The Truth about the Creation of the Kung Fu TV Series

Introduction

Myths abound in the martial arts world. One of the most pervasive is the myth that the late Bruce Lee created the “Kung Fu” television series. Airing from 1972 to 1975, this show on the ABC network and produced by Warner Brothers starred the late David Carradine. Portrayed as a half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin monk, Caine wandered about the American west in the 1870s, helping people and standing up to injustice and repression. Each hour-long episode featured the Zen-centered kung fu expert searching for his half-brother while evading the pursuit of assassins and bounty hunters intent on returning Caine to China to pay for his killing of the royal nephew.

In the following edited and augmented excerpt from Bruce Lee: A Life, authoritative Bruce Lee biographer Matthew Polly shares the true story of the creation of the Kung Fu program. The truth is more interesting than the myth, and readers who wish to learn even more about Bruce Lee are encouraged to read Polly’s book, arriving in paperback format in June 2019.

Ed Spielman

While Bruce Lee was desperately trying to get Hollywood to make its first ever kung fu movie, he received some unexpected East Coast competition from the most unlikely of sources: a young, struggling Jewish comedy writer from Brooklyn named Ed Spielman. Ed wrote and sold jokes to Phyllis Diller and Johnny Carson. But ever since watching Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 classic Seven Samurai as a teenager, Spielman’s real passion was Asian culture. While Bruce was studying philosophy at the University of Washington, Ed was one of five students in Brooklyn College’s Chinese language department. As an extracurricular he studied Japanese karate and, after he graduated, Chinese kung fu.

Still obsessed with Kurosawa, Spielman decided to write his first treatment for a movie about Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s most famous samurai. In the first draft, Musashi travels to the Shaolin Temple in China and befriends a Shaolin monk, who teaches him kung fu. Sometime in 1967, Spielman gave the story to his comedy-writing partner, Howard Friedlander, a graduate of New York University film school. “The story of that monk just resonated with me. I loved that character,” Friedlander says. “I suddenly got this idea— it burst in my brain— and I turned to him and said, ‘Ed, it’s a Western.’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘It’s a Western. The Shaolin monk— bring him to the West.’ And his mouth dropped open. He realized that was it.”  

They went to Friedlander’s apartment and started writing the outline. Spielman came up with the idea of making Kwai Chang Caine a half-American, half-Chinese Shaolin monk. “That guy is me,” Spielman says. “That Caine character is me in a way, just like Siegel and Shuster did Superman. He was always Eurasian; he always didn’t fit in.” When it was finally done, they entitled their treatment: The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon.

In 1969, Spielman and Friedlander submitted a portfolio of their jokes to Peter Lampack, a young agent at William Morris. Into the middle of the packet, Spielman slipped their movie treatment about a Eurasian Shaolin monk, who roamed the American West of the 1880s, righting wrongs with pacifist, Eastern philosophy and if that failed, kicking serious cowboy butt. “I didn’t think much of the comedy material quite frankly,” Lampack recalls, “but I was quite taken with their story of a half-Chinese, half-Caucasian boy, because it was a completely fresh idea.”

Fred Weintraub

The only person to take an interest in the treatment was Fred Weintraub, a forty-one-year-old executive at Warner Bros. [Weintrab would later produce Bruce Lee’s movie Enter the Dragon.] One of his next projects was Spielman and Friedlander’s treatment for The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon. “I liked the idea and gave the boys something like $ 3,800 to write a screenplay,” recalls Weintraub. The boys turned in the screenplay on April 30, 1970. As soon as Weintraub read it, he was sold. “Now I just had to sell the Warner Bros. honchos on the idea of a kung fu western,” Weintraub says.

Fred shared his enthusiasm for the potential of kung fu movies with his old friend Sy Weintraub (no relation). Sy, who had made a fortune producing the Tarzan movies and TV series, was one of Bruce Lee’s private students. He told Fred he had to meet his young Chinese instructor. “That’s how I first came face to face with Bruce Lee.

After chatting with Bruce, Weintraub realized he had found the perfect actor for the difficult-to-cast part of Kwai Chang Caine, the Eurasian kung fu master. Several names had been floated in association with the project. Spielman’s choice was James Coburn. “He walked beautifully,” Spielman says. “He was king for a theatrical. I thought he would have been a slam dunk.” But it was Weintraub’s project and he wanted Bruce.

Despite his success with Woodstock, Weintraub couldn’t save Kung Fu. He appealed the decision all the way to the top, but “even Ted Ashley, my best friend and head of the studio, passed on the film. The general consensus was that the public would not be willing to accept a Chinese hero.” With one racist swipe, Kung Fu was cast down into Development Hell, where previously promising projects are sent to torment the hopes and dreams of their creators.

Kung Fu Revived

While Bruce was in Thailand filming The Big Boss, Fred Weintraub had an idea for how to revive Kung Fu— instead of a feature film, turn it into an ABC Movie of the Week. If Warner’s movie division couldn’t appreciate Kung Fu’s brilliance, he’d just give it away like secondhand clothes to its TV people. Weintraub marched the Kung Fu screenplay over to Tom Kuhn, head of the Warner Bros. TV division. “Fred, this is fabulous,” Kuhn said. ABC loved the script too. Warner Bros. and ABC announced their TV deal for Kung Fu on July 22, 1971.

Bruce heard about the TV deal for Kung Fu after he returned to America in September. ABC had scheduled the air date for February 22, 1972. Kuhn planned to start production on December 15, 1971. The casting process was already under way, but they had yet to find the right actor to play Kwai Chang Caine, the Eurasian kung fu master.

[Bruce Lee had already appeared on television.] “It was because of [the] Longstreet [television program] that Ted Ashley and Warner Bros. became interested in him,” says Silliphant. On first blush, Bruce seemed perfect for the part. After all, he was the only actor in Hollywood who was also a Eurasian kung fu master. But the role of Kwai Chang Caine, the half-American, half-Chinese Buddhist monk, as written had a very different flavor from Bruce’s personality. “The concept of the series was a man who was not involved, a man who avoided action at almost any cost, a very quiet, seemingly passive man,” says John Furia, a producer on the show.

Caine was not the type of man who would, for example, burst into an audition and start swinging a nunchaku. “It did occur to me that this part was rather cerebral,” says Kuhn, “a guy who only fights when he’s absolutely cornered.” Even Fred Weintraub, who lobbied for Bruce to get the job, noted that Warners needed an actor “to portray the sense of quiet serenity that Caine possessed, a quality that driven and intense Bruce was not known for.”

But for Kuhn, the biggest problem with Bruce as Kwai Chang Caine boiled down to one thing— his accent. “By the end of the half hour I really liked the guy, but frankly I had trouble understanding him,” Kuhn says.

“We sought out every Asian in Hollywood, because you didn’t have to be super bright to know what was coming.” Among the Asian actors considered were Mako, who guest-starred on The Green Hornet with Bruce, and George Takei, who played Sulu on Star Trek. “We read everyone, but none of them really measured up. There wasn’t one guy who showed up who we thought, ‘This guy can carry a series,’  ” Kuhn says. “Mako had a thick accent, and Takei was not the physical type.”

David Carradine

Having discarded the Asian half of Caine’s ancestry, they turned to the American side and began auditioning white actors. “David Carradine came in to read and he was just bouncing off the wall. I don’t know what he was on that day, but he was on lots. I called his manager afterwards and said, ‘You know, even if he were fabulous’— and he did actually give a pretty good reading—‘ you can’t do a television series with a guy who’s stoned all the time,’” Kuhn remembers.

“But we still couldn’t find anybody, and we were maybe two weeks away from production, and I didn’t have a lead. All the other parts were cast, and the next time his manager called I said, ‘You know what, send him in. What have we got to lose?’ So David came in, completely straight, gave an incredible reading, and bottom line, we finally hired him. And that was the last time I ever saw David Carradine straight.”

Ah Sahm

Despite Tom Kuhn’s concern about Bruce’s accent, Ted Ashley saw star potential in him and, perhaps more important, didn’t want to lose him to Paramount. He was worried Bruce would make Tiger Force once he discovered he wasn’t getting the part of Kwai Chang Caine. In early October 1971, a month before David Carradine was officially cast in Kung Fu, Ashley offered Bruce an exclusive development deal to create his own TV show.

The advance was an eye-popping $ 25,000 (or $ 152,000 in 2017 dollars)— enough money to pay off most of his mortgage. Bruce had a pitch ready. Since The Green Hornet, he had been writing movie and TV ideas in his notebooks. On one page he brainstormed a Chinese hero by time period and type of job:

“Western: (1) San Francisco sheriff (partner of a blind man?). Modern: (1) bounty hunter, (2) agent, (3) detective, (4) embassy intrigue?”

On the next page, he expanded a little on the Western idea:

“San Francisco: (1) Sheriff X, presiding, (2) Ah Sahm, a ronin (unofficial deputy of Sheriff X— take care of office for room and board).”

He later developed this into a seven-page, typed TV proposal. The title of the show was Ah Sahm, which was also the name of the lead character. The story was set in the Old American West. Ah Sahm was a Chinese kung fu master who traveled to America to liberate Chinese workers being exploited by the tongs. In each episode Ah Sahm helped the weak and oppressed as he journeyed across the Old West.

The striking similarities between Ah Sahm and Kung Fu (both are Eastern Westerns) has led some Bruce Lee biographers to mistakenly assume they were the same project or that Bruce was the author of Kung Fu. In fact, they are distinct. Ah Sahm is full Chinese, not half-American, half-Chinese, like Kwai Chang Caine, and Ah Sahm is not a Shaolin monk — he is a warrior. Unfortunately, the proposal for Ah Sahm does not have a date, so it is unknown if Bruce typed it before or after he read the Kung Fu screenplay written by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander.

The Warrior

Once Ashley offered Bruce the development deal, Bruce submitted his proposal to Warner Bros. with one alteration. He changed the title from Ah Sahm to The Warrior. According to Linda, Bruce did not sign the contract for Warner’s development deal before he returned to Hong Kong. He wanted to wait and see how The Big Boss did at the box office. If it did well, it would strengthen his negotiating position. As it turned out, The Big Boss succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

Much of the confusion over the authorship of the TV series Kung Fu comes from Linda Lee’s first memoir, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (1975).

“Even before this [Longstreet], Warner Brothers had suddenly caught on to the fact that kung fu itself had captured the public’s imagination and decided to launch a TV series,” she writes. “Bruce himself had been working on the idea of a Shaolin priest, a master of kung fu, who would roam America and find himself involved in various exploits. The studio contacted him and he was soon deeply involved. He gave them numerous ideas, many of which were eventually incorporated in the resulting TV success, Kung Fu, staring actor David Carradine.” (Linda Lee, The Man Only I Knew, pp. 130– 31.)
Based on the brainstorming in his notebooks, it seems likely that Bruce came up with the original idea of a Chinese warrior righting wrongs in the American West (an Eastern Western) on his own. It also seems probable that Bruce didn’t write the full seven-page proposal for Ah Sahm until after Ashley offered him a development deal, which is to say, after he had already read the screenplay for Kung Fu.

Conclusion

Bruce Lee did not invent the Kung Fu TV series. Ed Spielman invented the character, and the movie treatment he wrote with Howard Friedlander was the origin for the 1972-1975 TV show. Warner Brothers first rejected the movie version, and later produced the television version. Bruce Lee auditioned for the part of Caine, but the studio was reluctant to hire a Chinese actor and had concerns with his accent.

In October 1971, a month before Warner Brothers officially designated David Carradine for the role of Caine, Warner Brothers executive Ted Ashley offered Bruce Lee an exclusive development deal to create his own TV program. Bruce Lee’s treatment described a show called Ah Sahm, which he later retitled The Warrior. Bruce did not sign Ashley’s deal, preferring to see how The Big Boss performed in theaters. When the movie was a smash success, Bruce Lee abandoned his plans to be a TV star and instead focused on the big screen.

References

This article is based upon pages 277-280, 321-327, and 573-574 of Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life, published by Simon & Schuster, 2018. See https://mattpolly.com/books/bruce-lee-a-life/ for more information and details on the paperback edition arriving in June 2019.

Note: This post was originally published at Martial Journal.

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