It does not take long for the new trailer for “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” to invoke the most discourse-inducing scene from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” In fact, the very first words we hear are “You heard the story about Bruce Lee getting his ass kicked by a stuntman?” Another reference to the Bruce Lee scene follows soon after, long before we hear any mention of Rick Dalton or any of the more consequential events of the first film..
The Netflix pseudo-sequel, directed by David Fincher and written by Quentin Tarantino, sees Brad Pitt reprising his Oscar-winning role as Cliff Booth. It’s billed as a separate adventure that happens to feature one of the film’s main characters — Leonardo DiCaprio is either completely absent or an incredibly well-kept secret, and Tarantino has said the film shares more DNA with Elmore Leonard’s paperback crime novels than the hangout movie style that defined the first film. But the marketing had to remind audiences who Cliff Booth is, and it’s curious that the second trailer’s primary reference point is a scene that is more memorable for the controversies it sparked than its role in the film’s plot. No mention is made, for instance, of the part Cliff played in dispatching several members of the Manson Family.
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A brief recap for those lucky enough to have been offline during the original saga. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” features a scene in which Cliff is left to hang around a TV set while DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton shoots an episode. While killing time, he ends up in a fight with Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh). Neither man is particularly polite to the other, with Cliff appearing more interested in Lee’s sidekick role on “The Green Hornet” than his higher profile movie roles, and Lee quickly challenges him to a fight. Each man wins one round of the fight before it’s broken up, ensuring there’s no clear winner — but the mere fact that Cliff was able to throw a martial arts legend into the side of a car is a feather in his cap.
Following the film’s release, Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon publicly objected to the way the film portrayed her father.
“It’s unfortunate because it has started this narrative in some places where some people are saying, ‘Oh, Bruce Lee was an asshole,’” Shannon Lee said in 2020. “Look, everybody can be an asshole sometimes. I can be arrogant and angry in my life — is that something I would say I am like generally? No, my father was not generally like that. He was extremely passionate and driven.”
She continued, “He could have a temper sometimes, but he did not go around challenging people to fights. Certainly not after he was a teenager. Anyway, he didn’t behave or boast in that way…My father worked extremely hard and directly toward the idea of authentic representation in Hollywood for an Asian man, so I don’t think he would’ve gone around beating up stunt people and that kind of stuff as a way of furthering his cause.”
Tarantino frequently defended the scene, saying that he based his fictional portrayal on real anecdotes about Lee from people who knew the actor.
“Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” Tarantino said in a 2019 press conference. “The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Mohammad Ali,’ well yeah he did. Alright? Not only did he say that but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that.”
The controversy still rears its head sporadically. During a 2021 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Tarantino told critics of the scene to “suck a dick,” with the caveat that he understood why a daughter would object to any negative portrayal of her father.
By the time “The Futher Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” hits select theaters this month (and expands to Netflix in December), more than seven years will have passed since “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” premiered. Perhaps all parties have said everything there is to say about the Bruce Lee scene. But given how much the trailer leans into the matter, we could be in for another round of arguments about the portrayal.