Why Movies Get Bruce Lee's Fight With Wong Jack-Man So Wrong
Bruce Lee's famed fight with Wong Jack-man has been recreated on film twice, but while both of these portrayals diverge from the facts of the original match, there are good reasons for the inaccuracies. Bruce Lee's development of Jeet Kune Do was born out of his fight with Wong, which took place in San Francisco in 1964. The fight was later depicted in the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and again in 2017's Birth of the Dragon.
Aside from the fact of the fight's occurrence and Lee's dissatisfaction with the outcome leading to his creation of Jeet Kune Do, the versions of the fight seen in both films are almost entirely fictionalized. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of consensus on many details of the fight, with even eyewitness accounts varying greatly. This extends to the duration of the fight, which has been, at different times, reported as being a quick match of a few minutes and as one lasting as long as 25 minutes. Accounts of Lee and Wong's motivations for the fight also vary considerably, as well.
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Any movie attempting to sift through the specifics of Bruce Lee and Wong Jack-man's match would encounter a very different version of events depending on who is telling the story. Both Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Birth of the Dragon adopt Bruce Lee's well-known virtue of simplicity in establishing the fight itself as a historic fact. Beyond that, both films take creative license where they need to, which feeds into the other big reason for their historical inaccuracies.
Both movies aim to tell very different stories with the life of Bruce Lee as their basis. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story acts as a biopic in the
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