Happy 45th Birthday Shannon Lee!
Posted to my site, but didn’t get a chance to post here. This past Saturday, it was Shannon Lee’s 45th Birthday! And if you don’t know who Shannon Lee is, I don’t know what to say to you. LOL
Made some GIFs in her honor.
Enjoy 3 more GIF’s here:
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2014/04/happy-45th-birthday-shannon-lee-enter.html
Poaching this thread for Shannon
Maybe we need a Bruce Lee Foundation thread? I dunno. It’s all about Shannon it seems.
Over Four Decades After Bruce Lee’s Death, His Family Carries On His Legacy
by MOHAMED HASSAN
Participants of the “Little Dragons” program at a recent event in San Francisco. The program, organized by the Bruce Lee Foundation, provides martial arts lessons to under-privileged children. (All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation. The Bruce Lee name, image, likeness and all related indicia are intellectual property of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. www.brucelee.com.) All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation.
Bruce Lee first found fame in the United States portraying Kato, the sidekick in the 1966 television run of “The Green Hornet,” but he didn’t enjoy the part, according to his daughter.
“Bruce really hated his performance in that show because he felt like he wasn’t really being himself,” Shannon Lee told NBC News. “After doing ‘The Green Hornet,’ he made up his mind that he was going to show Hollywood what the authentic representation of an Asian man was in television and film and that was his goal.”
Now, nearly 43 years after Bruce Lee’s death, his family is carrying on the legacy of the action hero whose posthumous success helped disrupt Asian-American stereotypes and introduced a new wave of entertainers with a particular focus on his philanthropy and life philosophies.
While filming “The Green Hornet,” Lee moved so quickly that the show’s producers would often shoot his scenes in slow motion because his movements were blurs at normal speed. The show failed to find sustainable success in the United States, but started a cult following in Hong Kong, where it was marketed as “The Kato Show,” according to Newsweek.
Bruce Lee in 1973’s “Enter the Dragon.” (All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation. The Bruce Lee name, image, likeness and all related indicia are intellectual property of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. www.brucelee.com.) All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation.
After the show ended, Lee returned to Hong Kong, where he made many of the films that helped him rise to prominence, including 1972’s “Fist of Fury” and 1973’s “Enter the Dragon.” While many remember Lee as the man with blazing fast kicks and punches that could send you flying, Shannon Lee feels her father’s philosophical teachings are often overlooked in his legacy.
“Most people know the name Bruce Lee, but they only know him as that cool Kung Fu guy in those old movies. They do not know much about his philosophy and how he lived it very actively in his life,” she said.
Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter and a co-founder and chair of the Bruce Lee Foundation. (All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation. The Bruce Lee name, image, likeness and all related indicia are intellectual property of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. www.brucelee.com.) All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation.
Shannon Lee is working to foster a better understanding of the wide net her father cast through her work in the Bruce Lee Foundation, which she co-founded and chairs. The mission of the foundation is to inspire confidence and motivate action through the lens of Bruce Lee’s philosophies.
The foundation, which initially began as a grassroots campaign, has expanded in recent years and now operates three branches: a Bruce Lee Action Museum, a scholarship program, and the “Little Dragons” martial arts education program.
The museum program is currently in its first phase, with exhibits in Seattle, Hong Kong, and Sacramento, California. In its second phase, the foundation plans to develop a “digital interactive experience” for fans across the world tentatively scheduled for early 2017. The final third phase would feature a brick-and-mortar museum that will house items archived from Lee’s life. This year, the foundation also received over 1,300 applications scholarships and launched the Little Dragons program, which helps provides martial arts instruction for low-income children.
A participant of the “Little Dragons” program at a recently San Francisco event. (All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation. The Bruce Lee name, image, likeness and all related indicia are intellectual property of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. www.brucelee.com.) All photos supplied courtesy of the Bruce Lee Foundation.
“My father had a philanthropist’s mind and a philanthropist’s spirit because he wanted to encourage people to be their best selves through his philosophy on self-actualization, being like water, and living in the flow of life. He was constantly a big advocate for anyone around him and anyone in his life,” Shannon Lee said.
Shannon Lee is also working on a biopic that takes focuses on her father’s philosophies and the characteristics that made him unique. With the help of her mother, Linda Lee Cadwell, the duo have been interviewing her father’s friends and spending hours combing through archives to gain a better understanding of his teachings.
“We don’t want this to be a typical biopic where it’s just a chronicle of events until his death,” Shannon Lee said. “We really want it to focus on his spirit, his struggles, who he was as a human being, and what he was trying to do with his life.”
In 1993, a biopic about Bruce Lee’s life titled, “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” was released. Based on the biography, “Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew,” written by Linda Lee Cadwell, the film was a box office success and received generally positive reviews critically. But, Shannon Lee felt the film dramatized a few aspects of her father’s life.
[QUOTE]
“WE REALLY WANT IT TO FOCUS ON HIS SPIRIT, HIS STRUGGLES, WHO HE WAS AS A HUMAN BEING, AND WHAT HE WAS TRYING TO DO WITH HIS LIFE.”
“I always thought that ‘Dragon’ had a really beautiful energy and spirit about it and I think that everyone in the cast did a great job. The one thing I didn’t love about the film was it felt like they took a little too much creative license with making adjustments for dramatic effect,” Shannon Lee said. “It was more of a biopic/action film. I think there could be a more dramatic compelling way to look at his life and his story.”
In celebration of his life, Bruce Lee Enterprises, which Shannon Lee is the CEO of, plans to unveil a new website on July 20 as well as launch a podcast focused on talking about Lee’s philosophies. Lee hopes that those who would like to honor her father’s legacy on that day take a moment to use their inspiration to cultivate their own passions.
“I feel so much good energy and love through my father’s words and through the way he lived his life,” she said. “I truly believe that it can bring good energy and love into their lives as well.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the Bruce Lee Foundation was launching a new website and podcast on July 20. Bruce Lee Enterprises is launching the website and podcast. [/QUOTE]
Oooh, look at that nice Tiger Claw placement in the Little Dragons pic - a Tiger Claw Super Shield!
still poaching
How Bruce Lee’s Daughter Is Sharing His Philosophies With the Digital Generation
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 AT 6:30 A.M. BY APRIL WOLFE
Bruce Lee’s Daughter Keeps His Legacy Alive
While most know Bruce Lee from his bad*ass fight scenes in kung fu movies, his daughter Shannon Lee says that too few realize he was also a writer and philosopher, adapting ancient Chinese wisdom with his own accessible, modern phrasing. He wanted everyone to find enlightenment, not just the philosophers.
Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, is holding open a tiny, leather-bound planner for me to take a photo. She says it’s from 1968, the year her martial arts superstar father fully transformed into the sculpted fighter with the bulging batwing muscles that were later showcased in his classic film, Enter the Dragon.
Scrawled in neat cursive penmanship, here’s just a single day’s worth of notes from Bruce Lee’s journal: One thousand punches on the right, 500 on the left. Eight sets each of side bends, sit-ups and leg raises. Two miles each of running and cycling. Wife Linda Lee’s birthday party. The All American Open Karate Tournament at Madison Square Garden. Two thousand more punches. A spar with “Ted.” A Jeet Kune Do demonstration for “Lewis.” James Coburn’s new phone number and address with his birthday. The Kalidasa poem reading, “Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life, and within its brief span lies all the verities and realities of your existence.”
Shannon corrects me when I call his entries “fragmented.”
“They’re fluid,” she says, “‘Be like water,’ right?”
While most know Bruce Lee from his bad*ass fight scenes in kung fu movies, such as Fist of Fury, The Big Boss and Way of the Dragon, Shannon says that too few realize he was also a writer and philosopher, adapting ancient Chinese wisdom with his own accessible, modern phrasing. He wanted everyone to find enlightenment, not just the philosophers.
Shannon says her father — who died in July 1973 — was in life the same man of honor he was in his films. And he saw those films as a mechanism to share his philosophy. Shannon raises her eyebrows with a smile. “My father was an entertainer, and he knew what he was doing.”
Shannon Lee
Amanda Lopez
Bruce Lee Enterprises, the company Shannon founded — originally with her mother Linda Lee Cadwell and chief operating officer Kris Storti in 2008 — creates T-shirts, coffee mugs, keychains and jewelry. Yet instead of just churning out widgets with Bruce’s famous visage — handsome with a broad nose, square chin and knowing smirk — Bruce Lee Enterprises also adds his words. A leather bracelet reads: “Summon the courage and walk on.” A hoodie suggests: “Be water, my friend.” The comic books from BLE’s Dragon Rises series feature a hero with great will and no weapons.
“He’s this ultimate philosopher, but he’s packaged as a kung fu action star,” says Shannon’s business partner, Sharon Lee (no relation). “He was a Trojan horse. What he’s saying is, ‘Look at my awesome kung fu, and you’re close to me now, so let me tell you about Asian philosophy.’”
BLE’s latest venture is the Bruce Lee podcast, which in each episode uses Bruce’s sayings as a jumping-off point for conversation between Shannon and Sharon. Shannon’s favorite: “The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the beginning.” For 50 minutes, they dig deep, espousing anti-guru, self-help techniques for a better mind. Just five weeks into production, and with little promotion, the show’s already been downloaded more than 224,000 times.
“In today’s Kardashian and Trump moment, to go, ‘I think the global millennials will appreciate a long-form conversation about philosophy’ was counterintuitive,” Sharon says.
The two also created a wildly successful Facebook fan page — it has reached 21 million subscribers in two years — where they post his adapted aphorisms. “Memes are the gateway drug to bigger thinking,” Shannon jokes.
Shannon Lee with her father, Bruce Lee
Courtesy of Shannon Lee
She calls her father the absolute expression of yin and yang. She motions to a yin-yang hanging on the wall, which belonged to Bruce. “If you take the yin-yang, it has a piece of the other inside itself,” she says. “You can’t be too much of one thing and be balanced.”
Bruce wasn’t too much of one thing, either. He was born in San Francisco but raised in Hong Kong. He was a quarter white, living in a British-ruled area of China that was occupied by Japan. He embraced both Western and Eastern writings; his book collection contains a volume on Chinese boxing side by side with John F. Kennedy’s Official U.S. Physical Fitness Program manual.
When he opened a school in Oakland to teach Jeet Kune Do — a style-less martial arts style he developed himself — the entire Chinese martial arts community supposedly challenged him to a fight — their best guy against him — because they didn’t like that he would teach every person who wanted to learn, no matter their race, religion or gender.
Bruce Lee was a man of harmonious paradoxes. He shaped his body to be a weapon but trained his mind and spirit so he would rarely resort to violence. People often seem surprised, Shannon says, to find that such a hyper-masculine man also had such a developed “feminine” side. Bruce Lee penned poetry on his lunch breaks.
As their podcast and social media presence grew, revealing this other side of Bruce Lee, Shannon and Sharon noticed another curious trend. They had expected the audience devoted to self-help through Asian philosophy to skew female, but their fan base is made up primarily of young men and boys. Sharon, who has a background in cultural anthropology, has a theory. “I’ve been in the field with young people for almost 20 years, and I know what they need and want most are credible ideas and role models that they can believe in.”
Bruce Lee with wife Linda and their kids Brandon and Shannon
Courtesy of Shannon Lee
Having a famous father does not mean that Shannon’s life has been charmed. Bruce died when Shannon was 4. After his death, she and her brother, Brandon, were raised by her mother, Linda, who sold the rights to Lee’s films and likeness for a pittance so they could pay the bills. In the 1970s and ‘80s, there wasn’t a developed market for the exploitation of dead celebrities’ images. But by the following decade, there was money to be made, and it definitely was not going to Bruce’s family.
Shannon grew up getting a degree in music and felt lost. Her brother, actor Brandon Lee, balked when she announced that she’d like to come to Los Angeles, maybe start acting too.
“He told me, ‘If there’s anything else you think you could do that would bring you as much or more joy, you should do that instead,’” Shannon says. She’d already bought the plane ticket to L.A. when Brandon was killed in a firearms accident on the set of the 1994 film The Crow. A live round was mistakenly left in the gun’s chamber.
“My brother was gone, and I was in L.A. in this emotionally strange place,” she says. “And then I went to go do this movie in Hong Kong, something my brother — and obviously also my father — had done. But my heart wasn’t in it. Being Bruce Lee’s kid, everyone wants you to be an action-film star. I took martial arts, and it’s fun to do those types of movies, but I wanted to act, not fight.”
Shannon says the Hong Kong film industry in 1997 hadn’t changed much since her father left L.A. in the '70s, to find a roundabout way into Hollywood through Chinese cinema. When Bruce made The Big Boss in 1973, he attempted to revolutionize China’s film industry. He insisted on writing a complete script, with multiple drafts, before shooting. He demanded cast and crew choreograph and practice the fighting scenes. He brought his Hollywood knowledge and battled with the director about camera placement and story, and later vowed to write and direct his own movies. One of his most overlooked accomplishments was adding touches of humor and whimsy to an often self-serious genre. The Big Boss changed Hong Kong’s movie industry for a hot second. But Bruce was around for only another few pictures, and after his death, progress quickly halted.
continued next post
Continued from previous post
Brandon Lee training with his father, Bruce Lee
Courtesy of Shannon Lee
Fast-forward 20 years and China’s film industry was still rough. On set in Hong Kong, Shannon was hollowed by grief. Everything was recorded without sound, because actors spoke different dialects and languages. Fight scenes weren’t choreographed. There was no script. A guy would show up, teach her a routine and then scold her if she didn’t get it right immediately. Propmasters were handing her guns, showing her the empty barrels, assuring her over and over there were no live bullets in there, which only reminded her more of her brother’s death. Then the director looked at her and said, “Just do it the way your dad would do it.” Shannon remembers thinking, “I was, like, ‘OK, and you direct it like my dad would direct it.’” If Bruce had directed it, there probably wouldn’t have been any guns in the picture at all. Bruce was adamantly anti-gun in his films. He thought men with guns were weak.
“It was hard,” she says. “I cried a lot. In private, obviously.”
It was only when she began studying her father’s writings after her brother’s death that she first felt complete. It was then that she realized how powerful Bruce’s words would were — and how far his circulated image had gotten from his intention. She launched a years-long battle to regain the rights to Bruce Lee’s archive, which consists of all those file cabinets of poems, love notes and planners, plus 10 large metal shelves housing things like his nunchucks, tiger-skin rug and the bongo drum he accidentally punched through (it helped him develop an arrhythmic fighting style to break into his opponent’s patterns). Even family photos belonged to third parties. “Publishers actually told us, ‘But you gave them to us to make this book, so we own them now,’” Shannon says, rolling her eyes.
Shannon admits it could have been different — she could have been one of those kids looking to make a quick buck off her pop’s image. “You have no idea how many bags of money I’ve had to turn down. But if something doesn’t match up with our goals — if it’s too violent, or even if it’s just too boring — my father may have been a philosopher, but he was always an entertainer — we’re not going to take the money.” And if they can’t fit a positive aphorism on it, they’re not going to make it. Spreading the message is imperative.
“People can’t believe he was so positive all the time,” Shannon laughs. “But he was.”
Shannon Lee
Amanda Lopez
Casual fans of Bruce Lee might miss that anger is not rewarded in his films, where violence is the last resort. Bruce Lee’s adage, “Be like water,” is physical and accessible. It’s simple. He even demonstrated the meaning, grabbing a fistful of liquid and letting it fall through his hands: Water is too slippery to catch. Vincent Brown of the History Design Studio at Harvard University, who studies cross-cultural effects of public figures like Bruce Lee, recalls a scene from Enter the Dragon in which Lee tricks an opponent into getting in a dinghy, which he then lets float away. “He wins the fight without fighting in that guy’s way,” Brown says. “It’s not about overpowering the world but changing the terms so you can come out victorious.”
No one knows this better than Aquil Basheer, the violence de-escalation specialist, who in 1971 founded the Academy of Tactical Street Fighters, one of the first black martial arts schools in Los Angeles — he also got his first black belt around the same time as Bruce Lee. Basheer recruited youths to train at his school, many of whom had been inspired by seeing Bruce Lee sparring with African-American actor/martial artist Jim Kelly. “You have to understand, this was a time when we didn’t see any black heroes on the screen,” Basheer says. “No Latino heroes, no Asian heroes. Nothing. So it was a period that brought a lot of happiness and a lot of confidence to people of color.”
Basheer, a former Black Panther, remembers showing up at rallies and protests all over Southern California in the early 1970s with his fellow martial arts practitioners. He says that while police would hassle the other black marchers, his group was left largely alone. His group was trained and confident, which led them to be calm and controlled; they fought on their own terms, using intellect, like the philosophies espoused by Lee. “If you have to resort to using the physical art, then you’ve already failed at the engagement,” Basheer says.
Lee himself dared in his films not to celebrate the dealing of death. In 1972’s Way of the Dragon — which he wrote, directed and starred in — Bruce’s character is forced to kill a karate champ played by Chuck Norris. As a filmmaker, he lets the camera linger on his own face as Lee, the actor, considers the gravity of what it means to snuff out a life. The climactic spar emphasizes thinking as much as fighting.
But today, many Bruce Lee fans forget the nuance beyond his kung fu moves. “The U.S. likes the competition part, the fighting part, the violence and aggression part,” Sharon Lee says. “The other stuff has slowly been stripped away, and what’s left is cage fighting. And it’s a far deviation from his original intentions.” But through their podcast and online community-building, Shannon Lee hopes to bring back her father’s messages of non-aggression to new audiences.
Shannon Lee
Amanda Lopez
Shannon and Sharon have monitored the positive effects that their Facebook and podcast community report having experienced from Bruce Lee’s teachings. At every event where Shannon is asked to represent her father, the rooms are packed with men from the military, martial arts and policing communities. And they are emotional.
“This is grown men weeping in front of [Shannon] on a regular basis,” Sharon says. It’s men “at great pains to tell her, ‘This never happens to me. I’m not emotional.’” She doesn’t quite have words for the phenomenon. “For men to have a space in a culture with strict male-identity rules, for them to show up in front of a woman, in public, and start weeping — I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
She says Bruce Lee perhaps showed men that they didn’t have to be just one thing, or fit inside a box. “You have a lot of men in our culture who are asked to be just one thing — manly,” she says, “But what even is that?”
Bruce Lee, she says, is filling some kind of cultural vacuum.“Right now, we’re at a point where self-help says you need to relinquish your control to someone else, a guru, who can tell you what to do. But what he’s saying is you already have it inside you. Like Shannon did.”
Shannon’s got every bit of Bruce’s perseverance gene in her. She’s now partnering with director Justin Lin (the Fast & Furious franchise, Star Trek Beyond) to bring her father’s TV series, Warrior, to life with a pilot for Cinemax — featuring a multidimensional Asian action hero in the honorable vein of Bruce Lee.
She also shares her father’s sense of humor. Shannon jokes that she’s “not just the president of the Bruce Lee philosophy club; I’m also a user, too. If it can work for me, it can work for everyone.”
And she shares her father with the world. Not once has she been alone at his gravesite, she says. Almost 100,000 tourists visit him annually. On the Bruce Lee online communities, she’s surrounded by millions who study his words. And now on the podcast, she’s breathing his spirit into the internet airwaves. She even speaks of him in the present tense. “I can feel him everywhere,” she says. “Once you get past the grief of losing the body, you can understand that.”
If there’s a third poach for this thread, and I imagine there will be, I’ll make a separate Shannon thread. This thread title isn’t quite appropriate.
