Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (14 page)

Longstreet
squeaked through for one twenty-three-episode season. Independently, however, Lee had been devising a television series of his own. It was called
The Warrior
and it was about a Shaolin monk who roams the old west in search of adventure and meaning. He took the project to Warner Bros. and nothing happened. At first. In 1972, however, a series produced by that studio appeared on ABC called
Kung Fu
starring David Carradine as a Shaolin monk who roams the old west in search of adventure and meaning. For years, fans have maintained that the studio stole Lee’s pitch and hired a Caucasian for it because they felt American viewers wouldn’t watch a Chinese actor.
[162]
When asked about this, Lee was pragmatic. “That problem has been discussed,” he said, diplomatically, “and it’s probably why
The Warrior
is not going to be on. Unfortunately, such a thing does exist in this world, you see, a certain part of the country. They think that, business-wise, it’s a risk, and I don’t blame them. It’s like in Hong Kong, if a foreigner came to be a star, if I was the man with the money, I probably would be worried if the acceptance would be there.”
[163]

It was at this low point that Lee and Silliphant started work on
The Silent Flute
.
[164]
Lee outlined his vision of
The Silent Flute
in a handwritten, undated eighteen-page document,
[165]
which Silliphant described as being “About an American who becomes involved in a lengthy search for The Book, which might be compared to the Holy Grail or the impossible dream. Even though he has achieved the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, he is driven to find spiritual peace. Of course, there will be lots of
physical
adventures too, since the hero is an expert in
jeet kune do
… a practice that carries street fighting to the highest scientific level.”
[166]
Set in a future society where martial arts are outlawed and the oppressive government has banned all forms of weaponry, it follows the odyssey of a man named Cord as he learns the way of inner resistance.

Full of hope for their project, they pitched it to another of Lee’s private students, Steve McQueen. Lee was expecting McQueen to give him an immediate “yes,” even though there was neither script nor financing (McQueen’s yes would have assured both). When the mega-star was noncommittal, Silliphant knew it meant “No.” Lee, however, felt betrayed. He insisted to Silliphant, “I’ll be bigger than any other Hollywood superstar before I’m through,” to which Silliphant thought, “Bruce, don’t break your heart. How can I tell you that the bottom line is that you are a Chinese in a Caucasian film industry? Warner Bros. wouldn’t let you play the lead in
Kung Fu
when you yearned to, when you were perfectly qualified.”
[167]

Silliphant persevered with
The Silent Flute
, bringing in another of Lee’s students, James Coburn, who had become a bankable star with
Our Man Flint
(1966) and had just finished
Duck, You Sucker (
a.k.a.
A Fistful of Dynamite, 1971)
for director Sergio Leone. Busy with paying projects, he hired writer Shelley Burton to start the script, for which he and Coburn fronted $7,500 versus $35,000 if the picture got made. When Burton delivered a script that was “mostly science fiction and screwing,” Silliphant fired him in a three-page, single-spaced letter expressing his outrage. “Your script is not about the material we commissioned you to represent,” it began. “In your personal apocalypse you appear to have been far more intrigued with sex and computer loopholes and with the martial arts. Martial arts is not an affirmation with the animal, but of the spirit.”

Next, Silliphant asked his nephew Mark (his brother Leigh’s son, born in 1946) to try, which also didn’t work out, although it led to a whole separate gambit.
[168]
Finally Lee, Silliphant, and Coburn resolved to do it themselves. They met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m. and worked the whole film out shot by shot, after which Silliphant took three months to polish it into a treatment-cum-script and sent it to Warner Bros. The studio was interested, but only if it could be shot in India, where they currently had blocked funds.
[169]
Lee, Coburn, and Silliphant made an excursion to India from January 29 to February 12, 1971, to see for themselves. Tension soon developed among the trio over Lee’s penchant for public displays of skill and Coburn’s desire for privacy. “Bruce came to me,” Silliphant recalled, “and said, ‘
I’m
the star, not him!’ For the first time I realized my guru wasn’t just a great martial artist, he was also an actor filled with ego. I didn’t respect him any less, I saw him more realistically.”
[170]

India was a non-starter, even though Coburn wrote production supervisor S.K. Singh in New Deli that they were prepping the film to be shot there, in the end he refused to go.
[171]
Warner Bros. lost interest and a despondent Lee left for Hong Kong to find work. Silliphant tried to dissuade him, to no avail, saying that
Longstreet
was about to make him an American star. When Lee hit Hong Kong in 1970, he discovered to his delight that his supporting role in
The Green Hornet
had made him famous there. He was signed by producer Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest Films to star in a pair of films that would come to define his screen character:
The Big Boss
(1971) followed by
Fists of Fury
(1972). Both were so outrageously successful that American distributors had no choice but to pay attention, even though they admitted they had no idea what to do with the pictures if they imported them to the States.

The adulation Lee received in Hong Kong supplanted his interest in
The Silent Flute.
He wrote Silliphant on Golden Harvest letterhead in August of 1972, “As you see with the [enclosed] clippings, the ‘Super Chinaman’ is doing his thing in the Orient. However, my desire is still to sock it to them in the States.” He closes with regards for Jim Coburn.
[172]

Lee’s desire was soon met. Although Chinese martial arts films had been playing in Chinese language cinemas in America for years, they didn’t hit mainstream theatres until Warner Bros. licensed the Shaw Brothers’ undistinguished 1972 production of
The Five Fingers of Death.
Released in the States on March 21, 1973, it became a monster hit, but only in major cities, and then mainly among Asian, African-American, and Hispanic patrons.

Seeing the bonanza in “chop-socky” films, as the show business trades had dubbed them (
dubbed
being the operative word), National General Pictures — formed in 1967 to distribute films from CBS as well as their own productions — firmed a deal with Raymond Chow to import the two Bruce Lee films. They hurriedly retitled
The Big Boss
as
Fists of Fury
and
Fists of Fury
as
The Chinese Connection
(to leach on the Oscar-winning 1971
The French Connection
), handily confusing film scholars for the next forty years. Despite poorly matched English dialogue, the addition of cartoon sound effects, and muddy picture quality, these films achieved the breakthrough that
The Five Fingers of Death
missed and captured crossover (read: white) audiences. The reason was Bruce Lee.

Immediately Chow, Warner Bros., and producer Fred Weintraub rushed into production what was to become Lee’s only completed English-language film,
Enter the Dragon
. Silliphant and Coburn went to Honk Kong to urge Lee to rejoin
The Silent Flute
, but, by then, he had lost interest. He told them that Dino De Laurentiis had just offered him $1 million to star in his next film after
Enter the Dragon
.
Enter the Dragon
was released in Hong Kong in July of 1973 and in the US on August 17 by Warner Bros., the studio that had rejected him as the lead in, if not also the concept of,
Kung Fu
.

Lee never enjoyed his American stardom; he died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973.

There has been unending speculation about the nature, suddenness, and timing of Lee’s death. The official cause was a cerebral edema, something from which a uniquely fit and healthy man of thirty-two could hardly be expected to endure. Soon it emerged that he had suffered an “episode” during a May 10 dubbing session for
Enter the Dragon
at Golden Harvest Studios. Then the rumors started. They ranged from an ancient curse to a contract put out by the triads he had tangled with as a teenager back in Hong Kong. A forensic scientist blamed it on marijuana — marking the first time that a death had been ascribed to cannabis (he later withdrew his claim). Other findings suggested an allergic reaction to a pain medication that produced brain swelling. In the end, it was termed “death by misadventure,” which only increased the mystery. Said Silliphant of such rumors and the cult that has grown over the years, “I find it sad. Where were they when he needed them?”
[173]

In 1978, with Lee dead and Coburn developing rheumatoid arthritis, Silliphant and Coburn optioned
The Silent Flute
to producer Elmo Williams at Fox after rewriting it “because, without Bruce in it, we had to make changes.”
[174]
When the budget came in too high (because Fox didn’t think a martial arts film sans Lee would be a wide enough success), it was returned to Silliphant and Coburn. But it did not die; instead, it achieved cult status in Hollywood among martial artists, two of whom were actors David Carradine and Jeff Cooper. They prevailed on producer Sandy Howard to purchase the script from Silliphant and Coburn.
[175]
Howard then made a financing deal with Avco-Embassy Pictures, hired Stanley Mann to rewrite the script, and put the picture into production in Israel. It was shot in Ben Shean and Tel Aviv on an estimated $800,000 budget (some sources have inflated it to $4 million) at a time when Middle East tensions were running so high that the producers had to seduce the completion bond company to issue production insurance by telling them that the Israeli army was standing by, just in case.
[176]
Howard signed cinematographer Richard Moore to direct, making this his only directing credit.
[177]

Following principal photography, it was necessary to shoot inserts at a local Hollywood studio to complete or beef up certain scenes, particularly those involving fights. Martial arts journalist John Corcoran was invited on set the first day of the insert shoot by his friend Joe Lewis, the retired world heavyweight kickboxing champion who was pursuing an acting career. Howard had wanted Lewis to star opposite Carradine in
Flute
, but Carradine insisted on Cooper. Howard later launched Lewis’s film career, giving him his first starring role in 1979’s
Jaguar Lives
, which Howard produced.

Lewis told Corcoran that Howard was disappointed with the outcome of the original fight scenes shot in Israel. He hired Lewis to double for Cooper in the fight-scene reshoots. Unknown to Carradine, Howard had also hired karate champion Mike Stone to double Carradine in the new fight scenes.

Says Corcoran:

“
When David discovered the reason Mike Stone was there, he had a fit and threw Mike off the set. Then he started kicking down the lighting and other equipment. I had just arrived that day and the film’s publicist met me at the door to prevent me from entering the set. But I could hear yelling inside and the racket of equipment crashing. I was only permitted to enter after David settled down. That’s when Joe Lewis told me what happened.

“When shooting concluded that night, David agreed to my request for a taped interview for a national martial arts magazine. In that interview, he expressly stated without hesitation, ‘I’m the world’s foremost fighting star,’ a comment that drew a lot of criticism from black belts when the interview was published. After all, not only was Chuck Norris’s career rapidly rising at that time, but Chuck was a bona fide world karate champion who had won his fighting titles in what is called the ‘Blood-n-Guts Era’ of American karate.

“Conversely, Carradine’s kung fu skills were modest at best. To make him look good on film required a lot of editing cuts.”
[178]

It was at a pre-release screening of
The Silent Flute
at the Writers Guild West where Corcoran met Stirling Silliphant in person for the first time. At that screening, a publicist announced they were seeking a new title for the film and solicited suggestions from the audience. No one offered any. Later it was retitled
Circle of Iron
and, under that name, it was released on January 19, 1979. The title
The Silent Flute
was restored for home video. A contemplative picture sent into an action/science fiction market, it was not a commercial success or, given its contorted genesis, an artistic one.

There are two scripts for
The Silent Flute.
The first is Silliphant’s seventy-page original, dated October 19, 1970, and written in European style, which is more of a narrative than the traditional Hollywood shot-scene-dialogue format. The second is Mann’s December 15, 1977, 100-page rewrite carrying both his and Silliphant’s names. This is the one that went into production. The first is billed
Pingree-Panpiper Productions
[179]
present a film by James Coburn, Bruce Lee, and Stirling Silliphant
and carries the production note:

What follows, in spite of the form chosen, is a precisely designed shooting script worked out shot by shot by its creators, that is, by James Coburn, who will direct, coproduce and act in it; by Bruce Lee, who will stage and direct all the combat sequences and also appear in the film as Ah Sahm, as the Monkey Man, as the Rhythm Man, and as Death, the Panther Man; and by Stirling Silliphant, who will coproduce and who has written the screenplay.
The Silent Flute
will be shot in three locations — Thailand, Japan, and Morocco.