Yes, only a couple of times. First was “The Dragon Dies Hard” in 1974. I could be wrong, but think it was the first Bruceploitation feature released in theaters (at least in the Washington D.C. area). It was playing at Loew’s Palace, a Grindhouse theater that was only 3-4 blocks from the White House. You knew right away the guy playing Bruce did not have the screen presence, charisma, and skill set the real Bruce had. Watching the movie felt odd because they used clips from other movies that really did not make any sense at all. But I was hoping MAYBE the real Bruce would show up in a scene to make my efforts to save up my money all week and take the bus downtown to see the movie would be worth my time. I was pretty pissed off after seeing that movie as well as many of the other patrons who complained to the manager. The theater had to place a handwritten sign in front of the box office stating something like “Bruce Lee does not appear in this movie. Please know this before you pay for your ticket. There will be no refunds!” Since I went to the first screening of the movie, the theater manager did offer to refund our money or give us a free pass to see another movie. Back in the day, those Grindhouse theaters would change movies every week, unless they made a ton of money. This movie stayed in the same theater for 2-3 weeks. Soon after that came a ton of other Bruceploitation movies appeared.

The second was “Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death.” I was still a young naïve kid, hoping I was going to see the unfinished footage from “Game of Death,” but I was really disappointed, again. It really bothered me at the time because I worked around the house all week to earn money to go to the theater and see something that the trailers and newspaper ads were trying to sell me. Although, I thought the “King of Kung Fu” song in the movie was kinda catchy at the time.

I vaguely remember at the time, I was reading an article in a martial arts magazine where Bruce’s widow, Linda, decided to sue movie distributors for using her late husband’s name to promote a movie that he is not truly appearing in. Maybe that’s when movie distributors try started using Bruce Le, Lo, Li, etc.??

Also remember that when the Kung Fu movie boom was in full swing and it was something Western audiences in general were not used to seeing at the time. Word spreads much slower those days because the internet, IMDB, rotten tomatoes, and youtube did not exist yet. By the time you read a review in a martial arts magazine, chances are the movie had already left town. You only heard of these films from ads in newspapers and TV commercials. Remember major mainstream newspapers turned their noses up to kung fu movies and typically did not review kung fu movies, because they felt they treated it as a small notch above porn. It was very hard to make a strong educated guess like you can easily do today.

As I got a little older, I know a lot of my friends were fooled into thinking a Bruceploitation film was a real Bruce Lee movie, because they were showing many of them on TV or rented them on VHS. They just didn’t know Bruce’s film history, what to look for in a movie that “supposedly stars” the real Bruce Lee, or simply because they thought all Asians looked alike. But for me, I was a Kung Fu movie fanatic. I studied the performances, the camera angles, the editing, and the choreography. It’s all helped me in my line of work today as an Action Director and Stunt Coordinator. Little did I know back then that going to see kung fu movies every week was actually my “film school.”