a half, and they got an unbelievable snowstorm that, likes they had never seen in Seattle and they actually closed the cemetery. So, it’s bright and sunny and we’re here. And we’re going to see Bruce and Brandon Lee’s grave today. So, the rationale for not letting anyone in was that they said that Bruce and Brandon’s grave is on a hill and they were afraid people would hurt themselves walking up the hill. So, we’ll see how, how rough of a hill this this actually is. As we were making our way into the cemetery, we saw this. We were really shocked to see that there would be you know, this kind of, but a lot of it’s been happening especially out here in Seattle. I know they were having riots and things so, wow.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
So, we saw this beautiful heart stone over here and that got our attention and it’s actually right directly in front of Bruce and Brandon there on the other side of these shrubs right there. Well, here they are. Bruce and Brandon, both early passings, both accidental passings. Brandon of course was ‘The Crow’ and the son of Bruce Lee. And you can see it’s Brandon Bruce Lee. And then here’s Bruce. Now, Bruce was interesting. He, I mentioned, you know he loved drama. So, he was majoring in drama and philosophy, while he was here and also was heavily studying martial arts and ended up teaching here. Most of the places that he taught are no longer any kind of studio or anything like that, but he eventually went on to compete in the Long Beach Convention Center and showed the two-finger push-ups and the one-inch punch and really made a name for himself.
Now, what is really interesting and important about Bruce is that he was credited, and a friend of mine is Cuban, he’s a comedian Joey Diaz. And he always told me, he said, Bruce Lee changed it for immigrants. He said he was the first guy I saw on TV that made me think, I could do something. He said, when I watched Bruce Lee movies ‘Fists of Fury’ and ‘Chinese Connection’, he said that that was my guy. And he was credited as being someone who changed the way that Asian Americans and Asians were portrayed in film. And I, I found him watching ‘Enter the Dragon’. That was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
We brought him some flowers. Amy wants to put down. One for Brandon as well. I became fans of both of these guys in their own right because like I said, I loved ‘Enter the Dragon’ and uh, and then when I saw ‘Rapid Fire’, I became a fan of Brandon. Now, Bruce had he had had um, problems with his disc. So, he was on muscle relaxants since the 60s. And they kind of say that was he had been doing this for so many years that was partially what ended up accidentally killing him. He was the day of his death, he was meeting with George Lazenby about a movie he was going to do. And he had been having problems with headaches and seizures before that. He had been filming or doing overdubs for ‘Enter the Dragon’ and had um, had passed out. And so, they were having to monitor him a little bit, but he went to an actress’s house and they were meeting about a movie, they’re reading over scripts and he started having a headache. And she gave him a medicine that was kind of an aspirin mixed with a tranquilizer. And it had a bad effect on his, the prescription he was on. And he ended up having uh, well they said death by misadventure was originally what it was ruled but, and they even tried to say because he had cannabis in his system, that had a part in it but it was just a bad reaction that made his brain swell. He died. But he was the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a spiritual form of martial arts.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
A lot of people say he’s the, the very first MMA guy. And here you can see over on Brandon’s it says, because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens a certain number of times in a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being, that you can’t even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20? And yet it all seems limitless. For Brandon and Eliza, Forever Joined in True Love’s Beauty.
And of course, Eliza was Brandon’s soon-to-be wife. And the reason that they put this was because this is a passage that Brandon loved and was going to use for their wedding. And he had quoted it in a, in an interview before this. So, they thought it was very fitting. The reason they’re buried here on Capitol Hill is because this is where Bruce and Linda met, and they had a house here, even though he passed in Hong Kong, Linda had Bruce moved and buried here. And uh, of course Brandon’s right here, right next to him. Take a look at the view that they have every day.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
So, sadly what ended Brandon’s life was kind of carelessness I would say. He was filming ‘The Crow’ and there’s a scene where he is shot, and he come back to his apartment after kind of in like the afterlife to see his girlfriend. And when he comes in, he’s shot at and they had used that same gun in a different scene before. And they were using it. It was supposed to be prop bullets and it…they were, but what instead of buying the prop bullets, they were buying live cartridges and emptying them out. And when they did this, they hadn’t cleaned out one of them completely. When they went to do the scene, the actor that shoots Brandon Lee, actually did shoot Brandon Lee and it killed him. Total accident. I mean it’s uh, some people said there was like a uh, there was like a curse or whatever, because both guys passed early but it’s both accidental. You know.
So, sad. But Bruce was filming ‘Game of Death’ at the time they weren’t finished with it. So, they ended up finishing the movie without him, using cardboard cut-outs and fill in actors and it just, it’s not very good. I mean the idea was to use the footage that Bruce had left behind to create something great in his honor, but it just isn’t very good. But uh, when they buried Bruce his, among his pallbearers were Steve McQueen, Bruce Coburn, Dan Inosanto and Bruce’s brother.
Daze with Jordan the Lion:
Says, your inspiration continues to guide us toward our personal liberation. And I believe I said that uh, he met with George Lazenby. He was going to, that was what he was in Hong Kong for, but uh, I don’t believe they ever had that meeting. And then not far from Bruce Lee I noticed this. Brian O’Higgins, the publisher of ‘The Intelligencer’. So, originally, Brandon’s plot was actually supposed to be Linda’s plot. But when this unexpectedly happened, Linda wanted Brandon buried here. And they had a memorial service at Polly Bergen’s house in Los Angeles for Brandon. Lou Diamond Phillips, Kiefer Sutherland, David Carradine, Steven Seagal, Melissa Etheridge, were all there.
All right my friends. We’re going to call it a day. I want to thank the Dub Now family, Jody Primo, Mindy M, Jake, Linda Sims, Kim Halper for becoming my newest Patreons. Stacey, I hope you enjoyed this vlog. And I hope you all enjoyed seeing the grave and a little bit of the history of Bruce and Brandon Lee. Have a great night. Bye.
